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to study little Sharon Freilich as she toddled about the grocery store and the brick sidewalk outside. I tried to detect what it was in her that offended others. I saw her sitting one day on the front step of the store. Her knees were smudged, and I thought, Is
that
it? Dirty knees?
    She wasn’t just sitting there, she was crying. I looked around to see if someone had said something mean to her, but the block was deserted, and I did not understand that an ugly word, once spoken, once heard, remains in the ear forever. Seeing her cry, alone and dirty-kneed on the front step, as alone as I’ve ever seen anybody in my life, I tried not to feel bad, because I knew so many others who would not have felt bad, who would have laughed. But I failed.
    On the other side of us, at 804, lived the Corys. Virginia, the younger of two sisters, was a year behind me in school. We played together at first, then less and less as we got older.
    My enduring memory of Virginia Cory centers on a particular Fourth of July at Elmwood Park. She was about fourteen years old and had entered herself in the annual talent show at the band shell. When she was announced, she walked onstage and sang a romantic ballad called “Too Young”:
    “They try to tell us we’re too young
Too young to really be in love  …”
    Her normally pale cheeks were red as apples as she sang earnestly—and off-key—into the microphone:
    “They say that love’s a word,
A word we’ve only heard
And can’t begin to know the meaning of  …”
    Out in the audience I felt uncomfortable, even embarrassed. I wondered if the people sitting around me knew that Virginia Cory was my next-door neighbor. Didn’t she know she was off-key? What ever made her think she could win a talent contest? Why doesn’t she stop? I wondered. But she went on singing and singing into the microphone until the very last note:
    “And then someday they may recall
We were not too young at all.”
    She took a bow and left the stage. People politely clapped. Naturally she did not win, not even the lowest of honorable mentions. But that was it. What had registered as a catastrophe with me left the rest of the world unfazed. They did not cancel the pet show or the fireworks that night, and Virginia herself, to my knowledge, did not spend a single minute under her bed hiding in shame.
    If I met her today, I would like to tell her that when I think of my favorite songs of those days, I think of Les Paul and Mary Ford singing “Tennessee Waltz” and the Chordettes singing “Mr. Sandman” and Virginia Cory singing “Too Young.” I would tell her that I play it often in the jukebox of my memory. I would ask her to sing it again, and this time to honor her moxie, I would clap long and loud.
    Spider Sukoloski lived next to the Corys, at 806. Spider’s given name was Eugene, but no one (except maybe his mother) called him that. Spider’s hair was long and dark blond and combed back and cemented with Brylcreem. Spider wore his collar up and his sleeves rolled. His pants were pegged so tight at his ankles that they must have threatened the circulation in his feet. On the 800 block of George Street, in the Age of the Cool Cat, in the days of ducktail haircuts and pink shirts and suede shoes, Spider Sukoloski was the coolest cat of all.
    If I could go back, I would ask Spider if I could touch his hair. I would ask if he would like to trade nicknames, for who would not rather be called Spider than Spit?
    The Freilichs did not run the only grocery store on the block. Across the street from Spider’s house was Teufel’s. Teufel’s was about as small as a store could get, no bigger than a row house living room. In fact, it
was
a row house living room before it was converted to a grocery store.
    My family did most of its shopping at Freilich’s. I bought only two products at Teufel’s: candy and Popsicles.
    There were two Teufels. One was a stout black-haired woman who managed the store. The other was