Collections - 25. Chapter 25 -- In The Dog Park

I was at the dog park Friday morning, but the rotating sprinklers were on in the large dog area, so after dodging the water for a couple of minutes, I moved to the small dog area. People don’t really make a distinction and mainly gather with their friends.

While walking inside the fence for exercise, I happened to hear three women talking about drivers. Since I’d spent part of the morning thinking about all the friends I wanted to see, from Ohio to Massachusetts, and then unhappily dismissing the idea because of my eyesight, the thought of a driver seemed interesting. So I wandered over to where the women were sitting and eased into their conversation.

They were talking about drivers, both locally and in Europe, but all were home-based and for one day trips. When I asked about longer trips, say from New York City to State College, Pennsylvania – a location I picked randomly among my friends – two of the women said that, coincidentally, they were going to State College this summer.

The women didn’t know each other outside the park, and one said she’d be visiting Pennsylvania friends, while the other said, “Bruce has an engagement there.”

“Who’s Bruce?” I asked, figuring he was a younger relative.

“Springsteen – I’ve had a fifty-year relationship with him that he doesn’t know about. In fact, the worst driver I’ve ever had was for a trip from Bayside to Asbury Park.”

“What’s Asbury Park like these days?” I asked. My mother and grandmother spent summers there, in the days of no air conditioning and frequent polio epidemics. Grandpa would “go to the shore,” as people still say, on weekends.

“It’s great,” the woman said. “All built back up, and the boardwalk’s terrific. Very different from where I grew up on Long Island.”

“Where?” I casually asked.

“A place called Valley Stream. On Fieldstone Lane.”

“Green Acres,” I said, and her mouth dropped open.

“You’re joking,” she finally managed. “You know it?”

“I grew up on Forest Road. Opposite the grade...”

“...school,” she finished, then laughed. “I’m kind of kvelling inside.”

Then we had to explain that word – both the spelling and pronunciation – to the third woman. The second already knew.

“You know,” the second one said, “I’ve never met any other former New Yorkers here and never any people who were Jewish.” Clearly, she and the first woman had never discussed religion.

The first woman and I exchanged names, and when she went onto the Facebook “I Grew Up In Green Acres” page, she realized she’d gone through seven years of Forest Road Elementary School with my brother Mike.

“He died recently,” I unfortunately had to tell her. But she already knew.

“Yes. We discussed that on the page.”

Then we talked about the shopping center – “the mall” to her – and pizza by the slice, the bridge, the path, and Daitch “out the back entrance.” And she mentioned friends, some of whose family names I recognized, and the “terrorizing Dr. Zuckerberg.”

“Zuckerman,” I gently corrected.

“I still hate dentists,” she confessed. “He never used anaesthetic. Just said, ‘Raise your hand when you feel the pain.’”

I didn’t remember that but told her about his experiment with blasting music and turning up the headset volume as the pain increased, until finally the music became white noise. Maybe he was beyond that by the time she was his patient, but he was my dentist into the early ‘80s and never used anaesthetic on me.

“I liked his assistant, Leah,” she went on. “She gave us things.”

“Mrs. Harris,” I said. I didn’t remember her giving us things, but they must have been like the prizes we got out of gum machines. They couldn’t have been candy.

The woman’s name was Nancy Lehman, and though she only graduated from Forest Road Elementary, she had brothers who’d started at the high school, Valley Stream South. They would have been in the classes of ‘72 and ‘74, while she would have been in my brother Mike’s class – ‘76.

She knew one other Tucson person who’d lived in Green Acres. “But she retired here – I’ve been here over fifty years. We moved here because of my mother’s arthritis.” Then she smiled, remembering. “You know, when I first brought my new friends home to meet my parents, it was so different from New York. Their last names were ‘Smith’ and ‘Jones.’”