Was Naben’s Advice Taken? 🤣

I had a dream last night about 2 long dead cousins.

Nathan & Benjamin were brothers. They learnt to be butchers from their Uncle Sam, my papa.

Eventually they worked, saved & borrowed enough, to open a butcher shop of their own. They called it “Naben’s Meat Company”.

Their business became many times larger than their Uncle Sam’s small, one -man shop.

In the 1940’s Trolley Cars had a stop in front of Nabens’, its steel tracks were laid in the cobble stone road. The cars had power from an electric cable…clacking & shooting sparks from its source above.

A black noisy, ugly elevatored train would screech as it hauled into its Rockaway Avenue Station.

This was a bustling street crowded with passengers from the train stop, trolley cars, trucks, autos and an occasional horse drawn wagon.

There were a group of stores lined up on this same block of Rockaway Avenue, in old Brooklyn.

The Schafer’s family bakery with its windows filled with delicious layer cakes, seated on paper snowflake doilies. Then rows of iced cupcakes, Danishes, and trays of cookies. Big loaves of freshly breads from its brick ovens were piled high.

Delicious aromas bathed the area, climbing the shabby metal train steps … thru trolley cars… tempting all the passengers and shoppers.

Naben’s was next off the corner from this IRT train Rockaway Avenue Station.

Its store front was plastered with bright painted paper signs shouting what was on sale: oxtails, pork butts, ground beef, etc.

My cousins ran the place together, with 3 employees.

At the day’s end, they’d travel home to Long Island.

They had been born & raised in this Brooklyn neighborhood by their immigrant parents. When this neighborhood turned downhill with crime, and they could afford it, they moved their young families to the suburbs.

I lived a block away on Chester Street and had to pass Nabens’ in order to take the train to school, in Manhattan, 5 days a week.

Almost always, when I would walk by, books in hand, one of my cousins ran out to greet me, their “cute” kid cousin.

“Remember Dee-Dee, you can easily fall in love with a rich guy, as fast as you can with a poor one”, they’d remind me.

I only smirked secretly, as they didn’t know I had already fallen in love, with one of the poorest boys, in this poor neighborhood.

He would become my only husband…for 50 years.