When I Was Cool
My Life at the Jack Kerouac School
Chapter OneA Postcard from Allen
Growing up on Long Island, my father used to tease me. He said
that I knew John F. Kennedy's birthday but that I didn't know his.
May 29, 1917 -- that was Kennedy's; my father was right. But I
knew the year John Kennedy was born only because Seymour was
born the same year. My mother, Marion, was younger. She grew up in her own house in Brooklyn, my father in a cramped apartment
on Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. My parents met in the Weiss &
Klau building on Grand Street in lower Manhattan. They had a
four-year courtship. My grandmother, my mother's mother, Lilly
Greengrass, used to call my father "the undertaker" because he
always looked so serious and wore dark suits.
They got married in 1950. Only recently did that start to
sound like a long time ago. We lived in Brooklyn on Avenue J, in
my grandmother's old apartment. She had since moved to South
Fallsburg, up in the Catskill Mountains, with my grandfather, a
retired furrier. They rented rooms and little apartments in an old
house they bought. Eventually, my father moved us to Long
Island, around 1960. I remembered watching television on a
rolling stand in our new house empty of fur ... read full excerpt from: When I Was Cool ebook
