The first few years of my life were pretty uneventful. In 1950, when I was born, my parents lived on 21st Street in Brooklyn. My mother's parents lived nearby and I have been told my grandmother would take care of me, but I don't recall it. To be honest, actually, I don’t remember much until my first year in grammar school.

    My father was a World War II veteran. He told me the story about being a 20 year old sitting in a boat on D-Day, and watching all the bombs exploding on the land. Thankfully, he didn’t go ashore until a few days later and survived to come back home. He worked for a grocery store chain. We didn’t have a lot, but we didn’t go hungry either. I don’t know the details, but somehow they were able to afford to buy a house on 11th Street in 1953. I really don’t recall much of the first few years there either. But I did make a few friends around my age on the “block”, as we considered the two sides where the houses were and the street in between, where the cars would go down.

    The neighborhood, when I was growing up, was called Park Slope. Now however, when I look on a map, they have renamed it Gowanus, after a canal that flows through part of it. We just called it "the Slope". The "Park" part referred to Prospect Park, which began around the equivalent of 9th Avenue. We were between 3rd and 4th Avenues, and to walk from our house to the park you really had the feeling you were climbing a steep hill, hence the "Slope" part. The 1950s in our part of Brooklyn was a LOT different than it is now. Our neighborhood was predominantly Italian and Irish Catholic and on the lower side of middle class. It has become a lot more gentrified now.

    When it came time to start school, I didn’t know that 11th Street formed the boundary between two Catholic parishes, St. Thomas Aquinas (STA) and Holy Family (which I recently found out have merged into one, probably due to budgetary issues). The grammar school for STA was on 8th Street, and the side of 11th Street closer to 8th with odd-numbered addresses belonged to STA, whereas the side where I lived with even-numbered addresses belonged to Holy Family, whose grammar school I believe was on 14th Street.

    Since some of my friends lived on the “other” side of the street, my parents decided to enroll me at STA. They actually had to pay extra to the parish, which was a little bit of a hardship since, as I have already stated, we didn’t have a lot. But it was better for me, so they did it. As a result, I went to school with people from 11th Street and the streets with the lower numbers (10, 9, 8, etc.). Had I gone to Holy Family, obviously I would have made other friends and, since I met my ex-wife at STA (another fork, later on…), who knows where my life would have gone?

    Note: I had one, fairly eventful thing happen to me in my early years on 11th Street. Don’t think it counts as a “fork”, really, but it is more of a mini, fork within a fork. There are going to be a few of them as we move along here, and some of them actually wind up being influential to the forks in which they are contained. Hopefully this will become clearer as we move on.

    I was an altar boy at the church in the parish and we regularly held meetings. February 1960, we were coming out of the school where we held the meetings and there was construction going on. Another altar boy picked up an L-shaped piece of metal tubing and was balancing it on his hand. I was standing there watching. It toppled out of his hands and hit me on the forehead, right above the bridge of my nose. I fell to the ground. The construction people ran over, took me back into the school basement down to the bathroom area and cleaned me off. I was bleeding pretty badly.

    They then drove me home and my mother and I went to Methodist Hospital, which was nearby. The doctors spoke with my mother and said they could just stitch it up, in which case I would have a nasty scar or they could perform plastic surgery. She decided on the latter, so I had to wait a while.

    I was admitted to the hospital and was assigned to a bed. Funny, how some of the things surrounding this are so vivid. I remember there was a TV on in the room and Soupy Sales was on. A priest from the parish came by and we played checkers to help me while away the time until they were ready for me and help me to not think about what was going to happen.

    I was brought to the operating room and they put sheets over my head with a cutout for them to do their work. They injected a needle into my forehead to numb the area so I didn’t feel pain but I was conscious during the procedure and heard their conversations. It was pretty intense. Remember, I was not yet 10 years old.

    I stayed in the hospital for a couple of days and then went home. For a number of years I had a small lump on my forehead, a little above and between my eyebrows. It was a little tender and I recall having a fear of diving into bodies of water headfirst. Eventually it faded away, although, if I get up real close to a mirror, I can still see faint traces of it.

    I will have issues with my neck in future forks. I don’t know if this contributed to those issues, but it was something that happened that remains in my memory.

    As I grew older and had more mobility, I did make some friends from Holy Family, but going to STA is what I would consider my first “Fork.”