Saying goodbye to our family’s home in Springfield, New Jersey

Some people have spirit animals. I have a spirit shape—the Circle.

In my life, circles have come up repeatedly, starting with the only home I ever knew as a child. I was born in 1954 and lived my first 18 years at 20 Warwick Circle. Twenty-one years later, I met my wife, who grew up at 20 Levering Circle. At summer camp, I was a member of the honored Winadu Circle for those who embodied spirit, sportsmanship, and cooperation. 

Circles are a persistent geometrical shape that keep occurring, rounding out my life.

RIP – The Sale of The Circle

In addition to mourning the loss of my beloved Mom, who passed away on December 29, 2023, I am now mourning the loss of the home I grew up in, that my parents bought on October 20, 1952.

Of course, the sudden loss of Bea Slater—Bea Bea to her friends, children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren—can’t be compared with losing a home.

But selling our family home feels like a second death in the family, another loss to grieve.

There is no longer a family home to go to, a beloved place to gather and celebrate the shared experience of life.

My siblings and I sold 20 Warwick Circle on April 4, 2024, after our mom died four months ago. As with Mom’s passing, our childhood home is also now gone, sold to a new family.

Can you sit shiva for a home?

 In less than 100 days after Mom’s death, we had to let 20 Warwick go.

Once the closing was completed and all the papers were signed, I experienced a deep sense of loss and needed to memorialize this second passing. I felt in my heart that this cherished house deserves an obituary.

The circle is now complete.

At the end of this blog, there is a link to two video my mother made giving a tour of the house about 15 years old. Don’t miss it.

20 Warwick Circle – 1952-style

My sister Diane was two in 1952. 20 Warwick Circle must have felt enormous to my parents and her when it was just the three of them.

The ranch house looked small from the street but opened to a large, generously sized lot. Living in a circle felt secure and protected. Like a never-ending circle, I always thought this home would remain ours forever. Mom would proudly brag to friends that her house wasn’t one of those “up and down” houses – she loved that it was ranch-style.

I used to joke with my dad when he told me he paid $22,000 for the house in 1952.

“Dad, why didn’t you buy a few on the street if they were so inexpensive?”

Of course, in 1952, fresh out of college, maybe Dad had an $ 8,000-a-year salary working at Bamberger’s department store in Newark.

We found the mortgage from 1979 from when Dad refinanced the house. The amount was $30,146.76. They had to pay $192 monthly.

“Our house was a very, very, very fine house.” Graham Nash

Our house was in suburban New Jersey, and our lives revolved around that circle. Growing up in Warwick Circle, we could walk to school, the local deli, or our friends’ houses. This home had a remarkable magnetic force that pulled friends and family inside. I remember spending countless days riding my bike around the circle.

Round and Round

I calculated that Mom lived in that house for 26,097 days. I wish I could have one more day.

The house was always filled with fabulous food, loving friends, and an extended family almost every weekend. I can still smell the noodle pudding baking in the oven. I can hear Diane practicing her scales on the piano in 1961. I can see my maternal grandparents, George and Fannie Ginsberg, coming up the walk with a Kosher salami chub in hand on Sunday mornings. Joe and Gertie Slater, my paternal grandparents, rarely missed a birthday or anniversary celebration at our house, too.

Birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, engagements, and holidays filled the house with jello molds, morning coffees, and our growing families. We celebrated the Super Bowl, World Series and so many football games. Each event was an opportunity for bagels, lox, Millburn Deli, or Geiger’s donuts. In later years, Natalie’s cakes were part of every ritual celebration.

That house embraced us, protected us and was like a warm blanket on a snowy night – comforting – and reassuring.

In the last few decades, we started to celebrate the house’s birthday each year – a ritual that allowed us to recently Zoom in family from around the world, from Hawaii to Israel. We shared memories on those calls, and they always gave each of us a warm virtual hug as we remembered shared occasions from 20 Warwick.

For the rest of my life, coffee brewing in the morning will remind me of 20 Warwick Circle. If a house could wear perfume, it would be the scent of the sweet fragrance of honeysuckles that grew wild in the backyard. Like a person, a house has a smell, an aroma. that can jump start a trip down my memory lane.

Each room was filled with ordinary and extraordinary reminders that will live in my heart and comfort my soul.

My earliest memories are of themed birthday parties that my mom orchestrated like the domestic conductor of our family. Mom bought matching plates, tablecloths, and a cake resembling pirate ships or baseball field.

On my fifth birthday in 1959, I wore a sailor suit and a white hat. There was a little treasure chest filled with candy for each child who came to my party. My cousins Janie, Mark and Michael Winick would attend along with my Aunt Lolly and Uncle Judd. Kids from school and the neighborhood came running into the house, gift in hand.

We are a family who believes life didn’t happen if you don’t take a picture, way before Instagram became a thing.

Each party was memorialized in black and white, burned into my most profound memories like light on photographic paper. Those pictures lived in photo albums and covered the walls of our beloved home.

I can still taste the wildly sweet frosting from my childhood birthday cake and hear the racket a dozen eight-year-old kids made running around the basement. We were always on a sugar high, although Mom’s famous candy drawer didn’t show up for a few more decades.

We were so lucky, but too young to fully appreciate all we had as children growing up in such a loving home.

Dorothy’s famous message from Oz about home is burned into our hearts.

We sat in what we called the den, watching an old 32-inch RCA TV in 1963 when JFK was killed on November 22, 1963. As a 9-year-old boy, I had never experienced so much sadness in that room, and it lingered for days and days after his assassination. We were frozen in front of that screen as if time stood still. I’m not sure the nine year old Jeff truly understood what was happening – but I felt the somber silence waft through the room.

We watched The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and countless episodes of I Love Lucy while sitting together and enjoying those wonderful programs. The soundtrack of the family room was almost always laughter.

Decades later, that room was redecorated as the safari room, a magical creation unlike any place I’ve ever seen in my adult travels. We had fake zebra skin on the wall and faux-ivory horns for handles on the cabinet. And there was an irresistible bar that was a magnet to my curious teenage friends and me.

But most of the time spent in that room was watching The New York Mets.

Since opening day on April 11, 1962, my parents, siblings, and I have watched countless baseball games, as we sat glued to the set. I thought Casey Stengle was my uncle, and Ed Kranepool, Cleon Jones, and Ron Swoboda were first cousins.

Then there was our family patron saint, Tom Seaver, whose name my parents mentioned with reverence.

Along with the Jewish baseball hero Sandy Koufax, it was as if I had an extended family who never visited us in person, but lived in our living room. They would stay for nine innings. 1969 was a banner year to believe in the Amazing Mets, who won the World Series under Gil Hodges’ leadership.

A few years later, my beloved Grandma Fannie told our Aunt Annette that the Mets’ manager, Gil Hodges, had been traded to the Angels, and my aunt thought he was playing with a new team in California.

Sadly, the truth was that he had died.

The Language of Our Home

Every family uses a secret language used to describe places in their house. We five shared those special names for these places in our hearts.

20 Warwick Circle was no different.

The den was filled with framed photographs—thousands and thousands of prints. Mom enjoyed showing off pictures from summers at Phillips Beach in Deal, NJ, to celebrate July 4th. Once their first grandchild was born, Dad did a collage of each year starting in 1976, when Jaime Bedrin, their first grandchild, arrived. When we started cleaning the house to prepare it for sale, we all felt Dad’s presence watching us. The den was the center of 20 Warwick Circle, where we gathered, watched endless baseball games, and celebrated 71 years of family milestones.

Up front included the entry to the house where guests rarely sat. It wasn’t a grand entrance, but on rare occasion, we would sit up front, waiting for guests to arrive for the latest shindig.

We had the back – the addition built after my brother Mitch was born in 1960. Mom and Dad extended the house with a new room for Mitch and a more oversized main bedroom, bathroom, and office for Dad. That room way in the back was called Dad’s study. An intercom system was put into the house. We never removed the intercom and it was like a beauty mark dotting the walls of several rooms. The contractor even built a corral to allow Mitchell to play outside.

The back hall was a small, narrow passageway to the garage that, for some odd reason, my now 31-year-old nephew Harrison decorated with a postage stamp. It was slightly damp and smelled of Pine Sol. There was a broom closet filled with cleaning supplies to keep the house sparkling. To get to the garage, you had to passed through the back hall.

My sister Diane’s old room became our daughter Fanny’s “dressing room” when she came up north to appear on TV shows like Rachael Ray and other TV show appearances. As teenagers, Sarah and Fanny would sleep over in that room watching endless episodes of Law and Order.

To the day she died, Mom left up the welcome sign on the door for Fanny even though Mom’s aide, Lovey, lived in Diane’s old room as she cared for Mom.

Mitch’s former bedroom morphed into Annette’s room, where our aunt lived with my parents after my grandfather’s passing. After Annette died, that room became the guest suite.

Whenever I would visit, that was where I would sleep.

The hallway leading to the back was flooded with photos of every possible occasion, from floor to ceiling. When a visitor would come inside the house for the first time, my mother would bring them to the hall like she was a guide at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Each and every photo had a story. And Mom loved to share our photographic history.

Every house has a secret place. At 20 Warwick Circle, it was the garage. We had a secret key hidden that everyone in the family knew about, tucked away. Over 71 years, I think everyone within a ten mile radius knew our little secret.

Another striking feature in the garage was a tennis ball hanging from a string that my Dad put up so that both he and my Mom knew where to stop the car when pulling into this tiny one-car space.

That tennis ball was one of the few things all the grandkids wanted, when we clean out the house. We decided it would become the traveling tennis ball spending six months with Georgia, six months with Fanny and then get passed to Garret, Jaime, Harrison and Sarah.

The kitchen had a stucco ceiling and perhaps the most uncomfortable chairs I ever sat on. But enjoying morning coffee with Mom will be a memory living in my over-caffeinated heart forever. A calendar was always taped on the way, marked by the next event like Sarah’s birthday, Jeffrey’s visit or a visit from her few remaining friends.

I can still see Mom looking out of the kitchen window as if she was waiting for Dad to come back home again.

Fanny, my youngest daughter, said she felt like Bea Bea’s kitchen was the heart of the 20 Warwick Circle. Mom and my Aunt Annette created the most extraordinary meals from this small kitchen. The outside of the refrigerator was another place filled with magnetic memories. There was always Haagen Dazs coffee ice cream and strong dark roast coffee bought especially for my visit.

When our grandson, Bodhi, came from Hawaii with Sarah for his first visit to 20 Warwick Circle for Mom’s 90th birthday, Mom made a sign to welcome Bodhi to Chez 20 Warwick. The sign hung on the front door with its inverted triangle-shaped window. I was ecstatic that Bodhi could bathe in the love of my childhood home. In fact seeing him bathe in the bathtub I used as a child was cleansing to my heart.

I doubt Bodhi Kai will remember 20 Warwick Circle – except for the candy drawer. That memory, I think, will be part of the story we will tell him about his two visits. The candy drawer is a sweet memory for him to enjoy, as did every adult and child visitor to 20 Warwick Circle.

My former bedroom had blue-textured wallpaper and bunk beds. There were some odd, revolutionary war-themed knickknacks on the wall and a small 12-inch TV. I had this bizarre pull-out desk that would be my place to get my homework done, and I struggled with math assignments that involved geometric shapes whose circumference we were somehow supposed to measure. To this day, I don’t know why the surface space of a circle matters. I guess that’s why I never became an architect.

One day around 1972, my buddies Jon, Larry and Jamie came over after school to hang out. Of course, I needed to memorialize that day because we were being especially weird as we listened to Frank Zappa on my turntable. The picture below was taken were with my Nikon F on a tripod, set on a timer.

If those walls could talk.

The basement was where my so-called band, The Mirror’s Image, practiced until my Dad told us to go make noise at someone else’s house. There was a hidden cedar closet and cabinets filled with photos and films from my Poppa George. This space where we had birthday parties as kids and hung out with friends as teenagers had a lifeforce of its own. Occasionally, we would walk (crawl) into the crawl space – a hidden fortress under the house’s extension. We would explore the mysteries beneath the house.

Like a family museum, 20 Warwick Circle reminded us of where we came from—our grandparents and late Aunts and Uncles.

Like a sacred shrine, our wallpaper was Kodak moment after moment. The sounds of grandparents and grandchildren echoed in the halls, soothing reminders that words spoken, and lively laughter never really go away. These voices live in the ether, hovering from room to room.

As I grew older into my teenage years during the 70’s, my friends would come to 20 Warwick Circle because our home was always filled and stocked like the local supermarket shelves with eight types of cookies and endless ice pops and warm cider Geiger donuts or, sparkly, gooey Dunkin Donuts.

We would play basketball in the backyard or pretend to be a rock n’ roll band in the basement. My best friend Jamie loved to come to 20 Warwick Circle as much as I loved to go to 25 Cottage Lane. We felt welcomed and safe.

It was bittersweet at my mother’s shiva when my childhood friend Jamie said, I guess this is the last time I’ll be in this house too.

The Circle Game – Sitting on the Porch

Few places at 20 Warwick hold more emotional energy than the front porch. I recall a vivid childhood memory, Mom and I would sit on our front porch around 5 pm, waiting for Dad to come home from work. We would count cars and guess how many more cars it would take until Dad pulled into the driveway with his navy blue Buick Electra 222. He would be clutching his leather briefcase, smell like pipe smoke, his tie loosened, as he came up a couple of steps to the front porch and kissed my mom.

He’d ask me if I wanted to throw the baseball around.

Life seemed so much simpler in 1966.

When my father unexpectedly died in 2009, it was a profoundly sad time, and 20 Warwick Circle absorbed the outpouring of love for him as we sat shiva. Guests would come and visit and share memories of what a wonderful man Jack Slater was and wished us that his memory would be a blessing. The house was like a shock absorber, giving us comfort and sanctuary in a family place where every room reminded us of Dad.

Years after Dad passed away, when I would come to visit Mom, we would sit outside on the porch on a warm spring day and reminisce about waiting for Dad to come home. In her later years, we would sit on that same porch, watching people walk their dogs or stroll around the circle. Mom would encourage me to walk around the circle and get some exercise.

I’d stroll past each house, remembering who used to live at which house—the Zahns, the Chetkins, the Ginters, the Newmans, the Norulak, and the Coopermans.

In the last few years of my mom’s life, she had kind and loving neighbors like the Dunayers who watched over Mom and the house. Mom and 20 Warwick Circle seemed blessed by so many kind caretakers and helpers.

In my mind’s eye, I can still take that trip around the circle of a memory lane.

Circles Aren’t Supposed to End

A circle is continuous and should never end.

After my brother Mitch notified me that the sale had closed, it didn’t feel like an ending. I thought I was beginning a new spin around the circle of life. I’m so glad my sister grabbed the address sign and gave it to our brother. As you can see in the photo above, he is hold the plaque, 20 The Slaters, a cherished artifact to remind us of home.

I know I’ll never replicate the emotional embrace of my original childhood home, 20 Warwick Circle.

Writing this obituary for this special place is how I am grieving this loss.

This home will always remain the original and unique creation of our parents, who made it more than a collection of connected rooms under one roof. They made it into a loving sanctuary, and every time we entered, we were wrapped in their arms with the warmest embrace. I can still feel them holding me tightly.

Like master artisans, our parents crafted a place that was always welcoming, comforting, and filled with the sweetness of life. They turned our home into an art form, and that loving feeling lives inside all who spent time within the circle.

The literal and figurative key to 20 Warwick Circle may be gone, but the feelings are enduring and never-ending.

My circle of life continues.

And the seasons, they go round and round.
And the painted ponies go up and down.
We’re captive on the carousel of time.
We can’t return; we can only look.
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round in the circle game

Joni Mitchell

Mom recorded two tours of 20 Warwick Circle for posterity. I videotaped her on October 2, 2010.

The following photo gallery represents a sampling of the tens of thousands of photos we have from 71 years at 20 Warwick Circle.

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