THE 5 BALL
“...all eight of us kids would head downstairs (sans adults) to play our version of pool….”
When I was a girl growing up in Brooklyn, my grandparents lived less than two blocks away, but that doesn’t explain why I always felt so close to them. (Proximity does not a relationship make.) Our closeness was built on card games and rounds of Dots and Boxes at the kitchen table. On bus rides to the mall. Picking mulberries in the front yard. Watching The Love Boat and Fantasy Island on Saturday nights. My grandparents were the ones I ran to when I wanted to run away from home. They were always there for me.
When my sister and I slept over, Grandma sang us “Mairzy Doats” and “Paper of Pins” at bedtime and promised a prize to whichever one of us fell asleep first. No prize was ever forthcoming, but they spoiled us in other ways: a marshmallow sundae at Jahn’s to celebrate a birthday or the end of a school year, a new pack of stickers just because. Grandpa built wooden cradles for our dolls, and every spring, though we were Jewish, bought us egg-dyeing kits so we could make Easter eggs.
Of all the gifts they gave us, the greatest was a belief in the importance of family. They created the space where the whole family—the Brooklyn part, the Connecticut part, the Buffalo part—came together at Passover and Thanksgiving and other special occasions. And for me that meant cousins. After the gefilte fish and charoset, the turkey and mashed potatoes, all eight of us kids would scramble into the living room for charades (usually joined by Grandma and Grandpa and our parents) or head downstairs (sans adults) to play our version of pool on the full-size table squished into a corner of the basement.
Too clumsy to manage the cue sticks, we used our hands, sending the cue ball racing acrossthe felt and watching the rest of the set ricochet in every direction. Conversation ricocheted, too. We compared ourselves to our Eight Is Enough counterparts (five girls and three boys, just like us!). Snickered at the Playboys hidden under the pool table. Practiced our rendition of “If I Were Not a Kid.” (Me: If I were not a kid, something else I’d rather be/If I were not a kid...a flight attendant I’d be/Relax, relax, the plane won't crash.) Knowing we’d be singing for our family made me anxious, but with my cousins I got caught up in the fun. And felt accepted just as I was.
After Grandpa died, in 1999, their house was sold and Grandma moved into assisted living, where she stayed until her death, in 2003. My cousin Regina took the pool table, my cousin Richard took the billiard balls, and in the years since, I never gave these things much thought—until the day a few weeks ago when the solid orange 5 ball arrived in the mail, scuffed, scratched, lovingly displayed in a case, and accompanied by an even more loving letter that was also sent to my sister and cousins.
After learning, on one of our cousin Zooms, that his brother David had no keepsake of our grandfather’s, Richard had decided the balls needed to be shared. So into the mail they went: to Virginia, Utah, New Jersey, Florida, Michigan, and two to New York. “The number of your pool ball is not an accident,” he wrote. I got the 5 ball because I’m the fifth grandchild of Max and Lillian Blaustein. It was their love of family that cemented the bond among us cousins. Like the wooden triangle rack from their pool table, they gathered us together again and again. And even now, long since gone, they manage to keep the Blaustein 8 a complete set.
—Debbie Feit
Debbie Feit has published prose and poetry in The New York Times, Passengers Journal and Emerge Literary Journal. A Brooklyn native, she lives in metro Detroit.