The Neighborhood Stores Are An Important Part

Those Were The Rommely Women: Mary, The Mother, Evy, Sissy, And Katie, Her Daughters, And Francie, Who Would Grow Up To Be A Rommely Woman Even Though Her Name Was Nolan. They Were All Slender, Frail Creatures With Wondering Eyes And Soft Fluttery Voices. But They Were Made Out Of Thin Invisible Steel.

You Took A Walk On A Sunday Afternoon And Came To A Nice Neighborhood, Very Refined. You Saw A Small One Of These Trees Through The Iron Gate Leading To Someone's Yard And You Knew That Soon That Section Of Brooklyn Would Get To Be A Tenement District. The Tree Knew. It Came There First. Afterwards, Poor Foreigners Seeped In And The Quiet Old Brownstone Houses Were Hacked Up Into Flats, Feather Beds Were Pushed Out On The Window Sills To Air And The Tree Of Heaven Flourished. That Was The Kind Of Tree It Was. It Liked Poor People.

But This Tree In The Yard-this Tree That Men Chopped Down...this Tree That They Built A Bonfire Around, Trying To Burn Up It's Stump-this Tree Lived! It Lived! And Nothing Could Destroy It.

It Meant That She Belonged Some Place. She Was A Brooklyn Girl With A Brooklyn Name And A Brooklyn Accent. She Didn't Want To Change Into A Bit Of This And A Bit Of That.

Bad Quarrels Come When Two People Are Wrong. Worse Quarrels Come When Two People Are Right.