Ghosts Walk On Alderson Street/Cousins Club
This title may be a bit weird but the truth is that a big chunk of my relatives lived on Alderson Street. Bryna and Nate, Audrey and Mache, even, for several years, my mother and father, when I was very young and my sister had not yet been born. We lived on the top floor of a duplex in the middle of the block.
For a while, one night a month, all the adult cousins got together. They called it the Cousins Club. I vividly remember the nights when they came to our home because I couldn’t sleep on those nights. The laughing, often hysterical, would keep me awake. But I always thought it sounded like a lot of fun. I can’t remember everybody but it was my aunts, June and Art, Wyllis and Joe, Bryna and Nate, Audrey and Mache, Bill and Lil Silvers. I know there are more but I can’t remember now.
Then in the summer there was the Cousins Club picnic in Schenley Park. The children were invited to this. And what a mob of people! Of course it was “special because Maxine was there.” Mark and Stu, Lynn and her younger brother, and there were several babies. Billy Shore was a baby and Debbie not born yet. The men always stripped their shirts off to play volleyball and my grandmother sat with her sister Lil and watched the men play. My grandmother always had something “earthy” to say about the men’s partially nude bodies. Shy, she was not!!
All the children played together. At one of these picnics my mother was 9 months pregnant and went into labor, so my father quickly drove off to the hospital with her. I continued to play, secure in the knowledge that I was one of a large, loving group of people who cared about me.
Bill Silvers liked to call me “Lestoil.”
lgmwriting 