My grandparents, Bessie and Max Levine, lived in Brooklyn in this building:
Once on a month on a Sunday, they would drive from Brooklyn to visit us in our little small house in Valley Stream:
Our house had a piano and Grandma Bess would sit on this piano bench and give her theories about everything.
She loved to bitch about the relatives in Red Bank. She complained about everybody and everything and she told us when she "dropped dead" not to bury her in "no expensive coffin." She said: "They are crooks. You buy a fancy coffin and when you are at the cemetery they lower you into it in the grave for show. Then everybody walks away and when nobody is watching later they take you out and plop you into the ground in nothing and cover you up with the dirt and resell that coffin. It's a big racket."
She died in 1967. I remember a day before she was buried we went to see her at I.J. Morris Funeral Home. She lay dead in a beautiful coffin and I stared at her dead body in there. I could hear her calling to me from the beyond: "Marjala mamala get me out of this here thing. I don't want no fancy coffin and dumped later in the dirt." I must have been standing there for some time because my mother came over and I said: "Remember what Grandma said about how she wanted to be buried in a cheap wood box?" My mother looked surprised and said: "Yeah, she did say that. I remember her saying that when she sat at the piano bench." Then she told me to "Shut up and go sit down."
I was thinking about that today and I think Grandma Bessie could have been onto something. I miss her. She was a wise woman.
Today I was thinking about the time Bessie told me about this talking dog she saw on TV. On command, the dog would say "mama."
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