Ruth at the Crossroads

Nu, so this another story, like so many others a mixture of true memories and pure fiction, even though the memories are not always of historical facts but of the fantasies and dreams experienced as a boy growing up in Brooklyn.  So maybe a little but you are interested in what it was like to grow up in  such a way in such a place, and maybe a little bit it interests you to see a person can make up a story fifty or sixty years later, and even maybe, if I may speculate a little bit here, you might also might want to know how the memory works.

We were coming home from the movies, like always on a Saturday afternoon.  Where exactly? Loews 47^th Street on New Utrecht Avenue. But we called it Leo’s because it made more sense.  Maybe we were twelve years old.  It could have been a little more, a little less, but before bar mitzvah.  The movie was entitled “The Babe Ruth Story.” Not the candy bar with chocolate and nuts but the fat baseball player who played for the New York Yankees (boo!) and hit a zillion home runs every year, and who did not play for the Dodgers (yay!) and so they didn’t always play for the World Series.  Big deal! 

Anyway, after this movie, the whole gang of us, five or six of the regulars anyway, had a lively and rational discussion about whether Babe Ruth really was such a great athlete.  Then suddenly, we get to 13^th Avenue, on the corner we see a shop, a dress shop—already we have seen it a million times before—but now it stands out like a challenge. 

It’s called Ruth’s.  For any sane person with common sense this means that a lady named Ruth owns the store and sells dresses to women such as our mothers who want.  However, given the excitement of the day and the dynamics of the group currently assembled, not to mention our peculiar ages on the cusp of adolescence, the sign tells us something very different.  Thus one of the gang says, it doesn’t matter which, in a question and an accusation together, that this must be the Babe’s store.  Another, not me this time either, chirps in with profound aplomb:  Fooey on you, it’s not his: it’s his sister’s.  Number three, not to be outdone, because maybe this time it is  me, declares rapturously, sister shmister, it belongs to his mother.  Aw no it doesn’t, says the next one of us, also maybe me if that wasn’t my voice before, his mother would have a different name; it has to be his   To counter this, I who am the last to speak (because actually, you might want to try to imagine all these speeches overlapping and occurring simultaneously, or nearly so, with just enough space between for the full effect of the logic to sink in) add to the debate: I know because my mother goes in there and Ruth is a lady from around the corner, Mr. Wachsenheimer’s wife.  All these opinions having thus been fully articulated, the five or six us were jumping on top of one another, punching each other’s shoulders and stomachs, grabbing hats, and starting to roll over the ground.  A truly talmudic session of lernin.  Or a more general problem in epistemology, that is, how do you know what you know is true.

Does it matter who won this grand battle?  Of course, not.  No one won, not in the sense of being right.  That’s not the point.  What can truth mean in such a situation?  So what is truth, you might ask, that is, if you were the kind of person who knows how to ask pertinent questions, the kind that push aside foolishness and red-herrings and gets to the quick, and therefore already shapes and stimulates the emergence of the answer, though it is never known, which if it were, would be a different kind of question in a text that was like an allegory or a parable, and this is not because the fight wasn’t rational and the thing I want to point out is always as elusive as it was on the day we rolled around on the street and pretended we cared who or what a Ruth was.          

Even while we were fighting on the street and getting dirty and also a little bit crying because each time someone got hit by a fist or a foot it was painful and each time someone shouted in your ear that you were a dummy it was humiliating and in your heart also you knew already that the whole shlamozzle was silly; however, you shouldn’t think we were just silly kids in all this, we also knew at the same time that it was fun to have everybody on the street—all the grown-ups with their packages and their briefcases—looking at us, so whatever we said and did was as much fun for them as it was for us, and for the memory that we sort of knew, too, though not as much as we might have boasted, that we were looking forward to looking back nostalgically on this day and would always treasure its memory.           

Truth to tell, as much as one can recollect an historical experience of this variety after so long a time, to play fight like this after a movie was also very serious business, and I know at least at that moment I really believed in whatever point it was I made.  That I don’t remember whether it was my argument that Ruth was the Babe himself or the lady that owned the dress-shop or whatever absurdity may have inhabited my mind then should be a sign for you that you shouldn’t jump to conclusions or simply dismiss out of hand the things people say, even people, like me, who you don’t know so well yet and think nebech you are wiser and more experienced in all this.  Ruth also means compassion, after all.