Little Neck Queens

The Scobbee Diner

When I think about a place I grew up and all of the locations that have meaning to me, one sticks out in my mind, The Scobee Diner in Little Neck New York. This dinner is tucked away in the small town in queens where I grew up right on the busiest corner of town. It is a haven for anyone older than seventy years of age on a Saturday or Sunday morning at the crack of dawn. They mob the place week after week, sitting at the booths seemingly uninterested in reading the paper, or the same old boring conversations and arguments they had the week before.
Each old couple distorted like the other. Their backs hunched over, and constant expressions of pain used to scare me as a small child, but now I am able to used to it. Their skin looks like the poison of a snake is traveling up through their veins and slowly killing their eyes. Their eyes are hidden behind the thick brimmed glasses that slowly scan the same menu day in and day out.
From an outsider’s perspective, this place is unlike any other dinner. The way it is set up allows you to get a good view of the entire dinning room from almost every angle and table. The old men with their wives seem so dull and almost forced to be here every morning and weekend, even though you know this is what they live for.
There are a few more places that jog memories like this are p.s. 94 park where I spent most of my childhood in queens. This metal gridiron was where most of my growing up took place. I learned how to take a tackle there on pavement, and learned how to play 21 on the basketball court. We rarely got to play basketball because the older kids had it on lock ever since I could remember. We were shunned to a small handball court in the far corner in the park. We played all different kinds of stickball and variations of that itself. The fence holding us in from the street looks into the sad parking lot of the Scobbee Diner, which was a homerun if we hit it over the second row of Oldsmobiles.