When I was about six or seven, he came to our apartment in the projects, piled us into his car, and drove us out to St. Albans, Queens, parking in front of a large, pimk stucco,four-bedroom house and disappearing inside while we played on the big front lawn, tearing out the grass and rolling around in leaves. It was fall, and leaves were everywhere. After a while he came outside and sat on the stoop and watched us play. We tore the grass to shreds, crushed the neatly manicured bushes, stomped the flowers, and cracked one of the house's windows with a rock. After ravaging the lawn for about an hour, one of us had the presence of mind to ask him, "Whose house is this?" He laughed. I never saw him laugh so hard. He had just spent his life's savings to buy the place.
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He was a gruff man with a good sense of humor, quiet, and stuck in his ways. He liked neatness, which meant our St. Albans house was out of bounds for him. However much he loved us, he couldn't live with the madness in our Queens home, preferring to keep his old digs at 478 Carlton Avenue in Fort Greene, Brooklyn. He came home only on weekends, striding into the living room with bags of groceries, Entenmann,s cakes, a pocketful of dough, and a real live automobile parked outside in which he often piled in as many of us would fit to take us back to his brownstone for the weekend. We loved staying in his house in Brooklyn. It was old and dark and filled with antique .
