He's the Jersey City expertIf you voted the right...
He's the Jersey City expertIf you voted the right way in that town, you had a jobAll I know is the ballparkJersey City had a great ballparkAnd they never got Hague, as you know, never put him awayWinds up with a place at the shore, right next to Asbury ParkA beauti-400 ful place he hasThe thing is, see, Elizabeth is a great sports town, but without having the great sports facilitiesA baseball park where you could charge fifty cents or something to get in, never had thatWe had open fields, we had Brophy Field, Mattano Park, Warananco Park, all public facilities, and still we had great teams and great playersMickey McDermott pitched for StNewcombe, the colored fella, an Elizabeth boyLives in Colonia now but an Elizabeth boy, pitched for JeffersonSwimming in the Arthur Kill, that was itClose as I ever got to a vacationWent twice a year to vintage omega watches Asbury Park on the excursionThat was the vacationDid my swimming in the Arthur Kill, underneath the Goethals BridgeI'd come home with grease in my hair and my mother would say, 'You are swimming in the Arthur Kill again' And I'd say, 'Elizabeth River? You think I'm crazy?' And all the while my hair is sticking up greasy, you know
It was not quite so easy as this for the two mothers-in-law to find common ground and hit it off, for though Dorothy Dwyer could be a bit loquacious herself at Thanksgiving--just about as loquacious as she was nervous--her subject always was churchPatrick's, that was the original one down there, at the port, and that was Jim's parishThe Germans started StMichael's parish and the Polish had StAdalbert's, at Third Street and East Jersey Street, and StPatrick's is right behind Jackson Park, around the chanel purse white cornerMary's is up in south Elizabeth, in the West End section, and that's where my parents startedThey had the milk business there on Murray StreetPatrick's, Sacred Heart in north Elizabeth, Blessed Sacrament, Immaculate Conception Church, all IrishThat's up in WestminsterWell, it's on the city lineActually it's in Hillside, but the school across the street is in ElizabethAnd then our church, StGenevieve's, when it started, was a missionary church, you see, just a part of StIt's a big, beautiful church nowBut the building that stands now--and I remember when I first went in it--"
That was as trying as it ever got: Dorothy Dwyer prattling on about Elizabeth as though this were the Middle Ages and beyond the fields tilled by the peasants the only points of demarcation were the spires of the parish churches on the horizonDorothy Dwyer prattling tiffany heart tag necklace on about StCatherine's while Sylvia Levov sat across from her too polite to do anything other than nod and smile but her face as white as a sheetJust sat there and endured it, and good manners got her throughSo all in all, it was never anywhere near as bad as everybody had been expectingAnd it was never but once a year that they were brought together anyway, and that was on the neutral, dereligion-ized ground of Thanksgiving, when everybody gets to eat the same thing, nobody sneaking off to eat funny stuff--no kugel, no gefilte fish, no bitter herbs, just one colossal turkey for two hundred and fifty million people--one colossal turkey feeds allA moratorium on funny foods and funny ways and religious exclusivity, a moratorium on the three-thousand-year-old nostalgia of the Jews, a moratorium on Christ and the cross and the crucifixion cartier tank louis cartier for the Christians, when everyone in New Jersey and elsewhere can be more passive about their irrationalities than they are the rest of the yearA moratorium on all the grievances and resentments, and not only for the Dwyers and the Levovs but for everyone in America who is suspicious of everyone elseIt is the American pastoral par excellence and it lasts twenty-four hoursThe Presidential SuiteThree bedrooms and a living roomThat's what you got in those days for having been a Miss New JerseyI guess it wasn't booked, so we got on board and they just gave it to us
Dawn was telling the Salzmans about their trip abroad to look at the Simmentals in Switzerland
"I'd never been to Europe before, and all the way over everybody was telling me, 'There's nothing like France, just wait until we come into Le Havre in the morning and you smell chloe black France