-The year was 1952-

It was a memorable

Saturday morning in 1952.

The kitchen door is open to the screen door

Which never closes the same way twice.

I’m on the first floor with my family

And I can see the entry clearly through the fine, wire mesh.

There’s my bike and my brother’s bike,

Same make, same color, but different in size

As measured by the Schwinn engineers.
My Schwinn is bigger.

Both will lean against the entry's wall until we’re ready.

My father’s house is a tenement.

I live in a tenement, complete with a toilet

And a small sink in a narrow space, separate
From the wider space where the bathtub sits.

During breakfast, the milkman

Knocks on the warped screen-door’s frame.

It’s a sickly knock because the door gives way
During contact with knuckles. 

My mother takes in the 4 quarts of milk.

The milkman represents the Hood Dairy Farms.

His uniform is white, but faded, with a hint

Of pale-yellow around the collar and armpits. 

No money is paid.

That’s next week, he says.

An intermission, with the typical goings on,

Going on in the morning kitchen.

A knock on the screen door’s frame
Calls an end to the kitchen's intermission.

Another sickly knock, but this time, more knocks

With a faster, more deliberate knuckled beat.

It’s the egg man.

His eggs are still warm, dotted with chicken shit

Where little strands of coop-hay pattern the brown

Shells like arteries in sclerosis.

The egg man is more interesting than the milk man.

He wears farmer's clothes, grey-striped bib overalls
topped-off with the obligatory, sweat-banded fedora.

My grandfather has one.

So do his few friends from the same
Italian province, still among the living.

Pay the egg man on Monday.

Wintertime.

It was a memorable

Saturday morning in 1952.

A heavier knock. Solid, like the heavily
Lacquered, solid wood of the closed kitchen door.

A blackened man stands in the entry, the first

Blackened man I ever knew by recognizable sight.

He’s black with the dust of anthracite, 

The coal shoveled down the chute

To the bin next to the furnace.

It's been over two months, he says.

My mother pays-up in cash money.

Spring is one month yet to come;

The coal bin's last full load.

                                      1017 Bedford Street, City