I say Ma, you say Babcia

Yesterday I met up with L, an old, dear friend. We’ve been friends since seventh grade. 

Though we belonged to the same church, lived less than a mile apart, and had many frenemies in common, we never met up until the age of zits and Seabreeze mainly because up until then we’d gone to different schools. We’d probably never have become friends at all if our two Catholic schools hadn’t combined back in 1972.  

That was a thing back in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. Kids from different schools didn’t socialize with one another, even if they saw each other every week in communion line at Mass, crossed paths a thousand times a month at the corner store,  shared the bumpy slide at the park, played that same stupid bean-counting game in that stultifying summer program in that hellish-hot asphalt parking lot behind the same grimy public gym building.   

The first ten years of my life I lived spitting distance from two kids who went to St. Mary’s school, which was where all the Polish kids in the neighborhood went. I attended St. John’s-Ascension, the school for the Irish and Italian kids. I never played with Jake or Johnny. Not once.  During the entire time we shared the same small street, they kept to their turf at the bottom of the hill. The rest of us -- me, my sister, the other St. John’s kids nearby, kept to our play area twelve houses away at the sunny top, where Vernon met View Street.  

We never questioned why we had this great division, we baby-faced Sharks and Jets. We never thought it was odd;  never made any effort to change the status quo. That’s how our parents lived and that’s how we all lived too. We stayed with our own kind; rarely ventured outside our ethnic and school worlds.  

Though to be fair, I had good reasons to avoid those two particular boys. The fact that they were Polish was only part of why I stayed away. In truth, they were hooligans. 

Take Jake. “He’ll hurt you. He’ll teach you swear words. He’s going to get himself killed one of these days.” That’s what my mom probably said back then to keep me from playing with him. Later on, I learned that Jake had a juvenile record. For what crimes?  I have no idea.

   

I knew he was bad news though, because I remember this. One night during a snowstorm he piloted his Flexible Flyer right down the middle of View Street, lost control and ended up stuck under a car. It was many decades ago. I was about eight at the time. I remember seeing my parents standing in our darkened good room, poking their heads out from behind the gold drapes and whispering to one another, emergency lights turning their silhouettes and the gilt and plastic fruit-bedecked walls alternately scarlet and white.  I remember hearing rumors from the big kids up the street that his guts were ripped out by the jagged underbelly of the car, and remember clutching my own stomach as they talked. 

When I was much older and had kids of my own, I learned a couple of things that have since given me insight into what life must have been like for bad Jake. He was raised mainly by his elderly grandmother who was quite ill and who rarely left the house. His father was an abusive, hard-drinking son of a gun who had abandoned the family when Jake was just a toddler. His mom was never home because she was working herself to exhaustion at some factory in order to support Jake and her mother-in­-law.   

And here’s a tidbit I recently learned that absolutely fascinates me still. My ma and Jake’s babcia were good friends, even though his grandmother barely spoke English and went regularly to Mass at Our Lady of Czestochowa, and my own spoke with a thick brogue and was a communicant at Ascension.  Where did this juvenile prejudice against all Polish kids and all kids from different schools come from then? That’s what I wonder now. Granted, I didn’t exactly have great experiences with the only two Polish kids I knew when I was in the single digits. Maybe those experiences influenced me? 

I absolutely hated Johnny. He was in truth a huge bully, though I didn’t have the words or mental ability back then to truly understand that concept.  Once, he chased me down the street and stuffed oak leaves into my mouth and down my uniform button-down. I was maybe in third grade at the time. He was in fifth or so.  What a jerk. When I was in my thirties I admit I laughed out loud when I read he’d been arrested for exposing himself one night in the parking lot of our downtown library. 

Childhood was tough for him too. I know that now. He had an older brother Henry who was cognitively at about a pre­school level, but had a good eight years and a foot in height on me. Henry had Down Syndrome and his health was frail. He needed tons of heart and brain surgeries. His parents spent a lot of time driving to and from Boston hospitals at a time when driving those fifty miles was so out of the ordinary and so time-consuming most of us visited the big city once a year, if that. 

I imagine Johnny spent a lot of time on his own, and got passed around a lot from relative to relative, and maybe some of those relative weren’t all that nice. I remember peeking out the window sometimes and seeing Johnny yelling at Henry. I remember seeing family members yelling at Johnny. The fact I remember must mean it happened a lot. Over the years, I’ve grown some compassion for my childhood tormentor. I guess. Still, I was and am quite glad that karma took a big bite out of him back in the nineties. He totally had it coming. 

Even though I’d had some personal experiences with both Jake and Johnny that might influence a little kid to then hate anyone associated with them, other kids on my street had no reasons, and still chose to avoid the two boys and all the other Polish kids who went to St. Mary’s. 

But then there’s this. We all played with Henry, Johnny’s older brother. All us up the street kids did. Henry was Polish, but none of us cared. None of us cared about his Down Syndrome either. We didn’t see him as different from us in any way whatsoever. 

 

When I was ten, we moved to the north part of the city and switched churches though not schools. I kept in touch with all my old friends and I made many new ones, some were even public school kids. I’ve since learned that lots of folks my age did the whole prejudice thing way back when. 

Now I have a United Nations spectrum of friends. I have friends who go to cathedrals, temples, mosques, friends who pray to trees and flowers, even have a few I’m currently keeping at a distance who’ve turned to worshiping the all-mighty dollar. 

But, wow of wows, among my best and oldest friends of all, there’s one in particular who knows where all the bodies are buried, who helped me bury them, who still laughs with me cries with me, cheers me on and knew me back when I wore polyester culottes and was an idiot school girl crushing on Ronnie Perry and a hot high school jock whose name shall go with me to my grave.  

And this friend is not only blue-eyed and blonde-haired Polish, she went to St. Mary’s.  We met in ninth grade, at what lots of folks back then called the “French” high school.  Funny, eh?