Having Fun/Life On Our Street was Like Lasagna 1
Delving into what life was like on Shady Ave. Ext. is like trying to eat a luscious, thick slice of lasagna; if you pick apart the layers with your fork, it isn’t a big thrill, taste-wise. However, if you slice down, from top to bottom, just enough for your fork to hold and stuff it into your mouth, you’re in Italian heaven. I should know. My last name is Mastroianni, after all.
So there were many elements, many situations, going on all at the same time on our street; taken together it was paradise for children.
One of the basic reasons our street was such a fun place to grow up was that we were all equals. All of our fathers were still young and not making much money–nobody had more than one car–nobody had fancy toys. If one of us got a piece of sporting equipment for a birthday or Hanukkah it was shared, always. If somebody did not share the new basketball or pair of badminton rackets received as a gift, then this person had to play alone for a really long time. We were strict socialists/communists/or something like that. The fact that the girls–me and my two friends–always asked for sporting goods as gifts tended to upset our mothers. What was this coming to?
In the summers when rain fell we always played Monopoly. We’d spread the whole game board out on the kitchen floor of someone’s house and played passionately, like fiends. There were two things that always happened to somewhat spoil this arrangement. First, nobody owned one complete Monopoly set. Several of us had Monopoly games that were missing either property deeds, houses, or hotels. So we did the logical thing–mixed the three games into one. But then the question came up: who would keep this massive bundle of Chance Cards, dice, tokens, play money, and sometimes triple copies of the same property deeds in their house? As usual on our street, this sparked a passionate argument. Nothing was ever quiet then. I don’t know how our mothers put up with it. Second, we’d be all set to begin to play, everything organized, then with the first roll of the dice, a cat, hiding in a corner, would rush in and throw the whole game up into the air.
Finally, when my mother was in the assisted living place, a lady who was one of the mothers on Shady Avenue Ext. often saw me come and go–she lived there too. Every time she saw me she’d say: “Leslie, you are a good girl.” Well, it didn’t matter to me that I was 60 at the time; Mrs. Field said I was a good girl for coming to visit my mother a lot and I felt as if I was dancing on air.
lgmwriting 