the Germans and Irish in the mid-nineteenth century, followed by the Poles and Italians some years later. Greenpoint was a culturally diverse neighborhood where everything from the foods to the traditions changed from block to block. You could guess the ethnicity of a street by the smells coming out of the kitchen windows. But even though their histories were wide-ranging, the people were close.

We were the Andrzejewski family, and we lived on the Polish block. Ethnically, we were a mixed family. Andrew, my father, was Polish and his family was new to America. Mom, Mildred, was Irish and Dutch with some Native American added in. I always used to say that my mother’s ancestors came over on the Mayflower. They didn’t really, but they had been in America for many generations when I was born in 1953. The Van Kuykendall and Douwes families had come from Holland to America in 1645.

When I was two years old, the family moved from Brooklyn to North Hamilton Avenue in Lindenhurst, on the South Shore of Long Island. We were not alone in this exodus from the city; quite a large group on the Polish side of the family moved to Long Island, including my father’s sister as well as many cousins on my mother’s side. It represented a different way of life—away from the concrete and toward the water. In Brooklyn, people lived in brownstones with everyone literally and figuratively close. That proximity to everyone you loved was terrific, but my parents wanted a “better” life for their family, a fresh start away from the immigrant neighborhoods. Out on the Island, we had space. We had real yards where you could hold barbecues and family reunions. Our house even had an aboveground pool, a luxury by anyone’s standards.

Looking back on it now, life in Lindenhurst was like an episode of Happy Days, complete with white picket fences and picturesque churches, but it was very much a blue-collar town full of factory workers, carpenters, and fishermen. I think the only “professional” I knew was the dentist. He was also the man who owned one of the only three Mercedes I saw until I was out of high school. There was nothing fancy or pretentious about Lindenhurst. It was the kind of place where you could play outside after dark and go berry picking when you weren’t clamming.

We went to the beach a lot, although it wasn’t as romantic as you might think. This wasn’t a beach like you’d find in Florida or California. Lindenhurst was a fishing town, and our local beach was affectionately nicknamed Crud Beach. Located on the South Bay, our waters were dark, with a reedy, sandy floor. They were also very shallow. You could practically walk across the bay. All of us kids hung out there until we were old enough that our parents allowed us to go to the “real” beaches on the Atlantic. Most of my friends’ fathers were fishermen, so we had great access to boats—not the smart speedboats, but clam boats.

The clam boats were fishing vessels, flat, with a little steering house. We’d pile on and hold on for dear life; if we got hungry, we’d stop and dig up some fresh clams out of the bay. When we got older, we’d sneak out some beer, and, well, that was a perfect afternoon. Boats were like cars where I grew up, and of course, my parents never wanted me out on anyone’s boat. But that never stopped me. One time, I went out on one of my friends’ father’s clam boat, and we were horsing around with another boat and managed to ram them into each other. We ended up losing power and needing a tow in from the Coast Guard. I was four hours late for dinner, and my parents thought I was dead. When I got home, believe me, I wished I was.

Our home on North Hamilton Avenue was a little twenty-four-by-twenty-four-foot Cape Cod, with four rooms on the main floor: a living room, kitchen, and two tiny bedrooms. The second floor was actually an attic with a pitched roof. There, we had two more tiny and much-needed bedrooms. My parents were in one of the bedrooms on the main floor, and my brother, Andy, and I shared the other. My grandmother May Prey Knapp, whom we called Nana, and her children—my mother’s younger sister, Ruthie, and her younger brother, William Jr.—lived on the top floor. It was a full house to say the