BY TODAY’S STANDARDS, my husband’s early childhood was intensely boring. When he was growing up in the industrial town of Chester, Pennsylvania — now a shadow of its former self — he did not have many of the opportunities very young children have today. He hardly had any toys, no gym classes for toddlers, no music lessons or early sports. He didn’t go to reading hours at the local library or children’s museums. There was no children’s TV. He didn’t even have play dates.

From the ages of three to six, his three older brothers and sister were out of the house and at St. Michael’s School. So he was mostly alone at home with his mother. He spent the day following her around as she did her chores. She had plenty to do, with a husband, five children, two boarders, a dog, a large, ramshackle house and a coal furnace that needed to be fed.

She began her main chores after everyone had left for the day, but first she had a cup of coffee and a cigarette. He remembers her staring straight ahead and blowing steam off the coffee. These were usually her only moments of leisure and peace. She would quickly read yesterday’s newspaper. She preferred yesterday’s paper because viewings of the local deceased were usually publicized a day ahead. These evening gatherings were a significant part of her social life.

The coffee break did not last long. She would move about the house — cleaning the one bathroom shared by nine people, straightening the bedrooms, doing dishes, preparing food, hauling coal, etc. My husband would stay by her side as she did all this. He was more a spectator than a helper.

He probably gabbed constantly while she worked. She is long gone so we cannot know what he said. But I have some idea. His talk would have been filled with all kinds of personal observations, the philosophical speculations that are common to young children and thousands of questions about big things and small. He probably learned more talking to his mother in the bathroom while she scrubbed the sink and toilet than he did in any single class in school. They figured out life together. There is an innocence to these hours as he describes them, especially in comparison to what children experience today on screens in their homes or on simple visits to the supermarket. But of course he was deprived — by today’s standards — of the stimulating and educational presence of his peers.

Around 11 a.m., Joe Sidell, one of the two men who paid for rooms in the house, emerged from his bedroom and tickled my husband to death.

Joe was a kind, quiet bachelor in his fifties. He was a bartender at the Imperial Hotel down the street. (My husband’s brothers would also work at the Imperial. They earned “pin” money in the hotel’s bowling alley. They would sit on ledges behind the pins and jump down after the pins crashed and scattered to put them back in place.) Joe worked at the Imperial till late at night. He lived with the Wood family, along with the retired welder Jonesy, until my husband was 15, when one day Joe announced he was retiring, buying a new Impala and getting married. He moved to Maryland and they never saw him again.

Another older bachelor who badly wanted to be a boarder in the house would sometimes stop by during the day and visit. He was a retired shipyard administrator named Walter “Charlie” Buckley. He had the annoying habit of drumming his fingers on the kitchen table as he chatted with my husband’s mother, who did not have the time to talk. Charlie told her he would leave her all his money if she would only let him live in that ramshackle house. But how could you live with someone who drummed the table all day? Besides there was a rule written on the Wood DNA: Never accept an opportunity that could make you a lot of money. His mother politely refused. Charlie ended up marrying the owner of the bicycle shop at the age of 75. His wife was about the same age. Everyone thought it was a match made in heaven, but it was not happy, perhaps because they were both “set in their ways.”

Sometimes Missy, a neighbor, would come with her car and drive the little boy and his mother to the A & P supermarket a few blocks away. (Normally, they shopped in the immediate neighborhood at Edgemont Beef, the store where Buttons, the family dachsund mutt, picked up his bones. It was closer and delivered a large order to the house on Fridays.) My husband remembers vividly the day he saw a package of Good Luck margarine in the A & P. He was stunned. It was the same margarine featured in a commercial on TV! It was as if he had seen a movie star. In its foil package the margarine looked even more glamorous than it did on their small, black-and-white TV. It was an unforgettable moment — proving, I guess, just how boring his life was.

He also remembers being left in the car alone a few times while Missy and his mother shopped. This was very annoying. He hated it and once he cried and banged on the windows. A police officer happened to see him and went into the store to reprimand his mother.

Not only was his childhood boring, but he was a victim of child neglect. So was his father. When he returned from work at about 5 p.m. every day, my husband in those early years always punched him hard in the stomach. That was love Chester-style.

But it must have been sad for the mother who had abandoned him in a parking lot when the little boy abandoned her to go to school. What a great companion a little child can be, sweetening and frustrating the most boring tasks. When you spend a lot of time with young children, you radically adjust your standards of efficiency. You embrace imperfection. They had shared a boring life together centered on the most menial tasks. When my husband went to school at the age of six, he had not learned any of his letters or all of his numbers. He couldn’t read or do basic math. By today’s standards, he was deprived of vital early childhood education. But mysteriously he learned all those things anyway.

He would even later become the first person in the family to go to college.

The little boy who did nothing all day became a young man who worked his way through college. That’s where he was filled with radical thinking. That’s what college is for, turning loving and obedient children into stuck-up revolutionaries. And he was no exception. He had become the enlightened one. He told his parents and brothers on several occasions that they knew nothing about anything.

He remembers one day after a short visit, he was heading back to college in Philadelphia and his father, then retired from his job at the shipyard, asked why he was leaving so soon.

“There’s nothing for him here, Pop,” his mother said.

Those words still cause him deep pain.

The house has long since been torn down. The stained glass windows at St. Michael’s were sold years ago. Both the A & P and Edgemont Beef are gone. The street where they played ball and Buttons pursued his wicked, night-time adventures is deserted. The entire cast of characters that was his neighborhood, both inanimate and human, has vanished.

But there’s still something for him there, Pop.

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