WHEN WE SANG

It was wartime. Everyone was patriotic, or that’s how I remember my childhood and my family. My father’s brother, Uncle Nathan was drafted. My father just missed the age requirement. Our neighbor, Sam Cohen was drafted but stayed stateside. My mother was a daytime Air Raid Warden. I remember the pale blue denim pantsuit she wore on patrol, her chunky mid-heel, lace-up black oxford shoes with short white fold down socks (ankle socks they called them then), her helmet. The sirens sounded, and she left home to patrol the neighborhood. She attended weekly classes to learn first aid treatment and practiced on my sister, Sally, and me. Her handbook lay open on the kitchen table, to be sure she was following the proper way to tend broken limbs. Sally and I were either complaining or giggling. 

During those years, our extended family gathered on a routine basis – most Saturdays at my maternal grandparents’ home in Baltimore on Pulaski Street. On Sundays, usually in the evening at our home on Columbus Drive - Pulaski and Columbus, prominent names of American history – Pulaski, a Polish military commander and American Revolutionary War hero. Columbus, who is attributed to have found the “New World,” our America.

We all had pianos. Uprights they were called. My Aunt Clara, my mother’s younger sister, was a concert pianist and a graduate of the Peabody Conservatory. Our living rooms were small in these two row houses where we all gathered. The upright piano in our home was against the wall behind which a staircase led to the second floor of two bedrooms and a den. The den housed a bookcase filled with a complete set of THE HARVARD CLASSICS and volumes of Book of the Month Club – where we sat together, and my mother read poems to us – Longfellow’s “The Song of Hiawatha, The Children’s Hour, Evangeline.”  Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven and Annabel Lee.” Emerson’s “The Snow-Storm.”

But it was downstairs where the family gathered – our family of four, my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins on my mother’s side. Sally and I were given the job of passing out songbooks. Aunt Clara sat on the piano bench in front of the upright. She played. We sang. In unison.

We sang, “Over there. Over there.” “Those Caissons Go Rolling Along and Anchors Aweigh.” “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. “Off we go into the wild blue yonder.” We sang, often off-key, with gusto. We sang “America the Beautiful.” And after - hot tea, iced in the summer, and home baked cookies. This was years before I took and failed at piano lessons.

And then early one August evening came news of the Japanese surrender. We kids celebrated by taking pots and pans and their covers from our kitchen cupboards and banged them together, as we marched up and down Columbus Drive. My mother was upset at the destruction of cookware she had protected so carefully during the years of metal (and other) shortages. A neighbor reminded her, “Now you can buy new ones.”