Up in Nanny's Room Behind the Clock

When we were kids and asked our dad "where is my (insert favorite toy, article of clothing, school work, etc...)", dad's reply was "up in nanny's room behind the clock".  This reply was in lieu of the typical "I don't know", and the ensuing lecture about how you should keep track of your own things."

I'm pretty sure that one of us kids (there were seven of us) must have mustered up the guts to ask " Who is nanny, where is her room, and how big is this clock that she can hide everything we need behind?"  I have no recollection of his answer.  But in Dad's defense, if I had seven kids always asking me to keep track of their belongings, I would try to find a way to fend them off too.

The mystery of Nanny and her clock contined, even for my children.  I followed in my father's tradition even though I had no idea what I was talking about.  They say that parenting does not come with a manual, so I stole a page from my dad's manual.  If you're gonna plagiarize, get a good source.  So my children were also stymied by Nanny and her clock.

Fast forward to last week, my sister Joan was visiting, and we were talking about when we lived in Jersey City.  Joan was on her Surface tablet and found a picture of our old house at 422 Bergen Ave on a real estate web site.  She was saying how the house looks nothing like it did in the fifties, but 424 looks  somewhat familiar.  She went on to name the families who lived on either side of us and some things she remembered about them.  That's when the story of "Nanny" came up.

Joan told me about the people who lived at 424, and how the children's grandmother lived with them on the upstairs floor.  The grandmother, Nanny, (which is what her grandchildren called her) did not speak English (that we know of) and had a beautiful garden in the backyard that no one was allowed in.  So in our eyes, Nanny was somewhat mysterious.  She was real mysterious to me, so mysterious in fact, that I had no idea that she was a real person until last week.

So our old neighbor's grandmother turned out to be the elusive and mysterious "Nanny" who had been hiding all of our treasures all these years. I wonder if she has the term paper I "lost" freshman year at Seton  Hall.