For the Record

Walking around the block recently, looking at the foundation of a new house going up, I remembered one of the most important days of my life. I was five years old. My parents had purchased a house—this was in Queens in 1978—on a double lot. They split the property in two and were building a second house on the empty half. The plan was for us to move into the new house when it was finished and sell the old house.

Chris and David Skinner; inset, Jesse

Courtesy of the Skinner Family

My father, an architect, had designed the new house, which at this point was only a cement foundation—what would soon be our basement floor, some 10 feet down, with walls that rose to ground level. It looked like a huge open cement box inside a huger hole in the ground. Between the two was a deep trench that filled completely with water when it rained for several days. Work stopped and my two brothers and I were sad. We would not get to see the general contractor, a family friend who always said hi, or the men who operated the machinery and nodded to us as we watched, amazed at the movement of earth and building materials.

One evening the rain let up, and my brothers and I lied to our mother that we were going down the street. Instead, joined by two neighbor kids, Mario and his little sister Edith, we walked onto the construction site to study the long pools of water that had formed around the cement walls. The oldest was Mario, at whose side I had fought many machine-gun battles against German and Japanese armies. Next oldest was my brother Jesse, two years older than me and always boss among the Skinner boys.

As we walked onto the site we were joking about standing too close to the water and falling in. The joke was, I remember, accompanied by a herky-jerky dance and fake screams, the kind of death throes we acted out while playing war.