I hope he won’t turn the car around. I hope I’m not making a mistake. I hope I don’t do anything to make him mad. I am eighteen. I will soon be married in Reno.
There was no money. Not a dime to be found in any drawer, nothing overlooked in a coat pocket, no coins stuck in the corner of an old purse, not a hint of copper hiding under a couch cushion…
The shrill woke me out of my sleep. An azaka, one of the newest words in my growing Hebrew vocabulary, a continuous alarm with an ascending and descending tone, an eerie up-then-down sound, echoed into the onyx sky.
Even though the train must still be at least 50 miles out, I can feel it chugging towards us in the darkness. It’s out there like an old friend in the night who’s got the means to come gather me up and take me away.
Way up in the Bronx is the Emerald, a broken-down old Irish bar…around the corner from the American Legion Hall where the plasterers’ monthly union meetings are held.
It was a Saturday morning … and I was in a community art school, awaiting the arrival of a handful of seventh-grade students in the fledgling PILOT program—Pottstown Influential Leaders of Tomorrow.