Cleveland Avenue

My maternal grandparents occupied a thin slice of a house on Cleveland Avenue in Trenton, New Jersey, the city of my birth and the recent subject of a History Channel "Gangland" show. Until I reached school age, I spent most of my days in their care.
Gram played the bad cop, a stout, white-haired Irishwoman with severe spectacles outfitted in plain, loose-fitting dresses and seemingly always sporting an apron. She scolded, against the backdrop of the pressure cooker's thwap, thwap, thwap in the hallway-like cooking area, when Gramps took me to Harry's and loaded me up with candy before dinner. Jesus and the apostles bore witness as they sat at their Last Supper table overlooking my grandparents' dinner table. The cast-iron radiator, folded like intestines, hissed intermittently beneath the decorative cover on which I used to sit until the heat became too much.
A narrow hallway connected the kitchen to the "parlor," in which I used to nap with Gram on a couch the color of a faded salmon. My head rested on her ample rump as Jesus, with the sacred heart exposed, overlooked us there, too, a palm leaf tucked into the frame. Stained-glass windows on either side of the fireplace helped keep the room suitably dark, and on the fireplace itself hung the old Irish blessing that i read countless times as a child but failed to grasp: May the road rise to meet you/May the wind be always at your back/May the sun shine warm upon your face/The rains fall soft upon your fields/And until we meet again/May God hold you in the palm of his hand.
Part of my problem stemmed from the fact that my grandmother's name was May. Syntactical confusion set upon my young mind as I tried to parse meaning. Was this fireplace-hung banner of sorts directly addressing my grandmother? If so, it didn't make sense, telling her the road rise up to meet you.
Uncle Tommy, my godfather and namesake, lived with my grandparents. His wife had died, but I'm not sure when, relative to my birth. Uncle Tommy had been a Seabee in World War II and then worked as a tool-and-die man at General Motors forever and smoked unfiltered Camels by the carton and drank a lot of Schaefer beer. He also bowled. He once observed me trying to remove small pieces of fractured asphalt from our driveway and likened the activity to "picking fly shit out of pepper with boxing gloves." He also made his own bullets, ostensibly for hunting, in the basement, but I don't remember any venison. As Christmas approached, he would tell me that he was going to shoot Santa Claus, which would induce more than a little anxiety in me. He also infuriated me by feigning interest in feeling my muscle, and when I would flex my bicep, he would squeeze my head.
He scolded me when I, home sick from school, would run the hallway like a 10-yard dash, and I, momentarily chastened, would retreat to the family room and Felix the Cat. Uncle Tommy eventually gave up the cigarettes and the beer, when diabetes threatened to exact a severe toll. He, loquacious like his siblings, in his later years liked to discuss his grocery list and his job as a hospital parking-lot attendant.
Uncle Tommy liked auto racing, specifically the Indianapolis 500. I once wanted to watch a basketball game instead, and he called me a "nigger lover." He yelled down the hallway to Gramps: "Hey, Dad, he's a nigger lover." The 6-year-old nigger lover--the worst kind. I hadn't been embarrassed before about liking basketball. I'm not sure where Uncle Tommy slept when Gram was alive, since the first floor of that house had only one bedroom. Aunt Virge and her brood lived on the second floor. After Gram's death, he slept in the bedroom with Gramps. My mother attributed such cohabitation to the Depression, when it sometimes was a necessity.
My cousin Joanie lived there sometimes, too, I think. She was divorced from Bob, who had served in Vietnam. Bob once shot up his parents' house with a shotgun. He also held hostages at a local drinking establishment, and his profanity-laced tirade appeared verbatim on the front of the local paper the next day. Joanie had a rabbit, which she sometimes kept tied up in the back yard. I spied Gramps one day from the kitchen window as he gave the rabbit some slack in the tether and then jerked it back, bringing the rabbit up abruptly. Not just once, either. So I, naturally, did the same the first opportunity I got. This time, though, Joanie spied me from the kitchen window. She took exception, and I became confused.
I remember sitting in the doorway that led from the family room, a.k.a. parlor, to the louvered-window front porch with my leg extended across the stoop. Gram didn't walk so well, with diabetes having claimed part of her foot, and I wanted to see her trip. She was on to me, though, and made a remark to the effect of my wanting to see an old lady trip. She surprised me more than once, taking the time one afternoon to regale me with a story about how she once beat up the school bully, the other kids henceforth taunting that boy by threatening to sick May Keenan on him. She also gave me the A.A. Milne book "When We Were Six" on my 6th birthday. She wrote a note inside the front cover telling me about how she and her siblings never could fall asleep as they lay awake on Christmas Eve and awaited the sound of bells on Santa's sleigh. She wrote that I was getting to be a ripe old age and that I was a very special boy. I gave that book to my son when he turned 6.
Gram died not long after that, when I was in first grade, too young to really grasp but old enough to appreciate the attention I received. Another lifetime. The mailman happened by while I played outside our house as the post-funeral reception took place. He asked me what was going on, and I told him my grandmother had died. He asked her name, and when I told him, he said he was glad it wasn't anybody he knew.
Gramps, the retired 40-year fireman, used to take me to the church carnival, where I would lob ping-pong ball after ping-pong ball toward glass bowls on shelves in an effort to win a goldfish. He made me soft-boiled eggs and would walk me around the block at Christmas to see the lights. When my mother and I would leave his house, Gramps would run along and knock on the car window, delighting me to no end. The grandchildren, 15 in all, if I'm counting correctly, fell prey to his failing memory, and he variously would refer to us as George or Harry. We have no Georges or Harrys in the family. But he usually gave me a dollar, just because, and he ran alongside my bike as I was learning to ride on two wheels. Cancer claimed him in 1979, 10 days before my birthday, and I ensconced myself in the bathroom and cried with abandon. I saw him the day before, a shell of his former self, less than a hundred pounds and fetal-like in his bed, and Jesus, head bowed, hung on the crucifix on the wall.