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My father introduced us to a trailer park

July 24, 2008 By pia

The first weekend after we moved to Jericho my father drove my sister and I a few miles to a trailer park. Nothing wrong with trailer parks but they’re not common in metro New York.
See, not everybody lives like us. We have more money than most. With money comes responsibility. And on and on he went

It was a very mixed message to give to two young girls who had been uprooted from Queens and weren’t dressed properly. It wasn’t that we were dressed badly. We were dressed from cheap stores not Best & Company.

I was going to have a hard enough time fitting in. I needed to look like everybody else.

Yet even then I understood why my father was saying the things he did. He wanted us to have a social conscience; to be aware of the larger world.

I did find it just that he got a ticket on the drive home for starting an accident on Jericho Turnpike. He was so busy lecturing us on social issues he was driving about ten miles an hour.

I forget the exact details of the “accident.”

Four or so years later Richard Nixon would become his idol. Then he turned into a Reaganite. I always have thought he had a stroke and died in 91 for several reasons; one being Bush One was so boring.

My father never did lose his sense of justice. I might have detested his politics but I knew how big his heart was I’m scared I can never do his story justice.

Actually my parents were friends with Marty Tankleff’s aunt and uncle. They introduced me to Marty’s case and were always convinced of his innocence. I am so happy all charges were dropped as they should have been years ago.

I

Filed Under: my parents Tagged With: my parents

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Comments

  1. Rose Dewy Knickers says

    July 24, 2008 at 7:43 am

    That is a lesson that most parents don’t teach.

    Rose

    xo

  2. TC says

    July 24, 2008 at 11:27 am

    I always have thought he had a stroke and died in 91 for several reasons; one being Bush One was so boring.

    ROFL

    Oh I know I shouldn’t laugh, and I am sorry for your father’s death, but that line was hilarious. As I’m *hoping* you meant it to be.

    I’ve always known trailer parks. We never lived in one, but in poor, rural Wisconsin, they were definitely a fact of life. (And my parents lived in one when my brother was a baby.)

  3. sage says

    July 24, 2008 at 12:53 pm

    You just brought out a memory I should try to recall more of–when we lived in Virginia, I remember asking my parents about slums one day after church (We’d talked about them in Sunday School and I was probably in the 3rd grade). My dad drove us to another part of town when we got to see “slums.” Later, we told these new friends of ours about where we’d been and found they’d just moved from that area… It was an odd feeling–looking back on it all, our neighborhood wasn’t all that great either

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About Me

I live in the South, not South Florida, a few blocks from the ocean, and two blocks from the main street. It's called Main Street. Amazes me too.

I'm from New York. I mostly lived in the Mid-Upper East Side, and the heart of the Upper West Side. It amazes me when people talk about how scared they were of Times Square in the 1970's and 1980's.

As my mother said: "know the streets, look out and you'll be fine."

What was scary was the invasion of the crack dens into "good buildings in good 'hoods." And the greedy landlords who did everything they could to get good tenants out of buildings.

I'm a Long Island girl, and proud of it now.
Then I hated everything about the suburbs. Yet somehow I lived in a few great Long Island Sound towns after high school.

Go to archives "August 2004" if you want to begin with the first posts.

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