Bert Moore-Owen was a Unitarian minister in downtown Manhattan. One spring, he preached a sermon that touched on Passover, but he admitted he’d never seen a seder. Afterwards, a congregant approached him and said, “If you’re interested in attending a seder, I know a family who’ll invite you.” So Bert and his wife Bea, also a Unitarian minister, came to seder at the home of Flora and Morris Feuerstein. The two families became lifelong friends. Flora’s sons called the ministers Aunt Bea and Uncle Bert, as if they were relatives.
Eventually Aunt Bea and Uncle Bert retired on their small pensions and went to live a subsistence life near Mt. Carmel, Connecticut. Right around this time, Flora’s ten-year-old son, Evan, became asthmatic and was unable to breathe the air in Manhattan. The doctors advised the Feuersteins to move to Arizona, but they didn’t want to, partly because Morris had established a dental practice in New York. Since he couldn’t breathe on this planet, Evan believed that he had fallen to earth from outer space. He felt unlike all the other creatures inhabiting New York City. So he was not unhappy when his parents said they were taking him out of school for a year and sending him to live in the country with Aunt Bea and Uncle Bert.
The Moore-Owens had no children and they had lived in exotic places like India. On a table in the upstairs parlor was a corked tube containing a cigarette made of tobacco mixed with gold leaf, given to Uncle Bert by a maharajah. There were other curiosities on this table, like the head of a copperhead snake Uncle Bert had killed, preserved in a jar with formaldehyde. Evan enjoyed looking at the snake’s tiny fangs. He also liked the player piano in the parlor, though he wasn’t tall enough to reach the pedals and had to cling to the ledge beneath the moving keys, pumping hard. Aunt Bea thought this exercise was responsible for the disappearance of his asthma. While Evan pumped the pedals, Uncle Bert sang World War I-era songs in his beautiful tenor voice: “Keep the home fires burning, though your hearts are yearning,” and “It’s a long, long trail a-winding, ‘til my dreams all come true…”
Aunt Bea taught Evan his school lessons at the kitchen table, rolling back the cloth so he could write. He would also take a basket to collect eggs from the chickens, and he learned not to be fooled by the porcelain egg that encouraged the hens to lay. The garden on the hill above the house was their main source of food, which was why Uncle Bert got so angry about the woodchucks. In the kitchen a red door opened into a stone-lined root cellar. When Aunt Bea switched on the single light bulb, jars of preserved fruits and vegetables glowed in deep colors. Each evening they listened to the news on a large radio–a sacred time when no one was allowed to talk. Afterwards they sang or played card games like Euchre.
During the day, Aunt Bea would put a flat stone on the back of the stove to warm. At night, she wrapped the stone in towels and put it in Evan’s bed in his unheated room on the third floor. In the freezing bed, he’d put his feet on the warm stone and eventually fall asleep. In the mornings he dashed downstairs to the kitchen where Aunt Bea had his clothes warming by the stove. There was no car, so every week Evan and Aunt Bea walked five miles to the nearest library, exchanged their books, and walked five miles home. Evan had no problem breathing the air of this new part of the planet and felt less like an alien from outer space.
When Evan grew up he decided to leave New York City permanently. With a small group of friends, he went to live a subsistence life in British Columbia. The Moore-Owens thought this was delightful and interesting, though the Feuersteins were not happy. But as Morris started telling his patients in the dental office about his son’s strange life, he met with unexpected enthusiasm. He discovered that many people cherished a similar dream and had left it unrealized.
Copyright © Leora Freedman 2015
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