Chasing Time’s protagonist, Tony Lucas, grew up in Brooklyn in the 1960s. Author Thomas Reilly shares stories of his Brooklyn days in a series of posts.
While Christmas is a wonder-filled season for children of all ages, certain ones stand out for special reasons. That was certainly the case for my eighth Christmas in 1960.
That year, the Christmas excitement in Brooklyn seemed to arrive earlier than usual. Our fourth-grade class started rehearsing its annual Christmas pageant weeks ahead of time. Almost daily deliveries to our house resulted in an early avalanche of Christmas goodies, including candy, fruit, cookies, gingerbread houses, and other treats. And a landslide of seasonal catalogs accumulated on the living room coffee table, providing ample time and opportunity to draft and revise a Christmas wish list well in advance of the big day. As the season unfolded, the net result was a swelling crescendo of unbridled excitement of the type that only young children, whose minds remained unfettered by a lifetime of difficult memories, can experience.
Many evenings in late November and early December, my twin brother Ned and I would leaf through several of those catalogs to draft our Christmas wish list. The number of choices seemed endless with toys and games of all types and sizes leaping out of the pages and seizing our imaginations. Nightly, our register grew until we had compiled a list of approximately fifteen toys, an outlandish number for parents with six other children to indulge. With greater hopes than expectations, we submitted the list to our mother for parental consideration, approximately three weeks in advance of the 25th.
When Christmas finally arrived we were not disappointed. It seemed that nearly every present on our list was included in a stack of brightly wrapped boxes piled high in our demarcated section of the living room floor. Exalting in our haul, we spent the day chasing our pet cat Lester with a motorized yellow bulldozer, firing salvos of shots from the turret of a metal tank painted in camouflage green, and engaging the whining engine and rotor of a large white helicopter. An array of books, games and other toys completed our stash. It truly was a Christmas for the ages!
In the frenzy of activities on that day, I hardly had the time or inclination to reflect on the one present that did not make the cut. Our wish list had included an additional toy, the Flying Fox. It was a model airliner mounted on the top of a console containing a dual set of controls for manipulating the revving engines, triggering the blinking wing lights, retracting the landing gear, and controlling the directional movement of the plane. Oh well, there’s always next year.
A few days after Christmas, my brother and I were playing in the basement. Playing is perhaps too mild a term to describe our true activity that evening for, in fact, we were engaged in brutal tug and war sessions with my younger sister’s jump rope to determine the stronger of the two. At one point in a tense standoff, my brother proceeded to wrap his end of the rope around one of the circular support beams that ran in length from floor to ceiling. Thinking that a few turns around this beam would suffice to hold the rope in place, despite my energetic pulling on the opposite end, he let go. As the resistance to my tugging force suddenly abated, I was launched in violent backward propulsion in accordance with Newton’s First Law of Motion—an object will remain at rest unless compelled to change its state by the action of an external force. Of course, Newtonian physics was the last thing on my mind as I landed in a crashing thud on the hard cellar floor.
Momentarily paralyzed by the throbbing pain in my right shoulder, I yelled out in agony as I realized that something was definitely amiss. Slowly crawling to the staircase and ascending, step by step, in a snaillike fashion, I could feel the quivering in my shoulder bone at the newly formed fracture line. Fortunately, my older sister who was on babysitting detail that evening met me on the staircase and gently guided me upstairs. With my parents unreachable for the evening, due to a dinner in Manhattan, she phoned the family’s closest friends, Aunt Ag and Uncle Joe Kearns, who lived down the block. Minutes later, Aunt Ag appeared and drove me to the local hospital in her large silver Cadillac, providing comforting words of solace along the entire route.
X-rays confirmed a broken collar bone, a common injury in kids. In fact, it was the fourth time in my short lifespan that I had broken a clavicle, twice on the left side and now, twice on the right. That night spent in the hospital with a newly casted shoulder passed like a blur as I started my recovery from a broken bone as well as a concussion that I had suffered in the fall.
A few days later, when the major aggravation of my injury had been reduced to the constant itching of my cast, I eagerly anticipated one more event, a kind of late Christmas celebration. In recognition of my “bravery” during my ordeal, Aunt Ag had promised me a trip to the toy store where I could pick out any single present I desired.
A week or so later, she drove me to Rosen’s, the local toy store, where I wasted no time in selecting a large box containing the one toy that hadn’t made the cut on Christmas day, the Flying Fox. Our holiday season was now complete, thanks to the incredible generosity of the Kearns, a trait they would display to my family countless times.
Ned and I spent hours with that toy plane, navigating through storms and other perils as we directed the aircraft through its paces. It proved the culmination of a most unforgettable Christmas, where our every wish was fulfilled, even if it took a broken bone to make it happen.
Chasing Time, a suspenseful and heartwarming book filled with unexpected plot twists, is available on Amazon.