The knackered Rose of Sharon's still got me magoogled.
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so much infinity, so little time
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Writings and photography
copyright 2009, Amy Melson
Available for use with permission
copyright 2009, Amy Melson
Available for use with permission
9 comments:
The Rose of Sharon was important in my childhood. I lived in a parsonage in Bedford-Stuyvesant. We had the big backyard on the block, open to the street on one side, and the fence was lined with Rose of Sharon trees. Their flowers opened in the day and folded up at night, and my memory, perhaps faulty, as that they stayed in bloom all summer. I am not ashamed to say that we kids used their lovely hard green buds, the size of olives, as ammunition. (Boys, always looking for weapons.) We picked them off and threw them at each other. We would have said "whipped them at each other."
Of course, in Sundays in church, we sang a hymn about the missionaries going to the heathen lands, to "plant the Rose of Sharon there." From the Song of Solomon, "I am the Rose of Sharon and the Lily of the Valley." We took it as a sign of Christ. So typically we Christian boys were quick to steal from Christ and wound his flesh as ammunition against our friends and enemies.
What a beautiful story! My pile does remind me of a stash of ammunition, but ammo for what? Amma, I hope.
Where did you live in Bed-Stuy?
Too bad kids today play almost exclusively with the plastic toxic crap we shove down their throats than the bud bullets.
Herkimer Street, which runs between Fulton and Atlantic. A couple blocks from the Ralph Avenue stop, the far East end of Bed-Stuy, two blocks from the Stuyvesant post office.
If you drive East on Atlantic Ave, just where the LIRR goes back down, turn left onto Dewey Place, and the corner of Dewey and Herkimer. The church is still there, it has a flat-topped bell tower. My brother and I were the only two white boys ("crackers") we knew of.
What kind of crackers were you? saltine, wheatsworth, waterbiscuit...
artisinal hand cut?
The full term was "White Crackers." That's all I knew, and it always meant us.
My parents did not allow us to have guns as toys. So we just made them out of boards and sticks.
Great thing about the ghetto is that there was so much junk lying around, to make things with.
I remember one summer the kids across the street found an old mattress in the vacant lot, so we played with that for a couple days. Finally we burned it. In the middle of Dewey Place.
What was a mattress made out of then?
In my neighborhood, we pretended the rolled-up spent flowers were cigars, and "smoked" them with mimed puffing. I also enjoyed dissecting them. Yes, the days before plastic crap toys came with every hamburger...
Could I smoke one for real?
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