The Collector

In 1950, when I was four and a half years old, my family moved from the temporary housing the government had built for returning soldiers and sailors from World War II in Canarsie, Brooklyn to a NYC Public Housing Project in Flushing, Queens called Pomonok. Apartment 1C at 65-56 Parsons Blvd. would be my home for the next seven years.

At that time, Queens was transitioning from suburban to urban, with apartments spreading all throughout the borough. I started school there at P.S. 201 on the other side of Horace Harding Blvd., a two lane road. The school was right near Kissena Park, and you could walk to school every day. To realize how odd that experience was, all you have to do is to know that old two-lane Horace Harding Blvd. is now the Long Island Expressway, a major artery with four lanes in each direction. Today, you would cross that highway at the risk of your life.

When people think of the 1950's today, they think of the beginning of rock and roll, the Brooklyn Dodgers, stick ball, scully, potsie and shooting marbles on whatever patch of dirt you could find. Those next seven years were an interesting experience, filled with activities that would never be seen again in American culture. For, no matter how "suburban" Queens was then, it was also "city." The fruit and vegetable truck came up Parsons Boulevard once a week, and our mothers would come out and buy fresh fruit and vegetables. And we would ask for the empty orange crates. Those crates, with their long slats of wood and thick ends, were great raw material for making a number of things. Two slats nailed together with one of the pieces of the end of the crate as a butt made a rifle that could be used in cowboy gun fights on the courtyard grass. And if your father bought you a four by four, the whole crate could be nailed to that plank, and old roller skates, taken apart, could be nailed on the bottom of the plank; and, voila, you would have a scooter.

But I really never wanted to live in the city. I yearned to live in "the country" with woods and fields, lakes and streams. It was at that time that Walt Disney ran a serial on Sunday night about a rich city boy and a poor country boy that meet on a dude ranch for teens; and, despite their different backgrounds, became great friends. The serial was called "Spin and Marty" and starred David Stollery and Tim Considine. I looked forward to their latest adventure each week, and reveled at the deepening of their friendship. I wanted a friend like Spin, and envisioned a life away from the continued urbanization of Queens.

When I was eleven, we moved out of Queens to a new split level house in Spotswood, New Jersey. There were woods and fields. What I had dreamed of, had finally come true.

Yet, today I look back at those seven years in Queens and am glad that I was a part of them, and that they have become a part of me. The poem that I have written about that experience, reflects not only who we were then, but who I am now.

The Collector
Christopher Bogart

He is a collector,
a boy from the projects,
from Brooklyn, maybe Queens
with a faded white tee shirt,
draped over bony shoulders,
and hanging down past the waist of his baggy blue jeans,
his white sweat sox ringed with stripes of blue and red,
and shoed with cloth Keds in midnight black.

He collects abandoned treasures,
things discovered, things rescued,
and finds in their forgotten state,
the majesty of form and function:
a pink spaldeen ball, bruised from its contact
with the stoop’s stone steps and pin-pricked
to give it just enough bounce and drag; a stick ball bat,
once consigned to sweep or mop the kitchen floor,
with just the right heft, held firmly in both hands
and tapped on the cement sidewalk before it slices through the air.

Soda bottle caps, filled with melted wax,
become an indispensable racing piece
in a fast moving game of street skully.

Empty shoe boxes of gray cardboard contain stamp collections,
coin collections, photos and postcards, or
the buried remains of a hamster or a budgie.

Empty coffee tins, with holes punched in their lids,
keep grasshoppers, crickets and toads,
while marmalade jars hold butterflies,
ladybugs and fireflies, collected past at the setting sun.

And tobacco cans, particularly the maroon Prince Albert,
hold true treasures, the talismans of youth:
a dyed blue rabbit’s foot on a chain,
assorted bottle caps with serious skully potential,
cat’s eyes and aggies for games kneeling in the dirt,
and baby teeth, forgotten by the tooth fairy.

Slipped into the back pocket of faded blue jeans,
these tin cans contained the treasure trove of one young life,
and their rattle, heard with each advancing step, a reminder
of the music in memory.