Two Years Old in an Orthodox Jewish Nursery School

“Cats in the Cradle and the Silver Spoon, Little Boy Blue and the Man in the Moon” – As I knew it.

By

David Gottfried

Whenever I ride the Long Island Railroad, a commuter train linking New York City with suburban towns to its East, I think of the Orthodox Jewish Nursery School I was enrolled in, in Boro Park, Brooklyn, from age two to five.  

Taking a Train to Toddlerhood 

Every trip on the Long Island Railroad entails a stop at Jamaica Station, a hub that connects the different branches of the Long Island Railroad just as the corpus callosum connects the left and right hemispheres of the brain.   And my brain is all connected and lit-up when the train lumbers into Jamaica Station and the conductor invariably says, “Change (trains) at Jamaica.” The words “change” and “Jamaica” are whittled down to “Change” and “Make,” and I remember the guiding policy of my nursery school:  If you make in your pants, you have to change your clothes. 

And to this very day, whenever my train lumbers into Jamaica station, and the conductor says, “Change at Jamaica,” I am thinking about getting undressed and changing my clothes, and I have a zany, freakish desire to run up to passengers, as they proceed to disembark at Jamaica Station, and to ask them, with a devilish but impish glint in my eye, “Did you make in your Pants.” 

Of course, when I was three years old, I could do stuff like that. In that era when there was no such thing as etiquette, life as a human was so much more fun.   Although most people consider me highly neurotic, I think I was a really swell and frolicking pain in the ass, and adorable little guy, at the age of three.  There was no subterfuge in human relations.  There was no artistry.   There was no dissembling.  There were only the belches and bowel movements and the short and clear sentences of toddlerhood:  “Gimme Chawcolate Milk,” “Just put a band-aid on it,” (When Michael was bitten by a bee, he eschewed all medical care, knowing that only a  band-aid  would do), “I want to watch Lucy Show,” (The situation comedy “I love Lucy”)

The Friendly and Festive Fisticuffs of the Wading Pool

Although we would express our ardor for chawcolate milk with alacrity,  language was usually a  pale imitation of physical things, such as the infantile and almost festive fisticuffs of the wading pond.   In the warmer months, we were directed toward a slight depression in the ground, filled with about a foot of water, and we ran around the pond joyously colliding into one another, gently or more forcefully punching one another, pinching one another, squeezing one another and all the while screaming the high-pitched squeals of children so joyous they seemed poised to take flight over the horizon of the Atlantic Ocean.

We played with the bodies of children of both sexes, and we hadn’t yet heard of Oedipus complexes or sexuality or gays or straights or castrating mommas, and the medicalizing and madness-inducing jargon of Freudians and feminists, and of all psychic interlopers on this side of the rainbow, had not yet festered our field of vision.

I was not in any way self-conscious, nor was I reflective.  I was aware of the past and the present and future. But I did not think of the past or future.  My only temporal reality was the here and now.  When one grew older, and became self-conscious and keyed-up, one often tried therapy.   But of course, therapy could not work.  Therapy taught one to analyze  one’s  life ad nauseum, and that makes you too afraid to live in the moment, and the analysand will flagellate himself like a nun or monk assaying his day-to-day encounters with a punitive sadism masquerading as the saving grace of G-d.

When I was three, the physical was always popping up, like pert, alert Pop Tarts popping out of the toaster to greet the Day like a rooster on a farm.  The physical popped up in my first, infantile erections, in the sheer ecstasy I experienced when an adult picked me up and out of the crib,  and when I felt my muscles develop when I ate Wonderbread, its advertisements teaching me that it built strong bodies in twelve ways and showing a 5-year-old boy turning into a big, strong man in 25 Seconds.

The Gleaming Jelly Apples of Seduction

Sometimes wonderbread became boring, and then my decrepit baby teeth dived into Jelly Apples, the universal joy of all little kids on Simchas Torah (It roughly translates as “Happy Torah”),  a holiday when we finish reading the Torah and are so happy because we have to start reading the Torah all over again.   On Simchas Torah, the torah scrolls are paraded around the Synagogue, and everybody kisses the torah.¹

And when we little kiddies kissed the torah, we were rewarded with jelly apples, apples that had been thrown into a vat of hot red sludge that quickly congealed over the apples like transparent helmets that had been tinted whorehouse red.   To get more and more apples, we kissed the torah more and more, and ran up to the Torah like a football player blocking  a guy from the other team or a teenage girl running through the field at Shea Stadium to kiss a Beatle. And the synagogue became an arena of great concerts, in the form of the moving, melodious liturgy, and great athletics as we ran after that Torah with all the unquestioning, wonderment of those apes, staring at a stab of stone or cement or some other hard thing, in the opening scenes of “2001: A Spacy Odessey.”

I saw “2001: A Space Odyssey” in April or May of 1968 with our Fifth-Grade teacher, a woman who knew that only a school trip with a bit of panache would do for our class, reputed to consist of the most brilliant ten-year-olds the school had ever suffered to know.   (Our class drove them crazy, what with Mary Mc Morris giving presentations on ancient Egyptian funeral rites; Michael Saks giving us reviews of adult books such as “The Guns of August” on a weekly basis, and Moria Mc Donald, a great painter from the time she had been a tiny tot, whose artistic allure was handsomely enlarged because she suffered from scoliosis.)

Although Space Odyssey was released at the peak of the Sixties, it signaled the end of the sixties and the end of the athleticism of my early childhood.    

In my earliest years,  I jabbed and handled and grabbed at a cup that runneth over, but my smiling physicality was poised to lose its boisterous, boyish excitement and chill into a very tart tarte, sneering with presumed  intellectual superiority in much the same way as Beatles’ songs such as exuberant “Any time At All” chilled into the quiet and passive perversity, and affected intellectuality,  of “Cry, Baby, Cry.”   

Actually, I can trace my flair for castigation back to age 4, when I learned how to stick people’s faces in the perverse the way a Salvador Dali or Magritte canvas reminds me of the ghouls on display at a Coney Island Haunted house. 

When I was 4, I decided that ordinary talk was so damn predictable.   So I turned words into poisoned puzzles.  

At age 4, I asked my babysitter if it would be alright for one to eat one’s hands.  Now I knew that was pretty damn fucked up because if we didn’t have hands, we would be helpless, and until the wounds healed, we would sport a bloody and bleeding stump.   But I so enjoyed the horror on my babysitter’s face.  

And so I learned the sly or stymied stance of the brilliant drop-out who assumed the jaundiced and jeering perspective of a sardonic saint in a black leather jacket.

And now, as I write this, I am consciously recalling why I  spoke of one eating one’s hands:   My Mother had insisted that I become right-handed and hit me whenever I used my left hand.  Her admonition that I treat my left hand as if it were something satanic alienated me from my innate neuronal wiring.  I become an utter klutz.  And that sounded the death knell of the smiling physicality of toddlerhood.  And the ascendance of my fetish for using words to wound.          

1. As I was writing this, I remembered the smells of prayer books in my childhood synagogue. Sort of like fine linen fortified with the gumption of garlic)