West Brighton First Aid

How I survived my Staten Island Childhood... barely.

When I was three-and-a-half years old, I stood on my tiptoes and reached into the top drawer of my mother’s dresser on City Boulevard in West Brighton. My chubby little fingers searched the mysterious textures that I could only identify with my tactile sense. Amid the soft, silky undergarments that felt like feathers, I grabbed something familiar - a tube with a cap! “Oh, I know what that is!”I thought to my young self -“That’s toothpaste!” I pulled it out, squeezed it into my mouth and ran to show my mother.

I credit the look on my mother’s face at that moment with introducing me to the art of Edvard Munch, as her expression strongly resembled his iconic painting, “The Scream.”

While washing a child’s mouth with soap and water has generally been regarded as an extreme form of corporal punishment, used perhaps only for cursing or talking back, in that instance, it was my mother’s only resource - the only way she could remedy the fact that instead of toothpaste, her little blue-eyed wonder had squirted his mouth full with Ortho Vaginal Cream.