Blockage

Our walk yesterday took us through my childhood neighborhood, past most of the houses I once served as the neighborhood paperboy. It was a lot of fun showing Mary where the various adventures of my youth took place. And me being me, it got me to thinking.

This neighborhood defined my world from ages two through fourteen. And as we walked, I realized that in some ways, I’d never left. The memories didn’t so much flood back as well up.

I could share fine details of the lives of most of the families on my block but outside that rectangle , the information becomes fuzzier. To put a point on it, one’s block actually referred to the houses on both sides of one’s street but only as far as the cross streets on each end. We knew some but not all of the folks behind us and nothing at all about the folks one street farther gone.

As I said, within narrow geographic confines, I can recall lots of stuff.  There were eighteen houses and at one point thirty-four dogs (yes, I counted – it got boring making the newspaper rounds at five in the morning) on what I considered ‘my block.’ The woods behind the Windalls’ and the Franks’ houses were shared by all the kids on the block as a sort of communal back yard.  In that grey house, Dave Hunt had a great train layout in the extra bedroom and used to let us watch him fly his model airplanes. He was a teenager who didn’t mind a ten-year-old tagging along behind him so long as said ten year old was available to fetch things from time to time.  Then there was the time he decided to walk across the Wilburton trestle – not, as it happens, the best idea he ever had. And I followed dutifully along, which was not my best idea.

As we rounded the corner headed toward the erstwhile Chez McDermott, I told Mary all about Johnny Sullivan who broke his arm playing buck-buck and Cha Cha Hitchcock who’d had a flagpole fall on his leg as a kid and spent most of his time in a wheelchair. There was the Wilde girl who learned the hard way that a fallen bee hive was not to be kicked and Steve O’Donnell, whose mom was the first woman I ever saw naked when I went to the back door looking for Steve just as she came out of the shower. Over there lived the Reeks, in whose driveway my cousin Sue taught me to ride a bike and just there was the powerline over which Pat’s toy parachute man met his lonely fate. And the Sullivans lived there and Nicholas’s here and all the other families whose kids we played with. I could tell you the precise layout of every house on our block but cross one street and the mental images become sketchy. Beyond our block, even my paper boy’s knowledge of the area ended at each front door.

I could spend hours telling these stories about life within the space of a few acres centered on 14410 SE 15^th St., but almost nothing about the blocks beyond.  It was as though there was a Great Wall at 144^th and a sheer cliff at 148^th, separating our block from the rest of the known world. Oh, there were occasional islands of familiarity. Within a couple of blocks, we knew the Velottas, the Golkas and the Owens – sort of – and the Lallys. But not the people living to either side of them because that was another whole universe.

My friend Mike Nowak lived a mile or so away beyond our school and while I could walk blindfolded around the Nowak house, I always felt a bit like an alien in the Nowaks’ neighborhood. I wondered what it must be like to live there.

My daughters must have had a different sense of neighborhood growing up. They went to a school a bus ride away and so most of their friends lived in ‘other’ neighborhoods. We didn’t have groups of kids blocking off our street to play kickball or Frisbee. There was no such thing as ‘going out to play,’ except to the back yard to play with each other and the dog.

We did everything we could to allow Daughters One and Two to have their latter day analog to the neighborhood gang. I hope they feel we succeeded. In a lot of ways, their view of the world was wider than was mine growing up. I lived in a kind of cloister in which I knew everyone. Heck, I delivered papers to most of their parents.  There is a physical place I can walk through with my wife and show her the framework within which my childhood played out.

For One and Two, it will be different. I hope different doesn’t mean less. Because good memories are the blanket that keeps you warm on cold nights.  

I’m probably worrying too much, a habit of mine that I wish I could kick. Because the truth is, a bunch of houses facing a common street don’t make a neighborhood. It’s not about proximity, at least not entirely. I’m guessing One and Two will have memories of their own ‘hood and it has more to do with the friends than with street addresses.