The following post is by my friend Heike Fuggetta
As someone who feels awkward in social situations, I’ve been abundantly blessed with long term friends. I recently started playing Words with Friends at the behest of someone I’ve been sort of peripherally in touch with who is a friend of my cousin’s. Each time I take a turn, I indulge in memories associated with her.
In 1961, at the tender age of 8, my mother, father, and I moved to the United States from Hamburg, Germany. My dad’s family lived in East Germany, with the exception of one sister-in-law and niece, my grandmother had passed away, and my grandfather remarried. The house I had thus far grown up in had been sold to developers who were building high-rise apartment buildings on our land. So, off we were to join my mother’s siblings’ families and the families of several of their lifelong friends in the U.S.
The difficulty of that move, for an eight year old with no siblings, is another story entirely. Today, I want to focus on the memories associated with my WWF (Words With Friends) partner.
When we first arrived in New York, we moved in with my godmother and her family which, at that time, consisted of my aunt, my uncle, their two daughters, and their son. They lived in what seemed to me to be a huge apartment in a building just off Mosholu Parkway. My WWF partner lived with her dad on an upper floor of a building that, while perhaps not pre-war, still had a dumbwaiter by which the trash was collected each evening.
Our belongings, which we had packed in huge crates, were not to arrive for several weeks (things went by ship in those days), so my more than generous aunt had bought me several outfits of shorts and short sleeved tops to wear in, what seemed to be unbearable heat, that first August in NYC. My teenaged cousins dragged me around with them everywhere they went that summer, retrospectively most assuredly at the behest of the adults in the family. This woman, by whose classic early sixties American looks I was totally awed, was there too.
She was there the day that my aunt and mother had been watching a Million Dollar Movie in the early afternoon which was miraculously playing at their friend’s house when we got there in the late afternoon. The explanation I received from my cousins was that the time zone changed at Mosholu Parkway, and it was now an hour earlier than where their home was.
Another of my most vivid memories involves sitting on the steps of their building, as we did in the Bronx in the summer, feeling just a little nauseous from the heat but appreciating the beautiful and colorful new shorts outfit from Alexander’s department store and holding my first Barbie doll, which my oldest cousin had bought me from Woolworth’s, thinking that this might not be the worst life in the world for an only child from Hamburg - when a bird flying above took a shit on my leg.
And that about sums up my life in America.
Heike Schulz is a mom and special education teacher in a public
middle school in Pittsburgh, where she lives with her three giant
rescued dogs and a 21 year old cat. She and Donna met on Facebook
through Donna’s cousin and Heike’s lifelong friend, Gary Guzzo.
In 1961, at the tender age of 8, my mother, father, and I moved to the United States from Hamburg, Germany. My dad’s family lived in East Germany, with the exception of one sister-in-law and niece, my grandmother had passed away, and my grandfather remarried. The house I had thus far grown up in had been sold to developers who were building high-rise apartment buildings on our land. So, off we were to join my mother’s siblings’ families and the families of several of their lifelong friends in the U.S.
The difficulty of that move, for an eight year old with no siblings, is another story entirely. Today, I want to focus on the memories associated with my WWF (Words With Friends) partner.
When we first arrived in New York, we moved in with my godmother and her family which, at that time, consisted of my aunt, my uncle, their two daughters, and their son. They lived in what seemed to me to be a huge apartment in a building just off Mosholu Parkway. My WWF partner lived with her dad on an upper floor of a building that, while perhaps not pre-war, still had a dumbwaiter by which the trash was collected each evening.
Our belongings, which we had packed in huge crates, were not to arrive for several weeks (things went by ship in those days), so my more than generous aunt had bought me several outfits of shorts and short sleeved tops to wear in, what seemed to be unbearable heat, that first August in NYC. My teenaged cousins dragged me around with them everywhere they went that summer, retrospectively most assuredly at the behest of the adults in the family. This woman, by whose classic early sixties American looks I was totally awed, was there too.
Another of my most vivid memories involves sitting on the steps of their building, as we did in the Bronx in the summer, feeling just a little nauseous from the heat but appreciating the beautiful and colorful new shorts outfit from Alexander’s department store and holding my first Barbie doll, which my oldest cousin had bought me from Woolworth’s, thinking that this might not be the worst life in the world for an only child from Hamburg - when a bird flying above took a shit on my leg.
And that about sums up my life in America.
Heike Schulz is a mom and special education teacher in a public
middle school in Pittsburgh, where she lives with her three giant
rescued dogs and a 21 year old cat. She and Donna met on Facebook
through Donna’s cousin and Heike’s lifelong friend, Gary Guzzo.
No comments:
Post a Comment