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The Enchanted Collection of Amy Zerner and Monte Farber
The Enchanted Collection of Amy Zerner and Monte Farber
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Saturday May 31, 2014

you can't change anyone

"You can't change anyone, Monte me boy; ." So said the giant Irish NYPD sergeant to me when I was a young boy playing on the expansive brick porch of the 74th Precinct in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, where my father did his time as one of the few Jewish cops on the force in the late 1950's.

It was around 4 PM, when the 8 AM to 4 PM shift changed over to the 4 PM to midnight shift and the place was a sea of large men in blue wool uniforms with shiny brass buttons, most of them carrying a three foot wooden club and all carrying revolvers on their hips. You couldn't ask for a much safer place for a child to play.

I had walked over by myself from our 4th floor walk-up apartment on Argyle Road, which bordered on the park's enormous Parade Grounds, so big it contained ten baseball diamonds(!) complete with outfields, to walk home with my father.

It may sound crazy to parents today but it was standard for kids to go out and play without adult supervision - wait, that isn't true. We had LOTS of adult supervision, but it wasn't our parents, it was every single person sitting on their stoop gossiping incessantly to each other and noting everything that moved in case it could be fodder for a juicy story, the solitary anti-social types watching out their open windows like security cameras, and every single person a kid might pass on the street. It didn't take a village to watch a kid and it didn't take a second for one of them to scream at you if you did something they didn't like and whack you if you persisted, if they could catch you.

Walking on the sidewalk around the sunny, windswept Parade Grounds ensured that you wouldn't have to encounter the apartment dwellers and their watchful eyes, though you had to dodge the occasional group of neighborhood kids who were looking for trouble.

I, however, had a safe passage pass, i.e., my father being a cop, and so I had come onto the porch of the precinct, which had been a huge mansion in the 1800's, during shift change and wandered over to my father while they were recounting their encounter with some "skells" (short for "skeletons") who'd made the mistake of thinking they could commit some crime within sight of my father, who'd been captain of his high school football team and could run when he wanted to (almost never as time went by).

This tale of derring do had drawn the expected round of 1-upping stories of bravery from the huddle and since I had no tale of my own I asked "Are you ever afraid?"

This was why I was now dangling from the grip of this mountain of a man as he held me up, face to face, and solemnly intoned "Domestic dispute." This produced a bad memories induced hush and silently nodding heads on these normally loud and jovial keepers of the peace.

"I hear that call over the radio and I unsnap me gun," he said in his strange Irish brogue. "I walk in and he's bouncin' her off the wall so I get a bit rough with him and the next thing I know I've got a steak knife in me buttocks. These women, I don't know what they're thinking or drinking. They marry these men thinking they're going to change 'em. You can't change anyone, Monte me boy, it's hard enough to change yourself."

This was the first time that a life-saving and life changing trait of mine manifested itself - I can recognize the truth when I hear it. I have never, ever expected to be able to change anyone, not even to change anyone's mind. My goal has always been to express my truth as I see it so that after I leave someone's presence I do not say to myself "I should have said..."

The great psychic Edgar Cayce, when asked what was the highest thing to which a soul could aspire said "To make one's home (and I always add: one's very being) a place where a person is better off for having been with you."

I sit here writing this in our Enchanted World emporium, confident that we have made it in keeping with Edgar Cayce's words of truth, and I hope your reading this story will help you help someone who hasn't yet learned that you can't change anyone, a crucial lesson for finding happiness gently taught to me by one of the toughest men I have ever met in my life.

 

May 27, 2014June 06, 2014
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