Book of Days

I am not known for my powers of memory, but the paradox to that is I am known for remembering the finest details of the strangest things. Like the time when I was a little boy, probably no more than four years old; it was me and my whole family, my parents, my sister, my grandparents, in the basement of our house in Valley Stream, and it was a Sunday, and I’m pretty sure I wanted to go to Nunley’s, the amusement park that was not all that far away. “No, Johnny,” I was told, “we’ll go some other day.” But I heard it as, “We’ll go some Mother’s Day,” and I always thought that some Mother’s Day we’d go to Nunley’s.

As it turns out, we never did go to Nunley’s on a Mother’s Day, though we did go plenty of times outside of Mother’s Day. My favorite ride was the track car ride. Going to Nunley’s was probably a lot more fun for me than it was for anyone else in the family (though they were all pretty good at Skee-Ball compared to me). But these are some of the things you do when you have kids: you do what you can to make them happy, even if it means setting them down in a kid-size slot car that has not one but two steering wheels and watching them as their little car motors around the wooden track, waving at them as they watch you. It seems I was always watching my folks while the car drove me around; I was never watching the road (it’s a good thing those cars were on tracks), although I am pretty sure my hands were always somewhere on the wheel.

And so today it is Mother’s Day, and we remember all that our mothers have done for us. We honor them, our mothers given and our mothers chosen, for sometimes there are more than one in our lives. It does take a village, as the saying goes, to raise good children. And so I think of my mother, and my grandmother, and my sister, who all were part of the raising of the me that was a little boy. I hope I was not too much of a handful. It is a job that comes, at times, with little thanks. Like the time I barfed in the car on the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut. Mom took care of that. It was not a pleasant task, but she did it, because when we are small we are not very capable and our moms know this and they look out for us and they take care of all that is not right so that it is, eventually, right again. To all of our mothers on this Mother’s Day: Thank you. A thousand blessings upon you all.

Image: The track car ride at Nunley’s Amusement Park in Baldwin, New York, circa 1960. That’s not me in the picture but ten years later it could’ve been me. Look closely and you’ll see the two steering wheels in each car. The amusement park closed in 1995. Its historic carousel was saved and relocated to Garden City, New York, where it now is part of the Cradle of Aviation Museum. The rest of the rides and amusements were dismantled and sold off piecemeal. They say that now there’s a Pep Boys on the site of Nunley’s, there on Sunrise Highway in Baldwin. So in a way, it’s still about cars. The last time I was there was probably about 1976; it wasn’t long after that that we up and moved away to South Florida.