The Smells, Ah, The Smells Of
Childhood- Ida's Bakery Redux-With The Doors’ The End In Mind
In memory of Peter
Paul Markin, 1946-1972, North Adamsville High School Class of 1964:
This is the way the late Peter Paul
Markin, although he never stood on ceremony and everybody in the corner boy
night at Jack Slack’s bowling alleys down near Adamsville Beach called him
plain old ordinary vanilla Markin, would have wanted to put his response to the
question of what smell most distinctly came to his mind from the old
neighborhoods if he were still around. Many a night, a late night around
midnight usually, in the days and weeks after we got out of high school but
before we went on to other stuff, maybe some of those nights having had trouble
with some girl, either one of us, since we both came from all boy families and
didn’t understand girls, or maybe were afraid of them, unlike guys who had
sisters, who maybe didn’t understand them either but were around them enough to
have figured a few things out about them we would stand holding up the wall in
front of Jack Slack’s and talk our talk, talk truth as we saw it although we
never really dignified the jive with the word truth.
Or maybe dateless some nights like
happened a lot more than either of us, hell, any of us if it came right down to
it, would admit to (I won’t even discuss the shroud we placed over the truth
when talking, big talking, about “making it” when we were lucky to get a
freaking kiss on the cheek from a girl half the time) we would talk. Sometimes
with several guys around but mainly Markin and me, since we were the closest of
the half dozen or ten guys who considered themselves Frankie Riley-led Jack Slack’s
corner boys we would talk about lots of things.
Goofy stuff when you think about it but
one night I don’t know if it was me or him that came up with the question about
what smell did we remember from the old days, the old days being when we were
in school, from around the neighborhood but I do remember we both automatically
and with just a couple of minutes thought came up with our common choice- Ida’s
Bakery. Ida’s over on Sagamore Street, just up the street from the old ball
field and adjacent to the Parks and Recreations sheds where the stuff for the
summer programs, you know, archery equipment, paints, sports equipment, craft-making
stuff, how-to magazines and all were kept during the summer and after that,
between seasons. Since both Markin and I when we went to Josiah Adams
Elementary up the next block (named after some guy related to guys who ran the
town way back when) would each summer participate in the program and as we grew
older (and presumably more reliable) were put in charge of the daily storage of
those materials during the summer and so got a preternatural whiff of whatever
Ida was baking for sale for the next day. So yeah, we knew the smell of Ida’s
place. And so too I can “speak” for old Markin just like if he was here today
some fifty years later telling you his story himself.
Unfortunately Markin laid down his head
in a dusty back alley, arroyo, or cul-de-sac we never did really find out which
with two slugs in his heart and nobody, not even his family, certainly not me
and I loved the guy, wanted to go there to claim the body, worse, to start an
investigation into what happened that day back in 1972 down Sonora way, that is
in Mexico, for fear of being murdered in some back alley, arroyo, or cul-de-sac
ourselves. See Markin had huge corner boy, “from hunger,” wanting habits back
then, going back in the Jack Slack days. Hell I came up with him and had them
too. But he also had a nose for drugs, had been among the first in our town as
far as I know although I won’t swear to that now since some kids up the Point,
some biker guys who always were on the cutting edge of some new kicks may have
been doing smoke well before him to do, publicly do right out on Adamsville
Common in broad daylight with some old beat cop sitting about two benches away,
marijuana in the mid-1960s. That at a time, despite what we had heard was going
on in the Boston Common and over in high Harvard Square, when the rest of us were still getting our
underage highs from illicit liquor (Southern Comfort, cheap gin, cheaper wine,
Ripple, more than a few times, Thunderbird, when we were short on dough,
nobody, including our hobo knight in
shining armor who “bought” for us as long as he got a bottle for his work,
wanted to bother lugging cases of cheapjack beer, say Knickerbocker or
Narragansett, out of a liquor store and pass it on to in obviously under-aged
kids so we all developed a taste for
some kind of hard liquor or wine). Markin did too, liked his white wine. But he
was always heading over to Harvard Square, early on sometimes with me but I
didn’t really “get” the scene that he was so hopped up about and kind of
dropped away when he wanted to go over, so later he would go alone late at
night taking the all-night Redline subway over, late at night after things had
exploded around his house with his mother, or occasionally, his three brother
(and very, very rarely his father since he had to work like seven bandits to
make ends meet for the grim reaper bill collectors, which they, the ends never
did meet as far as I could tell and from what I knew about such activity from
my own house, so he was left out of it except to back up Ma).
One night, one night some guy, Markin
said some folk singer, Eric somebody, who made a name for himself around the
Square, made a name around his “headquarters,” the Hayes-Bickford just a jump
up from the subway entrance where all the night owl wanna-be hipsters, dead ass
junkies, stoned-out winos, wizened con men and budding poets and songwriters
hung out, turned him on to a joint, and he liked it, liked the feeling of how
it settled him down he said (after that first hit, as he was trying to look
cool, look like he had been doing joints since he was a baby, almost blew him
away with the coughing that erupted from inhaling the harsh which he could
never figure out (nor could I when my mary jane coughing spurt came) since he,
like all of us, was a serious cigarette smoker, practically chain-smoking to
while away the dead time and, oh yeah, to look cool to any passing chicks while
we were hanging out in front of Jack Slack’s.
Of course that first few puffs stuff
meant nothing really, was strictly for smooth-end kicks, and before long he had
turned me, Frankie Riley, our corner boy leader, and Sam Lowell, another good
guy, on and it was no big deal. And when the time came for us to do our “youth
nation,” hippie, Jack Kerouac On The Road
treks west the five of us, at one time or another, had grabbed all kinds of
different dope, grabbed each new drug in turn like they were the flavor of the
month, which they usually were. And nobody worried much about any consequences
either since we all had studiously avoided acid in our drug cocktail mix. Until Markin got stuck on cocaine, you know,
snow, girl, cousin any of those names you might know that drug by where you
live. No, that is not right, exactly right anyway. It wasn’t so much that Markin
got stuck on cocaine as that his nose candy problem heightened his real needs,
his huge wanting habits, needs that he had been grasping at since his ‘po boy
childhood. And so to make some serious dough, and still have something left to
“taste” the product as he used to call it when he offered some to me with the
obligatory dollar bill as sniffing tool he began some low-level dealing, to friends and acquaintances mainly and then
to their friends and acquaintances and on and on.
Markin when he lived the West Coast, I
think when he was in Oakland with Moon-Glow (don’t laugh we all had names,
aliases, monikers like that back then to bury our crazy pasts, mine was Flash
Dash for a while, and also don’t laugh because she had been my girlfriend
before I headed back east to go to school after the high tide of the 1960s
ebbed out around 1971 or so. And also don’t laugh because Moon-Glow liked to
“curl my toes,” Markin’s too, and she did, did just fine), stepped up a notch,
started “muling” product back and forth from Mexico for one of the early cartels.
He didn’t say much about it, and I didn’t want to know much but for a while he
was sending plane tickets for me to come visit him out there. Quite a step up
from our hitchhike in all weathers heading west days. And of course join him in
imbibing some product testing. That went on for a while, a couple of years, the
last year or so I didn’t see him, didn’t go west because I was starting a job.
Then one day I got a letter in the mail from him all Markin-y about his future
plans, about how he was going to finally make a “big score,” with a case full
of product that he had brought up Norte, he always said Norte like he was some
hermano or something rather than just paid labor, cheap paid labor probably,
and was too much the gringo to ever get far in the cartel when the deal went
down. Maybe he sensed that and that ate at him with so much dough to be made,
so much easy dough. Yeah, easy dough with those two slugs that Spanish Johnny,
a guy who knew Markin in the Oakland days, had heard about when he was muling and
passed on the information to us. RIP-Markin
No RIP though for the old days, the old
smells that I started telling you about before I got waylaid in my head about
the fate of my missed old corner boy comrade poor old Markin. Here’s how he,
we, no he, let’s let him take a bow on this one, figured it out one night when
the world was new, when our dreams were still fresh:
“There are many smells, sounds, tastes,
sights and touches stirred up on the memory’s eye trail in search of the old
days in North Adamsville. Tonight though I am in thrall to smells, if one can
be in thrall to smells and when I get a chance I will ask one of the guys about
whether that is possible. The why of this thralldom is simply put. I had, a
short while before, passed a neighborhood bakery on St. Brendan Street in a
Boston neighborhood, a Boston Irish neighborhood to be clear, that reeked of
the smell of sour-dough bread being baked on the premises. The bakery itself,
designated as such by a plainly painted sign-Mrs. Kenney’s Bakery- was a simple
extension of someone’s house like a lot of such operations by single old maid,
widowed, divorced or abandoned women left for whatever reason to their own
devises trying to make a living baking, sewing, tailoring, maybe running a beauty
parlor, small change but enough to keep the wolves from the door, with living
quarters above, and that brought me back to the hunger streets of the old home
town and Ida’s holy-of-holies bakery over on Sagamore Street.
Of course one could not dismiss, or
could dismiss at one’s peril just ask Frank, that invigorating smell of the
salt-crusted air blowing in from North Adamsville Bay when the wind was up
hitting us in front of Jack Slack’s bowling lanes and making us long to walk
that few blocks to the beach with some honey who would help us pass the night.
A wind too once you took girls out of the picture, although you did that at
your peril as well, that spoke of high-seas adventures, of escape, of jail
break-out from landlocked spiritual destitutes, of, well, on some days just
having been blown in from somewhere else for those who sought that great
eastern other shoreline. Or how could one forget the still nostril-filling
pungent fragrant almost sickening smell emanating from the Proctor &Gamble soap
factory across the channel down in the old Adamsville Housing Authority project
that defined many a muggy childhood summer night air instead of sweet dreams
and puffy clouds. Or that never to be forgotten slightly oily, sulfuric smell
at low- tide down at the far end of North Adamsville Beach, near the fetid
swamps and mephitic marshes in the time of the clam diggers and their
accomplices trying to eke a living or a feeding out of that slimy mass. [Sorry
I put those smelly adjectives in, Markin would have cringed.] Or evade the funky
smell [A Markin word.] of marsh weeds steaming up from the disfavored Squaw
Rock end of the beach, the adult haunts with their broods of children in tow.
Disfavored, disfavored when it counted in the high teenage dudgeon be-bop 1960s
night, post-school dance or drive-in movie love slugfest, for those who took
their “submarine races” dead of night viewing seriously and the space between
the yacht clubs was the only “cool” place to hang with some honey. And I do
not, or will not spell the significance of that teen lingo “submarine race”
expression even for those who did their teenage “parking” in the throes of the
wild high plains Kansas night. You can figure that out yourselves.
Or the smell sound of the ocean floor
at twilight (or dawn, if you got lucky) on those days when the usually tepid
waves aimlessly splashed against the shoreline stones, broken clam shells, and
other fauna and flora or turned around and became a real roaring ocean, acting
out Mother Nature’s high life and death drama, and in the process acted to calm
a man’s (or a man-child’s) nerves in the frustrating struggle to understand a
world not of one’s own making. Moreover, I know I do not have to stop very long
to tell you guys, the crowd that will know what I am talking about, to speak about
the smell taste of that then just locally famous HoJo’s ice cream back in the
days. Jimmied up and frosted to take one’s breath away. Or those char-broiled
hot dogs and hamburgers sizzling on your back-yard barbecue pit or, better,
from one of the public pits down at the beach. But the smell that I am
ghost-smelling today is closer to home as a result of a fellow classmate’s
bringing this to my attention awhile back (although, strangely, if the truth be
known I was already on the verge of “exploring" this very subject). Today,
after passing that home front bakery, as if a portent, I bow down in humble
submission to the smells from Ida’s Bakery.”
That’s good enough for the Markin part,
the close up memory part. Here I am for the distant memory part:
You, if you are of a certain age, at or
close to AARP-eligible age, and neighborhood, Irish (or some other
ethnic-clinging enclave) filled with those who maybe did not just get off the
boat but maybe their parents did, remember Ida’s, right? Even if you have never
set one foot in old North Adamsville, or even know where the place is. If you
lived within a hair’s breathe of any Irish neighborhood and if you had grown up
probably any time in the first half of the 20th century you “know” Ida’s. My
Ida ran a bakery out of her living room, or maybe it was the downstairs and she
lived upstairs, in the 1950s and early 1960s (before or beyond that period I do
not know). An older grandmotherly woman when I knew her who had lost her
husband, lost him to drink, or, as was rumored, persistently rumored although
to a kid it was only so much adult air talk, to another woman. Probably it was
the drink as was usual in our neighborhoods with the always full hang-out
Dublin Grille just a couple of blocks up the street. She had, heroically in
retrospect, raised a parcel of kids on the basis of her little bakery including
some grandchildren that I played ball with over at Welcome Young Field also
just up the street, and also adjacent to my grandparents’ house on Kendrick
Street.
Now I do not remember all the
particulars about her beyond the grandmotherly appearance I have just
described, except that she still carried that hint of a brogue that told you
she was from the “old sod” but that did not mean a thing in that neighborhood
because at any given time when the brogues got wagging you could have been in
Limerick just as easily as in North Adamsville. Also she always, veil of tears
hiding maybe, had a smile for one and all coming through her door, and not just
a commercial smile either. Nor do I know much about how she ran her operation,
except that you could always tell when she was baking something in back because
she had a door bell tinkle that alerted her when someone came in and she would
come out from behind a curtained entrance, shaking flour from her hands, maybe,
or from her apron-ed dress ready to take your two- cent order-with a smile, and
not a commercial smile either but I already told you that.
Nor, just now, do I remember all of
what she made or how she made it but I do just now, rekindled by Markin’s
reference to that sour-dough yeasty smell, remember the smells of fresh oatmeal
bread that filtered up to the playing fields just up the street from her store
on Fridays when she made that delicacy. Fridays meant oatmeal bread, and, as
good practicing Catholics like my family going back to the “famine ships,” and
probably before, were obliged to not eat red meat on that sacred day, but fish,
really tuna fish had that on Ida’s oatmeal bread. But, and perhaps this is
where I started my climb to quarrelsome heathen-dom I balked at such a tuna
fish desecration of holy bread. See, grandma would spring for a fresh loaf, a
fresh right from the oven loaf, cut by a machine that automatically sliced the
bread (the first time I had seen such a useful gadget). And I would get to have
slathered peanut butter (Skippy, of course) and jelly (Welch’s Grape, also of
course) on oatmeal and a glass of milk. Ah, heaven.
And just now I memory smell those
white-flour dough, deeply- browned Lenten hot-cross buns white frosting dashed
that signified that hellish deprived high holy catholic Lent was over, almost.
Beyond that I have drawn blanks. Know this those. All that sweet sainted
goddess (or should be) Ida created from flour, eggs, yeast, milk and whatever
other secret devil’s ingredients she used to create her other simple baked
goods may be unnamed-able now but they put my mother, my grandmother, your
mother, your grandmother in the shade. And that is at least half the point. You
went over to Ida’s to get high on those calorie-loaded goodies. And in those
days with youth at your back, and some gnawing hunger that never quite got
satisfied, back then that was okay. Believe me it was okay. I swear I will
never forget those glass-enclosed delights that stared out at me in my sugar
hunger. I may not remember much about the woman, her life, where she was from,
or any of that. This I do know- in this time of frenzied interest in all things
culinary Ida's simple recipes and her kid-maddening bakery smells still hold a
place of honor. And with a tear in my eye as I say it fifty some years later my
boy Markin did too.
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