It was a small mill town fifteen miles from the Canadian border when I lived there for nine months as a boy. It’s classified as a hamlet of the town of Canton, New York, now, and I went to live there under just about the worst of circumstances.
I was ten years old, and my father had just died. He loved art and music, Gandhi and Paul Robeson; he was strong and sensitive and the center of my world. Then he died of congestive heart failure. His brother, my uncle Dominick, came to my mother after the funeral and said it would be tough to be a thirty-six-year-old working single mother and widow with three kids. Why didn’t she send me to live with him and his wife in their small town in upstate New York?
I thought it was a terrible idea. I was ten and had just lost my father. How could it possibly help to be without my mother, too? I think the idea of being apart also tore at my mother. But in some ways it also sounded so appealing, the fresh air, blue skies, and quiet roads of the country. She must have seen it as the best thing she could do for me, because that’s what she always wanted.
So off I went, ten years old, with a suitcase, leaving my family in Queens behind. Uncle Dominick and Aunt Dominica owned the general store in Pyrites and had a farm. They’d never had children and didn’t seem to know what to do with me. I gladly helped out with farm chores, but Uncle Dominick was upset to come home one day and find me singing in the kitchen to Aunt Dominica as she ironed. He must have had a hard day in the fields. He saw me singing to my aunt and just kicked the chair out from under me and screamed, “Why don’t you do some work around here? Why don’t you milk a cow or something?”
Singing gave me joy. It reminded me of my father, the man I so admired, and the stories I had heard about him singing before his sickness weakened his lungs. Getting my chair kicked out from under me by my uncle Dominick made me miserable all over again and made me wonder, what was I doing with them in this place called Pyrites?
I tried to spend most of my time with my cousins, the Futias, who lived next door, especially my favorite cousin, Mary Lou. I went to school with Mary Lou and her brothers and sisters. My singing was appreciated there. Parents would come up to me after school plays and ask me to sing some of the latest hits. They’d dig into their pockets to give me change. I was the kid from New York, and I guess they thought I was a little big-city entertainment. In some ways, Pyrites was my first out-of-town gig. Well, it was a tough one.
I was there an entire school year, and then my mother brought me back home—home to Astoria, Queens.
Nine months seems like a century to a ten-year-old. I see now that it must have seemed even longer to my mother, losing her husband and then missing a son. It’s been a hard story to explain over the years. But lots of families had to do hard things to get by during the Depression. My uncle offered to take in the young son of his brother’s widow to try to relieve her of some of the pressures of raising three children alone. My mother might have thought it would give a young child who had lost his father a fresh start under blue skies. What we soon realized was that we really needed to hold on to each other.
But Pyrites has a place in the list of the major influences on my life. It’s where, looking back on it, I first saw that I could entertain total strangers with my singing. The parents at school didn’t know me as a son, nephew, or cousin, just a little kid from New York City who could sing them a tune. I liked learning that and seeing the delight in their eyes. And I think even my uncle would agree that I’ve had a much better life singing than I would have had milking cows.
And I have Pyrites to thank for introducing me to nature. I loved the trees and the flowers and the grass rolling on for miles, not just the blocks by which we tended to measure the world back in Queens. What a work of art a tree is! The form, the colors, and the way it changes and grows. I see what looks like a lush, rolling ocean of trees from my windows overlooking Central Park today, but I first really saw the glory of trees in Pyrites.
And I fell in love with the river in winter: the beautiful, serene St. Lawrence River, which would freeze so thick and solid, it became a kind of glorious white avenue of ice. I learned how to skate there, and the frozen river would take me away. I’d skate mile after mile in the ice and sun, in the calm and quiet of the piles of soft snow along the riverbank and hanging in the trees, and I’d feel the peace of nature in my soul.
Golden Pavilion