A Remembrance: Amy Phillipson
When I was a kid growing up in Brooklyn, friendships were cemented in the classrooms of P.S. 306 and out of doors, from shared sandwiches in the school lunchroom to terraces of the Linden Houses in East New York, and to grassy areas where we played dodgeball, ring-aleevio, skelly, and crawled through scratchy bushes in games of hide-and-seek, hopped over sprinklers, and swung from monkey bars. Amy Phillipson and I met in kindergarten. We were both short and skinny and played the clarinet. She lived on Wortman and I lived on Stanley, in a paradise of childhood where apartment doors were left unlocked and her mother, Frieda, always offered me something to eat because my mother was a terrible cook. Amy and her sister, Abbie, shared a room with a fan while my sister and I did the same in our apartment two blocks away. The Phillipsons had a dog, maybe a German shepherd, which jumped up on one of their beds during one visit and nipped me in the behind. Amy assured me that I would be fine. …
