A Memory of Garden City
I was too young in 1965
to appreciate the irony
of the episode: Alan Epstein
from up the street, whose family
moved from Wilkinsburg
to get away from the blacks,
Alan, who owned and guarded
every toy advertised on TV,
chose to showoff
the neighborhood’s first
10-speed bicycle
the same day the borough
scheduled to tar and gravel
the road. How he
appeared out of nowhere,
speeding downhill
through arm-waving road workers,
passed the gravel truck and
onto the hot goo
that bogged his skinny tires
and sent him tumbling
in the stuff he would peel
from his skin for weeks,
how his mother dragged him
up the street by his one
clean ear and we never
saw that bicycle again.