Old Marty

By Loretta Morris

          Old Marty lives next door. I think he’s really, really old, but my mom says he’s not that old, he’s just had a lot of hardship in his life. I don’t know about that, but he looks pretty old to me.  He sounds funny when he talks because he’s from the old country. It’s not the same old country that my grandma’s from.  A different old country.  And even though he wasn’t born here he puts the flag up every day and takes it down every night because he says America is the greatest country in the whole wide world.

              He walks his dogs twice a day, every day. They’re all skinny looking things that he got from the pound “In the nick of the time”.  All three of them have something wrong with them.  Kaja only has one eye, Julita’s tail got cut off, and little Iga is scared of everything.  Old Marty calls them “the girls” and told me that they’re named after his three sisters who died a long time ago. Sometimes he lets me come with him on his walks, but sometimes he just wants to be alone.

              On the days he wants to be alone, my mom says to just leave him be, because he has things on his mind.  So I do.  On the days he lets me tag along he tells me stories from when he was a little boy in Poland – that’s his old country. Poland’s far away.  I know that because he showed me on the globe once.  He says the time he lived in Poland was called the olden days.  I think that’s when everything was in black and white like it is on TV and in our photo albums.

              Before he retired he worked at a place named Hawthorn Melody Dairy.  That’s pretty close to where we live in Skokie. Sometimes he takes me there in his old DeSoto to pet the cows and see the milking machines and say hello to his old pals.  It’s really neat there.  They have lots of other animals in the petting zoo, but Old Marty especially likes those cows.  He tells me to be thankful that I have fresh milk to drink and other good food to eat.  I guess he’s right, but milk?  Every kid has milk, don’t they?

              At Christmastime Old Marty doesn’t have a tree or put lights on his house like we do.  Instead he has lots of candles and foreign language songs. Sometimes he lets me touch the candle holder, but he always says to be careful with it, because it’s not a tchotchke. That means toy in a language called Yiddish.  He taught me that.

              When the weather’s good Old Marty goes to the cemetery to visit Mrs. Marty.  She was a real nice lady and made fancy cookies like the kind you can get at Kaufmann’s Bakery, but she died last year. He puts little stones on her grave, even though he has lots of pretty flowers in his garden that he could bring for her.  Once I asked him why he doesn’t put stones on his sisters’ graves too, but he just took out his handkerchief and blew his nose.  Then he shook his head and said they all died together in Poland during the war and their graves aren’t in the ground, they’re up in the sky.  “At least they were together at the end.”  He said that over and over. Then he said he’ll explain that to me when I get bigger.  I think 7 is big enough, but he said no, I have to be 12.

              There’s a bunch of little blue numbers on Old Marty’s arm in exactly the same place Popeye has his anchor tattoo. Except Old Marty doesn’t have the same muscles as Popeye.  He smiled when I said that and told me that when he was a young man my dad’s age he had muscles even bigger than Popeye’s, but then he had to go to a place where he got as skinny as Olive Oyl.  I know those numbers must be something very important because every time I ask him about it he gets a serious look on his face like Dad gets when he’s paying the bills. 

             I can’t wait until I’m 12 so he can explain it to me.