In the dark Bronx days of the Great Depression, I lived on a street named after the brook or burn that once flowed through it. I came down the front steps of my house into a world that was sunny, warm, and clean. Nobody in the neighborhood owned a car, and so the street belonged to the kids. It was our stickball field, our flea market. We flipped pennies against a wall, traded baseball cards, played skelly with soda-bottle caps; we opened our hands for the delicate art of box ball, and abandoned ourselves to the wild neighborhood wars of ringolevio. An eminence who lived on our block was a captain in the Sanitation Department, which is why every other day in summer, the water wagon came grinding up the street, spraying from the sides of its tank a beautiful spreading arc of glistening rainbows that seemed ethereally to be herding this beast of a truck like a pair of angels. And when the water wagon turned the corner and was gone, the street was suddenly quiet except for the bubbling rivulets of water running along the guttered curbs, carrying with it our fleets of walnut shells and ice-cream sticks as we scurried along to see how far they would go before running aground.
