That Reminds Me of a Story

By Barry Fireman

These short stories started as only-one story, which was an episode that took place when the author was a child in first grade. But as life would have it, many episodes just happened. The single-story became two stories, and then when an interesting episode would happen, the little group of stories grew and grew. Friends and family who have read them have encouraged the author to put them into a collection and have them published. So here it is. Enjoy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fulton Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638601296

Book preview

Foreword

I sent an email to a friend of mine and in it I told her about an idea I had for a story about an incident that happened in my first grade class way back in 1945. It involved Redsy whose real name was Billy. She suggested that I write out the story. I did as she suggested and when she read the story she told me about a contest where I could enter it. The story about Redsy won first prize…$300. I called Redsy and invited him and his wife out to dinner. He announced that he was divorced but he knew two other guys who were in the classroom that day of the incident. We all met at a very nice restaurant for drinks and dinner. We walked in at around 6:00 PM and did not leave until well after midnight. We laughed and told stories and carried on all night. It was such fun. Sadly Redsy died a few years later and we all miss him to this day. I then began to write more stories about episodes that happened in my life just to leave them for my children. My children encouraged me to get them published. So here they are. I hope you enjoy them.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Edith Tarbescu for encouraging me to write the first story and for telling me about the contest. Thanks to my wife and children for listening intently as I read the stories to them. Thanks to Ronni Miller, my writing mentor, for insisting that I get them published. A very special thanks to my daughter Debby for designing the cover.

Redsy

Little Redsy was not only the class character. He was the class terror. He was always in trouble with Miss Farley, our teacher, because Redsy was fearless and defiant. Miss Farley just couldn’t punish him enough. He would do whatever he wanted to do, no matter what. He was also very bright. He was the smartest kid you ever saw. We first met in Miss Farley’s first-grade class in William B. Mann Elementary School in the Wynnefield section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The year was 1945.

Here we were just starting first grade, and Redsy could already count all the way up to one hundred. But Redsy had a little problem with the th sound. He couldn’t say the word three. It came out as free. It drove Miss Farley nuts because she knew he could do it right if he only concentrated. Every time Redsy would break one of her rules, she would keep him after school and make him practice his th sound. One Friday afternoon, Miss Farley announced that we were all going to count up to one hundred the following Monday.

Sure enough, when Monday rolled around, she called on Redsy to come to the front of the class and count. As Redsy passed her in the aisle, on his way to the front of the class, Miss Farley grabbed his sleeve, and their eyes met. She glared at him without uttering a sound. She was a mean old lady from the old school. She would just as soon rap your knuckles with a ruler as look at you. She strictly insisted on having things done her way. I remember not ever wanting to look her in the eye. She frightened me. We were all terrified of her, except Redsy.

Redsy started counting fast and furiously even before he got to the front. One, two, free, four, five… The class snickered, and Miss Farley sat up stiffly in her seat. Redsy got a little flustered too because he realized what he had just done. He had told us in the schoolyard before class that he was going to do it right. On he went… Ten, eleven, twelve, firteen… The class was getting the giggles and excited as stifled laughter broke out here and there. Miss Farley stood up, her eyes glaring at the class. We stopped laughing and got very quiet as Redsy flew on into the twenties. Most of us winced as he streaked past twenty-free. Then the magic moment arrived. Redsy got to twenty-nine, and when he did, the class held its breath in unison as Redsy met Miss Farley’s stare with utter abandon, and he cried out, Twenty-niiine—long pause—"ferdy."

Redsy then flew on in a continuous, nonstop torrent of numbers, "Ferdy-one, ferdy-two, ferdy-free." He had a huge smile on his face. The entire class exploded into laughter because now we understood that Redsy knew exactly what he was doing. Our laughter was much more important to Redsy than Miss Farley’s wrath. Miss Farley lunged at Redsy, but he dodged her as easily as a rabbit and continued, "Ferdy-free, ferdy-four, ferdy-five…" to a rising din of uncontrollable laughter from the class. The laughter continued through the forties. When he reached the fifties, the laughter began to subside, and Redsy slowed his pace as he continued to dodge Miss Farley’s now-feeble attempts to grab him. She finally gave up and sat down at her desk. Redsy picked up the pace, and as he flew past ninety-free, no one uttered a sound because we all feared what would happen when he got to the end. "Ninety-niiiiine…a hundred." He bellowed with a triumphant huge smile on his freckled face. Then…silence. Miss Farley remained at her desk, her head lowered, resting in her hands. She was shaking, and we became alarmed. She was actually trying to suppress her own uncontrollable laughter, which finally burst out of her like the breaking of a dam, and the entire class joined in as Miss Farley finally realized for the first time in her long teaching career that she had met her match. She had been had by the best.

The Armband

When I was a little boy around four or five, we had a song we sang when we wanted to make fun of Hitler. Since we always wanted to make fun of him, we sang it often. It went something like this: Whistle while you work / Hitler is a jerk / Mussolini is a meanie / Tojo has a quirk.

We would march around our neighborhood with our left fingers under our noses to make them look like a small mustache, like the one Hitler had, and we would hold up our right arm and goose step and yell out at the top of our lungs. Ahhh, shtoonk! Ahhh shtooonk! We would suppress laughter while doing this. We were only kids after all. How strange that is in retrospect.

All this was before we learned that the Nazis had killed six million Jews and twenty or thirty million other people who stood in their way of conquering Europe so that the German people would have plenty of room in which they could live… This was called Lebensraum.

I remember that the war was still in progress, and I knew enough about the war to feel sad that we still had troops fighting in Europe.

We had a hero in our family. It was my cousin Fred who was serving in the army in Europe. After the Battle of the Bulge, he was awarded a furlough, and he came home for an extended visit, and while he was home, he came to visit us.

I remember him being a large man who could pick me up in his arms with ease and hug me. I always liked his hugs and loved him as he had a nice voice and a pleasing smile. During his visit, he told us he had brought us a war souvenir. My brother and I were so excited to see what it was. He asked my parents if it would be okay to give it to us and not knowing what it was they agreed. Fred pulled a red armband out of his pocket. It had a white circle on it, and in the middle of the circle was a black Swastika. He held it up, and my brother and I got very excited at seeing it.

Where did you get it?

I took it from a German prisoner.

Did you kill him?

We wanted to know because it would have been so exciting to tell our friends that we had a cousin who killed Nazis.

No. He was a prisoner. We didn’t kill prisoners. Did you kill any Germans? we asked. I shot at many of them, but I don’t know if I killed anyone.

I believe now that he knew, but he didn’t want us to know. We could tell that he really didn’t want to talk about it.

My brother and I took the armband and were preparing to go outside and play with it when my father yelled at us, Take that thing out of the house and don’t ever bring it back in here!

Ray and I took it outside and took turns actually putting it on and marching up and down the back lawn with it, yelling Ashtoonk. We finally tired of the game as we became aware of and watched a bunch of guys preparing to pour concrete in our garage as my dad was having the floor releveled. We showed the guys the armband, and they grimaced. We asked if they would care if we threw it into the large square space into which they were about to pour concrete. They laughed and motioned and encouraged us to do it. We threw it down just as the concrete began to pour out of the chute and covered it under eight inches of reinforced material. It is probably still there under the garage.

I’m Gonna Get You

I’m gonna get you! yelled Bugsy.

Haha! I retorted. Who ya gonna get? And with what? With who? You ain’t gonna get me. I’m too fast.

And with that, I took off running as fast as I could. I heard him yelling at me.

I’m gonna get my big cousin to get you! he yelled.

I imagined a bigger version of Bugsy with a lot of big kids with him…all chasing me. I was scared. What could it be that I had done to make Bugsy so mad at me? I heard footsteps behind me the whole way home. I was running as fast as I could, but I imagined the big cousin and his guys gaining on me, and I could only visualize them beating me up. I had never been beaten up in my neighborhood, but I knew what it was like. You got your face bloodied and maybe a tooth knocked out, and sometimes it was worse…like a broken jaw or eyebrow. So I ran home as fast as I could. When I got there, I tried to open the kitchen door. It was locked. Our house was never locked, but it was locked that day nevertheless. I knocked on the window. I thought my mom or my grandmother would hear me knocking and they would open the door and let me in—away from the big kids who were chasing me. They wouldn’t dare chase me into my own house.

I turned around and went back, looking for Bugsy’s big cousin. I picked up a rock and walked back out to the alleyway where I thought they were stalking me. There they were…angrily coming toward me. There were about four of them. All bigger than I. I yelled at them and showed them the rock. I went home and called my cousins. They are on their way over here, and they’re going to beat you up if you even touch me." They stopped.

Let’s go! they yelled. Let’s see who’s gonna beat who!

They started up the steps to get me. I turned and ran toward my house again. Bang! Bang! Bang! No answer. I banged again, harder, longer with louder knocks. I rang the bell like crazy. Still, no answer. I waited. I imagined the big kids entering my yard and coming up after me. I banged and banged on the window until it finally broke, and my fist went in and cut my wrist, which began squirting blood all over the place. I never saw anything like it. My blood was squirting out of my wrist like a water pistol. Every time I squeezed my fist, it went farther. It was amazing—scary but at the same time interesting. My grandmother finally entered the kitchen and saw what was going on. She sprang into action. She grabbed my wrist and the piece of flesh that had torn out, hanging, and she pushed it back in where it belonged. Then she grabbed a towel and tightly wrapped my wrist. Then she took me upstairs, yelling at me the whole time for getting into such trouble.

I couldn’t explain what had happened. I just went along with the fix. I was crying but not because the injury hurt so terribly but because I wasn’t used to seeing blood like that. There was a puddle on the floor. It looked like a murder scene. She should have taken me to the doctor’s office, but he was blocks and blocks away and we only had one car, and my dad was using it to go to work. Everything seemed to calm down until my mom came home from the market and started yelling about the hoodlums that were hanging outside our house.

Who are these guys? she screamed. I don’t want them near my house. Barry, I want you to chase them away.

My grandmother told her that I couldn’t do it because I was injured. Mom wanted to see the injury immediately, and when she saw it, she flew into a rage. This is serious, she yelled. You can’t just put a Band-Aid on this! We have to take him to the doctor’s office for stitches.

When I heard stitches, I began to cry. The stitches were going to hurt more than the window glass. And besides, Dr. Rittenberg’s office was blocks and blocks away. It would take an hour to get there, and then how would we get home? After all…I was injured!

My mom finally started calling my dad. She was frantically trying to find him as he was not in his office. He was out visiting a customer. She finally found where he was, and he called her back. She frantically described my injury. He only wanted to know if they stopped the bleeding and how the other guy was. Did I win the fight, or did the other guy win? She began explaining to him what had happened. She didn’t care who won. She only knew that I needed stitches. He told her to take the trolley down to the doctor’s office and he would meet her there. When we got outside again, the hoodlums were gone. Probably breaking into someone’s house.

I still don’t understand why my grandmother and my mother both yelled at me because I was injured. They should have been trying to soothe my wounded pride—never mind the wrist.

Broken Window

When I was a little boy of four or five, I felt so comforted when my dad held me in his arms and patted me on the head to comfort me for whatever malady had befallen me. For a small guy like my dad to have big hands was uncommon, but I always regarded him as someone who was bigger than life. After all, he had come all the way from Russia and had married my mom who also came from Russia, and we lived in this lovely house in the Wynnefield section of Philadelphia…in a Jewish neighborhood. And my dad was the owner of his own successful business although he never got past eighth grade in school.

My dad was…what he called himself in the late forties, a progressive, what we call people like him these days is a left-wing liberal, and what he was branded in the midfifties by the McCarthyites was a Communist. One thing was for sure. He certainly was a conundrum. I never knew if he was telling me the truth or just playing with me. For example, he wore a gold ring on his right hand with the initials BZF. When I learned how to read, I asked him what the Z was for. He said that’s my middle name. I asked him what his middle name was, and he said Zonvel.

Come on, I said. No mother would plant a name like Zonvel on a little kid. You must be kidding me again.

No, he said. That’s my middle name. Go ask your mother.

So I asked her, and indeed, his middle name was Zonvel.

He was a good father, and he strictly insisted on honesty and truthfulness. I lied to him several times during my childhood and got caught every time, and I paid a dear price for my dishonesty. Once, I stole a ten-cent comic book from a drugstore, and he wanted to know how I came to have it since comic books were forbidden in our home. I lied to him and told him that they were giving comic books away, and all we had to do was show up and claim one. He nailed me on that one and threatened to turn me over to the police. I was hysterical. He even had my mother in tears when she realized I had learned my lesson as he relentlessly pressed on with the threat of jail.

But he was fair and had a great sense of humor. When I was ten, I was entrusted with a key to the house. When I came home from school, I was to let myself in and do my homework until my mother and grandmother returned from the grocery store. I lost the key, and when I got home, it was raining, and the only way I could get into the house was to break a window in the basement and climb in. When my mother came home, I was bawling. I lost my key, and I broke the window I cried. Usually, the threat would be for me to wait until your father comes home.

But my mother calmly said with a little smile, Tell your father and see what he says.

When he came home, I couldn’t wait for him to get through the door as I blurted out, Daddy, I lost my key and broke the window.

He looked at my mother, and I could see the magic when their eyes met as he understood from my mother’s imploring gaze what he had to do. He poured himself a little shot of scotch and took me into the living room, a sacred place in our house where we discussed very serious events in our lives as a family. He told me that when he was a little boy in Russia, there was a man in town that nobody liked. The man had a big greenhouse, and my dad and his friend went there and broke every window in the mean old guy’s house.

So don’t worry about the little basement window, he said. We’ll get it fixed, and thanks for telling me the truth.

This was better than being punished… I was rewarded.

The Bike Ride

Wynnefield is a western suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Houses that were built there in the late thirties and early forties were usually constructed around an alleyway. Our block was a little different from most of the others as our alleyway was almost as wide as a street. On either side of the alleyway were manicured lawns trimmed with flowers and shrubbery. At the lower end of the alleyway was another alleyway that crossed it, forming a T intersection. There were another ten or twelve houses along the lower T intersection.

My father bought me a Schwinn two-wheeler bike for my eighth birthday, and we decided that he would help me learn how to ride it one Saturday morning. I tried to ride it a few times on my own, but I kept losing my balance and falling and couldn’t quite get the idea of how to pedal and steer at the same time. My dad suggested that I would have to develop a little more speed and then the steering would become much easier. So we went up to the north end of the alleyway, and I got on the bike. He held on to the back of the seat and wrestled me into a steady upright position. Then he jogged with me for a few yards and began coaxing me to pedal.

Pedal, pedal, pedal! he cried. And I pedaled…hard.

In a matter of about ten seconds or so, I was really moving. I pedaled harder and harder and went faster and faster. I was drunk with the speed. I loved it. My hair was blowing in the wind, and tears were streaming out of my eyes and into my ears. On and on I went, faster and faster. The houses and lawns on either side of me were flying by me in a dizzying rush. The neighbors who were out and about waved at me and cheered me on. In less than a minute or so, I could see the lower T intersection. Beyond that was a wide lawn shared by a house on either side. The Dribin family was on the right, and the Pincus family was on the left. Mr. Pincus was standing on the front