Motherhood Quote by Cy Coleman

The line lands like a sly overture: disarmingly plain, almost bureaucratic, then quietly explosive. A four-year-old doesn’t “have” a childhood memory here; he has a balance sheet. By choosing the word “owned” and specifying “tenements in the Bronx,” Cy Coleman compresses an entire New York story into a sentence that sounds like it wandered in from an interview about real estate, not innocence. That mismatch is the point. It’s funny in a dry, offhand way, but the humor is doing social work: it signals a kid raised around hustlers, rent ledgers, and adult talk, where sophistication arrives early because it has to.

The subtext is a double move: humblebrag and critique. Coleman isn’t claiming inherited glamour; “tenements” evokes cramped apartments, immigrant striving, and the hard edges of city economics. Yet the fact of ownership also hints at unusual mobility and proximity to power. He’s positioning his origin story as both gritty and improbably grown-up, which mirrors the tension in his music: brassy, street-smart, and engineered with precision.

Context matters: Coleman came up in mid-century New York, a composer who could write tunes that swaggered like Times Square while keeping the craft tight enough for Broadway’s unforgiving machinery. This sentence works as a miniature biography of that sensibility. It tells you he learned early that sentimentality is optional; timing is everything. Even his childhood arrives with a punchline and a ledger, like a show tune that winks while it counts the cost.