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house  …  pouring Morton salt on the fat summer slugsthat left silver trails across the bricks  …  Quaker Oats  …  bathtub-shaped Hudson cars  …  the bug truck spraying everything, including me, with mosquito poison  …  cat’s-eye marbles in the dirt  …  Bono’s fruit and vegetable bus  …  on a winter morning, a slow white plug of cream pushing up the cap of the milk bottle on our front step  …  the bread man  …  the rag man  …  the rag man’s horse, itself slow and drooping as a sack of rags, as if every
clop
upon the street would be its last  …  the rag man’s mournful warbling bleat: “Raaaaaaags!”… the sad, slow syncopation passing George, heading for Kohn, Noble, Buttonwood, westward … “Raaaaaaags!”
clop-clop,
“Raaaaaags!”
clop-clop
.…

Mrs. Seeton’s
                Whistle
    More than a Victrola crank handle or the blizzard of coal dust, George Street was its people. It is something I understand better now than I did then. I can find old marbles and baseball cards in antique shops and rummage sales. I wish I could find the people there, too. I have so much to ask them.
    I have questions for the Freilich family, who operated the grocery store next to us, on the corner of George and Elm. The Freilichs were, I believe, the only Jews on the block, and to live next to them was on some days like living next to another country.
    Nothing but a thin wire fence separated our backyards. On most days the Freilichs’ backyard was just like ours: trash barrel and garbage can, a flower bed or two, a clothesline, a walkway down the middle to the back gate. But on certain Sundays in summer there suddenly appeared in the Freilichs’ backyard people such as I had never seen. The men especially were distinctive, for they dressed all in black and wore black hats and long shaggy beards. Afraid to stare openly at them, I ran upstairs to my bedroom window and stared until my eyeballs ached.
    Next day on the way to school I usually saw Nancy Freilich. Nancy was the older of two sisters. She was thin and had long red hair and walked pigeon-toed in her black and white saddle shoes. She was very bright and friendly, and she would have made a terrific friend, but she was a year older and a grade ahead of me, and fifth-grade boys did not mix much with sixth-grade girls, even if they were next-door neighbors. So I did not ask Nancy Freilich about the black-suited shaggy-bearded people in her backyard the day before. And instead of becoming terrific friends, we simply smiled and waved and said hi to each other.
    Nancy’s older brother Morton was seldom seen on George Street. Unlike most of us, who seemed to have sprouted like grass from the cracks between the sidewalk bricks, Morton Freilich occupied a higher plane. He was brilliant. He became a doctor. He made people well. But he could not make himself well. Morton had always had a bad case of asthma. Sometimes it was hard for him to breathe.
    So he moved himself and his medical practice to Arizona. I pictured him arriving in that faraway state, smiling to see the palm trees and desert sands and adobe-style houses. I pictured him looking up at the cloudless sky and throwing out his arms and going “Ahhh!” and for the first time in his life taking a long, deep clean breath of air. And maybe he did, but within several years the asthma had tracked him down andkilled him, Morton Freilich in Arizona, only in his thirties, brilliant, the grocer’s son.
    Nancy’s little sister was Sharon. From the day she was born, some kids on the street, I don’t remember who, seemed to have it in for her. They were always saying unkind things about her. I remember thinking, Why? What did she do? I could understand people getting mad at someone who was always bugging them, but Sharon Freilich had just been
born.
She hadn’t had time to bug anyone. I wondered if there was a secret that I had missed.
    I began