Conti's Pastry

I was planning to do a blog on the jobs problem but then this piece in this mornings NY Tmes jumped up at me. So the jobs piece will have to wait.

There it is in today's February 1, 2010 Times Conti’s Pastry shop has survived. Hooray! The article is about a section of the north Bronx known as Van Nest. My family had moved there some time around 1923. We lived on Morris Park Avenue about 3 blocks from PS 34 where I went to school. The Times article is about the lack of any banking facility in that neighborhood forcing people to go long distances to simply cash a check. Yes there are check cashing stores that charge a hefty percentage to simply cash a check. According to the article it remains a place of “houses with front porches.” Yup, that's how I remember it.

What caught my eye was a reference to “Conti’s Pastry shop” where local Italian men were still gathering to talk over coffee and a pastry. I remember the pastry shop as a stop over on my way to PS 34. In the morning on my way to school there was a line of horse and wagons from Sheffield Farms that had been delivering milk since 3AM to many of the private homes that covered the area. Back in 1926 the milkmen were inside Conti’s having their breakfast. The horses had their feedbags on. The horses would have trouble getting at the feed down at the bottom of the bag. Their solution was to keep bucking their heads up and down hoping to catch some of the bottom feed. That was not a good solution. They would lose most of the feed as it ended up outside the bag down on the ground where the sparrows had their feast. One of the milkmen suggested that if I held the bag up for the horses to get that bottom feed there might just be a pastry in it for me.

That started my career as “the horse feeder,” that’s what the kids began to call me. In order to insure my new found position I would get to school pretty early to make sure that I would have time for my feed patrol and my pastry. Pretty soon the horses began to recognize me a block away and would start a regular chorus of stomping and braying and that sent me running to carry out my feed duty. It was the beginning of a long love affair with horses. My reward, that started out as a pastry would become the appreciation that the horses showed me. It just made me feel good to have the chance to be of help to these giant creatures who befriended a 9 year old boy.

As I read the Times piece I couldn’t help but wonder, why is it so important to us humans to have places in our lives that we can remember as part of our growing up time? Is it an assurance that there are some things in our constantly changing world that we can count on as unchanging? Yes, the neighborhood of Van Nest has changed form Italian to Latino and Asian yet, Ruggeiro’s Funeral Home is still there as is Cont’s. I’m certain that St. Domenicks Catholic church, where I went to confession with my Italian friends, who just didn’t want me to feel left out, is also still there. I used to wonder what my atheist father would have said if he knew about it?

Ernest Hemingway had a life long concern about finding places he could return to that hadn’t changed in his lifetime. A home in Cuba, a Bar in Key West and the Sawtooth Mountains in Idaho, It was in those mountains that he decided to go and end his life. Did he just want to be in a place that he could count on would always be as he first experienced it? Maybe thats what we humans want or need? Something, someplace that, helped define us, that we can depend on as not being washed away by the winds of time? Just knowing that Conti’s pastry shop is where it was when I was 9 years old makes me feel good. Exactly why I can’t tell you. But no matter there it is.