“They are just like brothers,” said Alex’s grandfather to my father. “They play with each other more than any other boys in the neighborhood.” My father nodded his head and said nothing until he got home and told my mother.
We were seven and in the second grade. We lived just around the corner from each other with no changes until we reached adulthood. We played together. We ate the Syrian food his grandmother made and the hot dogs my mother served us. We both joined Cub Scouts when we reached age nine. We played touch football and threw baseballs on the street in front of our house. In the winter we shot basketballs at a hoop on his family garage.
Alec’s grandfather and grandmother were Syrian emigrants who came to our little town before World War I. They were one of a half-dozen families who made the same exodus. Most of the other families lived in our neighborhood. Most of them were cousins and some of them went into business together. Alex’s grandparents arrived with their son, Alex Senior, as a very small boy.
The grandfather started his earning by selling clothes, patches of cloth, yarn, threads, needles, and other small utilities to families who lived on farms out and around our little town. He would pack two large suitcases and start walking out into the countryside. He was usually lucky, because someone would come along with a wagon or car and give him a ride. At the first farm, he would be fed a lunch by his friends. By late afternoon, he would reach a farm where he could sleep in the barn that night. Besides his merchandise, he brought news from our town and shared it with most of the families he knew well. When the suitcases were almost empty, he headed back to town, again lucky to get rides. A couple of days later, with the suitcases packed, off he would go in another direction.
When Alex Senior, my “brother’s” father, graduated from high school, he bought an old car and loaded his merchandise in it to tour other farm roads. The grandfather continued to make his trips, sometimes relying on his son to put him into a neighborhood and retrieve him a couple of days later. When the grandfather needed to retire, Alex Senior had enough money to buy a small clothing store on the main street of our town. The grandfather stayed in the store and Alex Senior continued his travel routes. The store had shoes for children, work shoes and work clothes for men, garments for ladies, and bales of cloth and thread. By those years, many of the farm families had cars or trucks and would come into town to do their shopping.
As Alex Junior and I were growing up, he got very sick with a heart ailment. He was kept out of school for a year. I visited him most days, but we did not play outside for the months of his ailment. When he recovered, both of us were trying out on the high school football and basketball teams. And we went back to our daily exercises together. Because I was then a year ahead of him, I would coach Alex on his algebra, English compositions, and mechanical drawing. By then, his father insisted that he work in the store afternoons and on Saturdays. So we played our athletics on Sundays.
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