A Zero

The photo goes with the poem.  All the elements in the poem are real.  My uncle Dwight was my dad's older brother.  The oldest one died at 19 in an accident.  I've heard family stories that Dwight even stole from his mother before moving as a teenager on this own from North Carolina to spend much of his life in Brooklyn, NY, then moving to Florida, and eventually a Veteran's home in North Carolina where he died.  The poem follows:

ZERO

Cheering for Campanella, Hodges, Furillo,
and other Dodgers at Ebbet’s Field,
sitting among a live studio audience
knowing stars on stage were snow
on Grandmother’s next door neighbor’s
round screen black and white TV,
listening to my uncle’s tales
about being a cabbie
plus chauffeuring a Kodak executive
to have money for the track
became notes for writing “My Summer Vacation”
on the first day of sixth grade. 
Their building in Brooklyn was my
initiation to fire escapes stacked and squeezed
between brick walls streaked with soot,
and to riding home on a creaky elevator
rather than a red Columbia bike
motorized by a jack of diamonds
attached to the front wheel with Mother’s wooden clothes pin.   
At eleven, I hadn’t learned not to ask,
“Why do you call him Zero?”
as my diaper-clad cousin
with the nipple of a bottle of Bosco clinched in his teeth.
meandered through their fourth floor Flatbush apartment.
With his ruddy face radiating scorn, 
My dad’s brother replied,
“Because he ain’t worth nothing.”  
His answer is the indelible memory
of the summer of ’51 that pierced my conscience
fifty-eight years later when Uncle Dwight
died alone in a VA nursing home
not knowing if Zero
was already waiting.   

Dan W. Moore