I Can Still Smell Brooklyn Even Through My Face Mask: Ode to Popper, aka Staff Sergeant Julius S. Rosenberg, 4th Infantry Division, WWII

Please teach me how to ride a bike.

I remember staring at him with my eight-year old’s sense of disbelief. I was just a kid and this grown man was my grandfather. How would I teach this giant (to me) human how to ride my little bike? How in the world didn’t he know how to ride one anyway? Doesn’t everyone know how to ride a bike? Everyone in my neighborhood rode a bike. My parents rode bikes. Didn’t my mom’s dad teach her how to ride hers when she was a kid?

I told him this was just not possible. My yellow Schwinn Banana bike could in no way hold him. He would simply have to watch me in order to figure it out. That seemed reasonable.

In his life, he had already figured out so many things. At that time, this is what I knew about him: he could catch a fly with his hand, he could make leather belts and purses, he could remove the top of his thumb (momentarily), he could fight in war, he could survive war, he could live without a dad and he could nap, sitting up, in the corner of our couch. There were lots of other things he could do but those in particular struck me as his very special, very specific Popper things. Surely he could master this bike riding task without my…