My father died young, thirty-seven. He had so many heart attacks his heart was like mush, the doctors said, when he died. They didn’t know much back then. He would rock back and forth in his chair at work and just ask the guys to cover him for fifteen minutes. Those were heart attacks. He was a marine, fought in Korea—died sitting in a chair like that, rocking back and forth willing it to pass. It was hard on Mom with so many kids, so I got sent to Grandma’s a lot while she worked. My Mom, bless her heart, didn’t use the N-word as much as Grandma. She usually called them “the Gold Teeth.”

I was my Grandma’s favorite and spent plenty of time at her grocery store on the corner of Orleans and Rose. The store was briefly famous when the Dundalk Florist truck ploughed into it and destroyed the main floor and would have killed my mother and aunt if my aunt had not been sick and my grandmother wasn’t taking her upstairs as it happened.

The store was the front of the house on the street level. Halfway back the stairs went up into the kitchen, then you had the bedrooms.

I used to help my Grandma in the store when I was little [1968-72]. At the time blacks were entering the area, and my grandparents called them niցցers and wouldn’t let them in the store in groups, saying they stole everything. When school let out my Grandmother locked up and sat their smoking cigarettes looking at them as they banged on the doors and tried to get in. One time I was with her when some black kids came in and started taking stuff off the counter. She reached over and chopped at this one boy with her butcher knife—almost got him in the hand. She always kept that knife by the register and they ran away when she broke it out.

It really was scary when school let out and they all came through the neighborhood taking what they wanted. My grandparents were very protective of me, which meant I couldn’t go down to my aunt’s house on my own even though it was just one block. I also could not walk her two Chihuahuas, which were mean little things that would bite your face off and hated kids. Mister Ruddy, a homeless man, used to walk the dogs and run errands for her. She was mean on the outside but had a soft spot—a tough Polish broad. She fed Mister Rudy three square meals every day, but made him eat on the stairs in the store. He couldn’t sit at the table because he ate with his mouth open.

When Grandma was eighty [in the early 1980s] she sold everything. The crime was so bad she had to keep the store locked most of the time so there wasn’t much point. One by one everyone in the family moved out of East Baltimore out to Rosedale and Parkville—Polacks on the run. What else is new? Now they’re coming out here pistol whipping and kicking in doors. I guess it’s the way of the world, eventually there’s no street you can walk down. I had an old black man today complain to me that he can’t walk down the street anymore either, that the young ones will jack up anybody.

The world is sad place if you keep your eyes open to it.

-Megan