Did I enter the would frowning, or just confused. Her I am in September 1948, at about five months old. The photographer is my dad, Ted Clark, who is very Anglo and Protestant. The pretty lady squeezing me is my mother, Shirley Marino. Her mother is Jewish and her father Catholic. Protestant, Jewish, Catholic. It would only take me about 50 years to sort this out. Welcome to America.

That trinity of influence shaped me in ways I only now, closing in on 50, begin to understand. The mixed marriages of my grandparents and then my parents left me, at various times, confused, dismembered and eclectic. Their unions also made me tolerant in matters of religion, for to insult any of the three great American faiths was to insult someone I loved.

On most Sundays, getting home from the 9 o'clock mass at St. Aidan's on Long Island was a joyous occasion. It meant, most of all, escape from a boring church service. It also meant cheese Danish and toasted bagels and reading the colorful comics in the New York Sunday News. Reporter Brenda Starr, red hair aflame, blue eyes flashing, was my favorite. At noon, my grandfather and I would settle in the TV room to watch "Meet the Press" and get ready for an afternoon of Yankee baseball. If we were lucky, we'd watch a doubleheader, my mother serving a delicious Italian dinner between games.

But on this particular Sunday, forevermore thought of as the Feast of the Expectoration, I found myself in my room, crying. My father was about to march around the corner and confront the woman who had spat at my mother and called her "that Jew."

My father was a big man who could take care of himself. But in confronting this family -- call them the Funkhousers -- [editor's note: This and some other names from the past have been changed.] he was outnumbered. The father Funkhouser was a barrel-chested man, and he had two dimwitted and burly sons to back him up. But most of all, I feared the mother, Constance Funkhouser, for her pure meanness.

The boys in the neighborhood had felt her sting before. When we gathered on the street for a game of stickball or punchball, we did our best to position our games to steer clear of her yard. But, inevitably, it would happen. Joe Delaney would belt a long drive with a broomstick, and a gorgeous pink Spalding rubber ball would fly into a high arc against the Funkhouser roof, or in their bushes. This led to a desperate dash by an outfielder to retrieve the ball before it was too late.

One day, that outfielder was me. I was a fast kid -- but not fast enough. Connie Funkhouser rushed out her screen door and down her steps, grabbed the pink sphere as if it were a magic egg and retreated into the cave of her house.

We gathered in a group. What was she doing in there with our ball?

"Cooking it and eating it, I bet," said one of the Delaney clan. There were 12 of them.

Then, it happened. The front door swung open, and the ball came flying out in two hemispheres, looking as if it had been sliced with a butcher knife.

The destruction of the ball filled us with fury. With no other recourse, we marched up and down the street, a decade before antiwar protests were the rage, eight scruffy boys, yelling, "We hate Funkhouser! We hate Funkhouser!" and slurring the first syllable of the name into an obscenity.

I begged my father not to go over there, not to enter that goblin's lair, but he assured me he was just going there to talk. "It's wrong to spit at another person," he said. He didn't have to add the next part, "especially at your mother."

While he was gone, I tried to make sense of the morning's riddle. Why exactly did Connie Funkhouser think we were Jewish? Didn't she see us go to mass? Didn't she watch us march back from Communion?

My mother explained that her mother, Grandma Sadie, was a Jewish lady who had married Grandpa Pete, an Italian-Catholic man. "To get married in those days, Sadie had to become a Catholic, but she just did it so the priest would agree to marry them." She explained to me that some people hated Jewish people. She told me that our family had once tried to rent a summer cottage upstate, but we were turned down because Grandma Sadie was Jewish.

I loved my grandparents more than anything. My grandmother was kind and generous. She took great pleasure in our accomplishments and never missed an occasion to express her love with big, smacking kisses, or gifts of money or food. If that's what it meant to be Jewish, why would someone want to hate you for it? Or why would someone want to cut up a beautiful new pink rubber ball? A ball that cost 25 cents?

I stopped shaking only when my father returned safely to the house. He had confronted the Funkhousers about the spitting incident. They did not deny it. Instead, they launched a counterattack against me and my friends. The boys in the neighborhood were always ruining their yard, they said, and calling them dirty names.

That, at least, made a bit of sense. I could see where you could hate people for what they did. After all, I hated the Funkhousers for cutting up our ball and for spitting at my mom. What I couldn't yet understand is how you could hate people for who they are.