The beginning of what I call my continuous memory occurred near the end of the summer of 1937 not long before my sixth birthday. We were living in a house on Walbrook Avenue in Baltimore, Maryland. That day, we moved. I can still picture me, in the kitchen, watching my mother wrapping the dishes in newspaper and placing them into wooden bushel and half-bushel baskets. Next, we have just arrived at the appartment, in a taxicab, to see a big moving truck that has entered an alley street. It is wedged against the buildings on each side of the alley keeping it from getting fully into the alley. My father goes over and starts yelling at the driver and then the truck starts backing out of the alley very slowly making loud screeching sounds. The truck made it out without bringing down the walls.
We moved into the basement apartment of a very large and very old house on the southeast corner of North Avenue and Etting Street. It had stone walls and I'm sure it was at least three stories high. The entrance to our apartment was through a wooden cellar door that you lifted to open and then you walked down some concrete steps to reach the apartment door. The sidewalk on Etting Street sloped downward going south away from North Avenue and past our kitchen windows which had deep sills that I would climb up onto and sit looking to the outside.
The kitchen was a large room and, to the left of the entrance, was a hallway leading to the large bedroom where my parents and my brother, Kenneth, slept. On the left, as you went down the hall, you passed the bathroom and a small room where my sister, Rosalie, and I slept. On the right was the door (which was always kept closed) to the furnace room for the whole house.
At one point, my father brought home a turtle he had found on the road somewhere. He put it in the furnace room and, occasionally, took Rosalie and I in to watch the turtle a few moments. The turtle was always crawling between the furnace and the wall and getting stuck. My father would remove it and block off the area so it couldn't go back there again, but it usually managed to push aside the block and get stuck anyway. Eventually, it got stuck at a time when we didn't visit for a few days and it died.
The bathroom was the strangest I have ever seen. Just inside the door you made a half-right turn and stepped up two or three triangular steps onto a floor that had barely enough room to contain a commode in the left corner with a footed bathtub almost butted up against it. The tub extended to the right and butted up to the wall on the other side of which was the hallway. I've always been glad that I was a small child instead of an adult when I had to use that bathroom.
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