Etta Abrahams

THE GOOD OLD DAYS

"Here's how you spot a pickpocket,"
my father warned:
"He's the one who shouts
'Watch your pockets!'
"Then when you feel with your hands,
he's onto you,
and goes to work."

One of many warnings
I scoffed at:
Fifteen years old,
on my way to Times Square
to see the ball light up
1959, before explosions
tore apart the Towers
built on Battery Place
where he once worked, when
Kabul and Baghdad and Aleppo
were only names
in fairy tales, and pickpockets
were the least of our worries.


Etta reads "The Good Old Days":



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Etta confesses: "My dad's office was on Battery Place, site of the World Trade Center. He died January 2001 at 106, eight months before 9/11. I remembered his decades-old advice. Poignant."

ETTA ABRAHAMS is Emerita Professor of American Thought and Language, Michigan State University, and is co-owner of 2 Write Better LLC, an editing company.