At this time of year in New England, I think about how much the changing seasons reflect the phases of our own lives. At the beginning of the summer it is easy to squander a beautiful day - to stay inside or to spend a Saturday in the office. There will be more Saturdays, there will be more sunshine. And then suddenly Labor Day is fast disappearing in the rear view mirror, and every day that delays the killing frost is a victory. A celebration.
Work has picked up lately, and due to unfortunate delays on a few of my projects I found myself last weekend with the distasteful decision of spending either Saturday or Sunday in the office to catch up. Saturday was forecasted to be 80 degrees and sunny, and Sunday was to be cold and rainy. Hardly a Sophie’s choice there. Saturday noon I grabbed my book and headed down to Lynn Beach.
I live in Lynn, several miles north of Boston. It is a working class city, with an industrial character once dominated by shoe factories, later by the GE jet engine factory. It is a city that tends to define itself by the communities and neighborhoods within. People are born there, marry there and die there without ever moving out of their neighborhood. We moved there in 1986. Ten years later I was talking to a couple who had just moved in next door. “Oh yes”, they told me. “We just met the people across the way and they said that you were the new couple on the street.”
Despite the huge increase of real estate prices in Boston and surrounding areas, Lynn tends to trail the crowd, remaining one of the last affordable housing markets within Route 128 (the belt highway that forms a semi-circle around Boston). There are some who would say that there was a reason for that, but I like to focus on the positives. I’m a fairly short drive into Boston. Lynn Woods Reservation is a 2,200 acre municipal forest park within the City; the second largest municipal park in the United States, with golfing, hiking and horseback riding. And of course, there is always the sea. Like King Haggard said, “The sea is always good. There is nothing I can look at for very long, except the sea.”
Driving north up the Lynnway, it would easy at first to miss the fact that there is in fact ocean frontage. Some of it has been wasted, thrown thoughtlessly and carelessly to industries that could just as easily have prospered inland. But then, after passing the causeway to Nahant, the land on the ocean side narrows down to a width that is a little too narrow for industry, and that is where I go when the weather cooperates. There are beaches, a promenade of sorts, and a number of seating areas where you can sit facing the ocean or the people who can’t seem to stay too far from the wind and the waves.
I have my own bench, although I am far too polite on those rare occasions to evict the thoughtless people who unknowingly sit on it. I face the sun, reading my book or looking up to see the skyline of Boston or watch the jets leaving Logan Airport. I’ve lived in the City for over 20 years, but I just found out a few months ago that my father and mother would go to Lynn Beach when they were dating. Revere Beach was the more popular destination at the time because of the amusement park, but Lynn Beach offered a quieter view of the water.
For me it’s a place for quiet contemplation, as odd as that may seem. The summer after my wife died, I found myself just sitting there and watching the waves and the gulls. After 9/11, when air traffic had been grounded, it became almost eerie in its quiet. People weren’t talking much, few people were even driving, and it was easy to close my eyes and think that there was really no one else around.
Saturday I was sitting on my bench when a little old man drove up in a motorized scooter; it said “Pride” on the back, although I think that that was the manufacturer’s name, and not his attempt to pimp his ride. He parked it next to my bench and began to walk on the sidewalk. His gait was slow and labored and he was wearing what looked to be orthopedic shoes. The best I can describe his gait would be to imagine a cord about one foot in length between one’s ankles, trying to walk without falling over. In fact, even with that it seemed that I could probably walk faster. Nevertheless, it seemed that I just looked down at my book for a moment and he was down the end of the sidewalk with the tortoise’s perseverance.
When he came back my way I smiled at him and commented on what a beautiful day it was. He smiled back and we began to talk. He asked me if I could guess how old he was. I guessed that he was in his seventies, but I thought I’d be polite and ask if he was in his sixties. I needn’t have worried. After he stopped laughing he told me that he would be ninety one next month. He told me that he was born in 1916, was Jewish and had moved to Lynn in the 1950s. I had noticed a strong accent, and asked him where he had been born. He told me that he was born in Poland. “Oh no”, I thought. I realized that he had been Jewish and in Poland during the Second World War.
His name is Borys. "With a ‘Y’ ", he said. His mother had died of tuberculosis when he was eight, his father died from the same when he was eleven, and so he was sent to an orphanage. After he left the orphanage, he moved to Kraków and lived there for some time. When war was imminent, he got together with some of his friends from the orphanage and went to enlist, but he was rejected because of his feet. His friends were enlisted; he never saw again.
During the German occupation of Poland, he went back to his home town to visit his relatives. He went to see his aunt and uncle; but the aunt had had a nervous breakdown. When the Germans had occupied their town, they had demanded the residents give them all of their supplies. When they found that some residents were holding back, they took a few men out to the forest, killed them and mutilated the bodies. His uncle was one of them, but the family was afraid to tell the aunt for fear that this would kill her. She still thought that he would be coming home, and couldn’t understand why he had stayed away so long.
Borys learned quickly that if he appeared to be Jewish, he would be captured or killed. When walking down the street, he witnessed a Jewish man beaten to death in the street, recognized by his beard and clothing. He realized that it was time to leave Poland, so he headed across a river into Russian territories. The Russian soldiers were going to shoot him, but he told them that it would be better than going back to the Germans. They agreed to let him resettle in their territory.
After the war, he tried to reunite with his family, but found that they were no longer in Kraków. Years later he found that his brother had been shot for not keeping up with a work detail. His two sisters had been in the camp in Płaszów (the camp in “Schindler’s List”); when a prisoner tried to escape, they were part of a group who were hanged in retribution. He contacted American cousins and emigrated here to Lynn in the 1950s.
He married a Holocaust survivor, and they lived here in Lynn, with two sons and one daughter. In 1989, after mental instability and episodes of violence, she was involunatarily committed to psychiatric care, but died of a heart attack during the eviction procedures while he watched.
Borys was a poet in Poland before the war, but never thought to pursue it afterward. But recently his family and friends urged him to take up poetry again. He wrote a book of poems in English this time (self published) about the war and losing his wife.
We talked until the sun started to set and the cool air started to settle. I told him that I would look for his book, and would buy it if he would autograph it for me. He gave me his email address, and asked for mine.
We said our goodbyes. I got into my car to drive home, and saw him drive off on the scooter with the name “Pride”.
