Sweet Apple Cider

The full moon woke me at 1:30 AM. I finally got up at 2:22 AM. After reading the New York Times online, I dug out my 1970's stainless steel Acme juicer that Grandpa Nat bought me when I lived on Mott Street NYC. Grandpa's fans and motors store, UNITED BLOWER was on Centre Street around the corner. I visited him daily. We would sit together at his big wooden school teachers desk and he pulled out the sliding wooden panel and I would eat my apple and orange for lunch. I was a fruitarian.

Grandpa signed me up for telephone service on my black rotary desk phone (back in those days the phone came with the service!) and he had the electric company turn on the lights. I was 17, in 1978, still technically enrolled in high school in Mamaroneck NY although I wasn't attending. I was on my own living alone in Chinatown NYC and getting school credit for it.

I didn't know anything about anything but I was trying my best not to be afraid. I got a job as a cashier at Gillies 1840 on Bleeker Street in the village. I got off work at 11:30 PM and ran home through Little Italy, to my Mott street apartment in Chinatown. The gods protect the innocent and I was very lucky. More to come on that adventure.

I am making apple cider from bushels of fallen apples that Jeff and Francine harvested from Northern New Hampshire. They filled four gigantic boxes the size of washtubs, almost too heavy to lift and hauled them over here in their big pickup truck. They live 1 mile down my street but you have to cross state lines to get there. Everything is different in Massachusetts compared to RI. For example, they can have chickens in their backyard.

Spontaneously I sweetened my morning black coffee with cider and it was delicious. I have three more bushels to go!

from Jon Frankel: I remember the old machine and gizmo shops on Canal Street well. It was amazing walking down the broad sunny street packed with small stores and people, the boxes of oscilloscopes, meters, and electrical devices, tools stacked up outside of the stores, which were themselves crammed floor to ceiling with obscure machinery. And Mott Street! Chow Fun for $1.69….old mafia guys in cadillacs, and dark social clubs with flaked gold lettering on the windows.