Remembering the colorful co-inhabitants of the street on which I grew up, and how movies depicting the war years were a component of our bond
"Oh Danny Boyyyy...the pipes, the pipes are caaaallingggg..."
To this day, I cannot hear one bar of that age-old song without it being in his soft, accommodating lilt.
It was, in effect, their doorbell, the sound their house made whenever I approached it, from mine just across the street. And though these homes were but a few feet away from one another, they were worlds apart.
Theirs was larger than ours, smelled constantly of foods we never ate, and featured a large addition that suggested another time: a spacious Victorian era back room, complete with perpetually blazing hearth (even in summer, if memory serves!)
There was a downstairs, divided into several rooms: a sauna, a spare bedroom with color TV, and a red carpeted parlor that always smelled of Guinness and featured an acre-long pool table.
We never played pool, my best friend and I, but spent countless hours at an improvised game in which one pool ball was thrown across the table at another one one of us had just sent on a slow, horizontal mission.
Their property was surrounded by several apple trees (the fallen fruit of which we would plunge the barrels of our Daisy air rifles into, then aim and shoot at one another) and such suburban novelties as a pear tree and a plum tree!
At lunch, over hot dogs (always hot dogs), we would burn our initials or those of any girls we had an eye for into a side-yard picnic table, courtesy of our magnifying glasses, while the skull of a long horned cow - yes, that's correct - kept an eyehole on us (it was one of the many curios that belonged to his older brother, who, in that complicated era -the '60s - had mysteriously left home, his things - including an old pump organ - too difficult to bring along, I supposed.)
All of this was made normal by his father, the simple, adorable Irishman who loved to sing me "Danny Boy," his class-conscious but accepting mother (who took me into the fold despite obvious reservations), and his freckled, lively sisters, whom I never seemed to cease to amuse.
When not playing the pool ball game or attempting to take each other's eyes out with bullet-sized pieces of fruit, we could be found in the spare bedroom, our plastic guns carefully aimed at the large TV screen, on the lookout for any anonymous, blonde-haired actor who might appear wearing a Nazi uniform. At the first sight of his appearance, our mouths would reel off endless streams of amateurish sound effects to simulate the rapid firing of our weapons.
By the end of each film, we were proud comrades in arms with whichever square jawed hero - from Errol Flynn to John Wayne - we had decided to join up with.
No doubt that sight was one of the things that made his father, who had grown up in Hitler's Europe, sing so sweetly to me.
