Flare-Up

I wish brain doctors could come up with the reason why certain memories fire through decades of burial, at the most incongruous times.

I grew up in an economically eclectic neighborhood. We were the poor Italians. There were a couple of comfortable Italian families, one or two poor German families, at least one middle-class German family... Now these weren't immigrant Italians and Germans...and Poles and Slovaks...but the children -- and probably grandchildren -- of these immigrants, just like my father is.

Right next door to us to the south was the only Mexican family on the block, the Fonsecas. I don't know if the mother and the father had come FROM Mexico, or if they were the children of immigrants, but they spoke Spanish to each other, Mrs. Fonseca speaking only Spanish, and Mr. Fonseca a heavily accented, very broken English, except when he was speaking Spanish to his family or other Hispanic friends. They were poor as well.

Theirs was a large family, just like ours, but with four boys and two girls. All of the Fonseca children are older than I am, all but one of or beyond high school age when I was still in diapers. The one exception is Ben, his father's namesake, so he was called, simply, "Junior."

Junior is one year older than I am, and, with no other boys on the block close to us in age, it was almost required of us to be friends. Junior and I had our ups and downs, as friends often do, with his sensitivities and mine often working against each other. As I have written in the past, my family was poor, but I never knew that. I have the same understanding about the Fonsecas. It seems to me now that Junior's family made him more aware of their circumstances than my family made me aware of ours. Mr. Fonseca was a laborer/entrepreneur. He owned a tractor, the kind you might see on a very small farm. In the summer he attached a mower unit to the back and earned money mowing people's fields. In the winter he attached a blade to the thing somewhere and plowed people's driveways and parking lots. In between the plowing and mowing jobs, his garage was employed with fixing cars. Mr. Fonseca did a fair amount of this work, but his sons did quite a lot of it. And as Junior got older, more and more was required of him to help the family earn money. As soon as he could reach the pedals on the tractor, he was mowing the fields. When he was strong enough and had enough practice, he was doing body work on cars.

But I digress. Junior was an employee of his father's enterprise almost as early as he was a member of the family. I never understood this responsibility to his father, and it often affected our friendship.

Junior had some cousins who lived about a mile away, in the next suburb to the north. As I recall, there were five brothers, all ranging in age from about a year younger than I, to about eight years younger. I didn't like these kids. When they came over to visit the Fonsecas they played differently than any of my other friends; the older ones were mean to me, they often spoke Spanish to each other, looking at me, and then laughing...and Junior was at these times in on the joke. Any play with them was usually short-lived, as I wound up either fighting with one or more of them, or I would just walk away and go inside my house.

One summer day -- I figure I was about 9 or 10 years old -- Junior and I saw a kid across the street operating a lemonade stand, and we thought that what that kid deserved was competition! The next day we pulled my wagon out of the shed, and I procured the can of lemonade powder from my mother's cupboard. Junior supplied the water, the Dixie cups and the location -- the sidewalk in front of his house...as that's as far as his water hose would reach. He also brought out some newspaper to lay in the wagon to soak up any spills. It also worked to hide our "till," the money we were raking in selling the cups of lemonade at a nickel each.

We had been working all day and probably had about a whole dollar's worth of loose change underneath the newpaper when, in mid-afternoon, Junior's cousins poured out of their father's car at the curb. We made our sales pitch, and one of them had a quarter. I poured the drink and gave it to him, and he gave his quarter to Junior. Junior flipped up the sheet of newspaper to make the change, exposing our fortune to his cousins' eyes. I don't know now if it's hindsight, or if it was in that moment, but I resented that Junior had flashed our till to them. It seemed inevitable, I guess, but within a few seconds one of the cousins violently threw aside the newspaper -- and the cups and the pitcher of lemonade -- to make a grab for our money. I was so angry he did it that I can't remember if he got any or all of it. From that day forward I refused to have anything to do with those kids, vowing to myself to just leave whenever they showed up.

I recall that the Chicago winters of the mid- to late-1970s were pretty harsh. As happens too often in snow-belt cities, poor people live in inadequately heated homes and they resort to alternative methods to keep warm, some of which are deceptively unsafe. And so it was one evening that following winter when Junior's cousins' family, living in a converted garage across the street from the gradeschool they all attended, went to sleep one winter evening with one of these alternative heating methods in use. I don't remember what it was found to have been -- a space heater or an open oven. Whatever it was, something near it caught fire, and the small apartment was rapidly consumed by the flames, and all but their father were consumed with it.

The memory of this event came to me yesterday while driving to work. Nothing triggered it, that I'm aware of. Later in the day I caught a news headline about a family of 5 who died in a Missouri fire. I found it odd to have thought of Junior's cousins in the morning, and then to see the news story later in the day.

In the aftermath of the tragedy I failed to see the depth of Junior's pain over the loss of his cousins. I could only remember them as I knew them, with dread and animosity. I made a comment about them, something to the effect of how we wouldn't have to worry about them stealing our lemonade money any more, and that deeply hurt Junior, another dent in the finish of our friendship.

Any time their visages swim up to the viewing screen of my memory, I first remember the lemonade stand incident, and how angry it made me. Then I remember that their lives didn't progress much farther past that moment, and that their lives ended in a hell of terror and pain. And I always feel regretful that I hated them so much as a kid, that I made that stupid comment to Junior, and that I don't think of their tragic deaths BEFORE I get to the lemonade stand.

But I guess we remember certain events chronologically, and that serves us to remember life's lessons that way.