Generation Two- The Middle- Me- Jean Alice

I was the second of four children born to Sylvia and George, also the middle girl of three, ergo; I was always referred to as “the middle one”.  This epithet often annoyed me.  I felt that I was incorrectly labeled, as there are actually two middle children if there are four children.  In any case, in many of my self-diagnosed, self-treated psychological breakthroughs, it led me to believe that I might have “middle child syndrome”.  Upon further investigation I found that I do not exhibit many of the characteristics of “middle child syndrome”, thank you very much, some of which include being a loner, a sense of not belonging, lacking ambition.  I always felt I was quite the opposite of the personality of a middle child, the antithesis, really.  If the middle child is deemed so because of being in the center, I used that fact to try to be the center of attention, most of the time. 

As far as “lacking ambition”, nothing could be farther from the truth.  My unbounded imagination allowed me to conjure up any possibility or impossibility for myself.  I only revealed one of my most extraordinary delusions of grandeur about six years ago on a business trip.  Naturally, I had a glass of wine or it might have been a martini- better known as truth serum for those who travel often and are bored of talking about work after hours.  I never told this to anyone before, not even my mother. 

It happened when I was very, very young, perhaps six or seven.  I grew up in a very non-Jewish neighborhood.  My best friend, Mary Ellen Toal, who lived next door was Irish Catholic.  I wanted to be just like her- don’t we all want to be like our first best friends?  She had a pudgy face and short, thin brown hair and always smiled.  She went to Catholic school and got to wear a uniform every day- a plaid skirt with a white tailored shirt and blue vest.  I wanted to go to Catholic School, too, but of course I couldn’t, for obvious reasons.  However, my mother did allow me to go to church with Mary Ellen and her mother Genevieve, on Sundays.  Genevieve used to separate us because we would giggle during mass, but I still loved being in Church.  I loved the wooden pews, the stained glass windows, the towering ceiling which held within it an echoing hum, above our heads.  I never understood why I was just a visitor and didn’t really belong (could that have been a bit of middle child syndrome?).  One day, when my mother was cooking dinner, I asked her as she bent over the opened oven door, “What does it mean to be Jewish?”  We really were not practicing Jews at the time.  Of course, my grandmother lived with us and she ate kosher food and cooked and baked all these delicious ethnic Jewish dishes.  But that was as far as my Jewish identity disclosed besides for being the only people on my block who couldn’t celebrate Christmas and were granted the “consolation prize “of Chanukah.   What does it mean to be Jewish?

My mother looked at me as she basted the roast beef– “What do you mean?”  “I mean, what makes us different from Mary Ellen and her family?” I demanded.  “Well,” my mother answered, as if she had it rehearsed. “Mary Ellen and her family and other Catholic and Christian people believe the messiah has come.  We don’t believe the messiah has come.  We are still waiting for the messiah.”  And that was it in a nutshell.  I pressed further though.  “So who is the messiah?” I continued.  “We don’t know.  It could be anybody,” my mother responded and with that, went back to basting her roast. 

I went back to my boundless imagination, just like any other 6 or 7 year old.  And for about a week, I believed, I truly believed I could be the messiah.  At one point, I was almost sure of it.  I walked around, feeling very self-important, waiting for people to notice me and my self-proclaimed possible role in being the leader of the Jewish people.  I don’t know why I gave up on it, maybe because the attention span of any 6 or 7 year old is limited or more probably because it was apparent to me that nobody saw a big halo-y glow around my head that signified I was the messiah.  Possibly because I really still didn't quite comprehend what it means to be a messiah and was not quite ready for the demands it might imply.  Who knows?   I just remember that it was a short-lived, although larger-than-life fantasy of mine, one of many, fantastic illusions I conjured up in my formative years.  And maybe knowing it was a bit preposterous, I kept it to myself, until I was having dinner on a business trip, with my boss at the time, Ann, and one of our clients, Myra, who both thought it was rather amusing.  As a matter of fact, for a while after that, Ann used to refer to me, facetiously, as the messiah.

So that’s me- designated middle child and messiah want-to be.  Upon further research, I did discover that one of the best careers for middle children is to pursue something that would use their creativity, perhaps as a writer or journalist. Coincidently, as a middle-aged woman, that’s just where I am right now, so my birth order might be more significant than I considered.  It is ironic that in this blog of three generations- my place is in the middle. 

Generation One- The Beginning- Sylvia

Sylvia Waltzer, my mother, was born on November 5, 1923 in Scranton, Pennsylvania.  I always thought that Scranton made my mother more distinct than most other mothers and I will always mention that fact about her, even though she only spent the first four years of her life there.  I seldom mention that she was the youngest of eight children born to Fanny and Morris Waltzer, one of two daughters and six sons, even though that is unique, too.  I also rarely tell that the doctor who delivered her was Dr. Milkman and supposedly he did deliver milk while attending medical school.  My aunt, Dorothy, who was seven at the time, even said that the baby looked like Dr. Milkman.  This always reminded me of the old joke, the baby looks nothing like the father, better ask the wife about the milkman.  That fact about my mother is a bit implausible, although true. 

I remember the first time my family traveled to Scranton, my mother’s place of birth, to attend the bar mitzvah of her cousin Ruthie’s son.  We visited the house at 816 Marion Street, where my mother was born, the house she spent the first four years of her life.  She stood in front of it for a picture.  That picture is somewhere amidst hundreds of other disorganized photos stored in one of numerous boxes and sometimes I come across it when we dig through those boxes. 

My mother, the lady who has a thousand stories to tell about her life- the kinds of stories I can hear over and over again.  And then, when I think I’ve heard them all, there’s always another story I’ve never heard before that she surprises me with.  One of my favorites is when she lived in Scranton and my aunt, Dorothy and her friend, Gertie Schleis, decided they wanted to run away from home to make movies in Hollywood.  At that time, there were only silent films made, but apparently, the lure of Hollywood was as appealing as it is now.  My mother was a baby, maybe three or two and my aunt, who was nine or ten at the time, packed her clothes and my mother’s, too, because she used to watch her all day while my grandma was very busy with other chores.  She figured she had to take her baby sister along.  I consider that very noble and unselfish of my aunt, who even though was pursuing an acting career, would continue to be responsible as a big sister.  

So, the plan was that they were all taking the freight train, which ran a couple of blocks from Marion Street.  They figured they could hop the freight train just like all the hobos who would come off of it from time to time whom my grandmother would feed; maybe that’s why she was too busy to take care of my mother.  Of course, my mother had no say in the matter– she was just the extra baggage.  Anyway, my grandmother became suspicious when she went to look for a dress to iron for my mother and found that all the dresses were mysteriously gone and that her iron was ruined.  Dorothy had evidently ironed all my mother’s dresses to pack and left the iron plugged in.  It was Mrs. Schleis, Gertie’s mother, who found out about the great escape and called my grandma, thus revealing the mystery of the dresses and the iron.  Gertie, Dorothy and Sylvia didn’t get very far.  Mrs. Schleis was very angry, but my grandma laughed it off; however, she wasn’t too happy about her iron.  

Even though my mother didn’t get to Tinseltown; her small-town girl days ended when the Waltzer family moved to New York when she was four.  All my uncles were musicians and my grandparents figured the best place to be was New York City, where their sons often worked.  My grandfather, who had a window cleaning business, concluded he could clean windows in New York just as easily as in Scranton.  They moved to East 92^nd Street in Brooklyn, first, renting in a two-family house owned by a Mrs. Fader, probably the first person my mother knew didn’t like her.  Mrs. Fader kept insisting that when my mother would go down the stairs, she would touch and soil the curtains on the window of the door and complain to my grandmother.  My mother swears to this day that she never touched those curtains and that her hands weren’t even dirty.  

Sylvia missed Scranton terribly.  She didn’t have any friends, the streets were too big and too noisy, she was just not happy.  Soon after, my grandfather bought a house on East 52^nd Street, between Tilden Avenue and Beverly Road.  That would be the house that Sylvia grew up in.  That’s also the house where many of my cousins lived in, where there were always relatives and friends visiting.  There were even a few weddings there. It was a very busy house. There was always room for anybody.  Legend has it that even the famous playwright, Arthur Miller, came once, a friend of my mother’s cousin, Oscar Saul, who was also a writer.

East 52^nd Street, the Waltzer home- the setting where many of my mother’s famous stories took place.  There is a black and white picture of me in the backyard, when I was very little, 2 perhaps.  That’s the only proof I have that I was once there, although, I do not remember at all. 

My mother grew from little girl to teenager to a young woman in that house on East 52^nd Street.  That’s where she played with her dolls, all of which she named Alice.  My grandfather’s partner and cousin, Joe White, had a daughter named Alice.  She had jet black hair and was beautiful; my mother was in awe of her and so she named all her dolls after her.  My middle name is Alice.  I always think of my mother’s dolls when I think of my middle name.