Posted tagged ‘hometown’

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“There is divinity in the clouds.”

May 9, 2017

Gracie woke me up around six this morning. She was panting, a sign she needed out. I put on my sweatshirt and took her out to the back yard. It was so cold I could see my own breath. My heat has gone on a few times. When I went to my early morning library board meeting, I saw people dressed in layers and wearing hats and gloves. Today is spring gone awry.

The sun was shining earlier, but now the clouds have taken over. The sky is a range of grays from dark to light. The prettiest clouds are the darkest of grays so dark as to be almost blue. No rain is predicted, just a cloudy day.

When I go back to my hometown, I pass houses where my childhood friends used to live. I remember them all. I used to envy Kathleen whose house was two houses away from school. She used to go home for lunch every day. My friend Eddie lived right across the street from the church. He also went home every day. Paula and Dennis lived close to each other about a fifteen-minute walk to school. Everyone walked. There were no busses, and very few parents drove kids to school as most families had only one car driven by dads and gone to work early, too early for school. I never gave walking to school a thought except when it rained.

My favorite lunchbox sandwich was bologna with mustard, the yellow kind of mustard. It was always a white bread sandwich. I didn’t even know bread came in a variety of tastes and colors. Friday was tuna fish sandwich day as we couldn’t eat meat. I can’t even remember the number of tuna sandwiches I ate all through elementary school, but I ate my fill. I don’t eat tuna fish anymore. I still eat bologna.

I used to love milk. It was perfect for washing down dinner and even better for dunking Oreos. I stopped drinking milk when I was in the Peace Corps as Ghana had no milk except evaporated in the can. I have milk now but only with my cereal. The best part of that is the flavor of the milk left on the bottom of the bowl after the cereal has been eaten.

Nothing much going on here. Today is a perfect day to stay home, to do nothing. My laundry finally made it upstairs, and I even put it away. That was my yesterday’s accomplishment. I’ll take what I can get and be content, maybe even a bit proud of finally getting that chore done.

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You can never go home again, but the truth is you can never leave home, so it’s all right.”

September 21, 2012

It was only 5:00 when I reluctantly dragged myself out of bed. I am not a fan of this early in the morning. It is too reminiscent of my working days when every morning started in the dark, but I can now see a tiny glimmer of the morning light in the gray sky and that makes me glad.

It is as if I never went anywhere.

My town, where I grew up, has three churches on three street corners across from each other. The Catholic church is two blocks down the street. Both funeral homes are on the same street and are right beside each other. That street is convenient to all four churches. The police department, the town hall and the fire department are basically on the same block, one right after the other. When I was young, the fire and police were in the same building, but the town and the police department grew so the police needed their own building. The bowling alleys are gone now. There were once two, and each of them was candlepin, the kind of bowling where you use three small balls per frame. Candlepin bowling is a New England thing. We all grew up playing it, and the bowling alley was a spot for Friday nights with your friends. My town has a good Italian restaurant which is always filled. You need a reservation. It used to have only a Chinese restaurant, but now it has Thai and Indian restaurants. I have eaten at both, and the food is excellent. I know of two Dunkin’ Donuts and neither one has a drive-up window. There is no bakery and no bookstore, but there is a wonderful library built with money from Andrew Carnegie. I remember reading the plaque about that when I was standing in the doorway out of the rain when I was younger. The two golf courses are on the edges of the town in two different directions. I never knew anyone who played golf. My mother had her senior prom at the club house of one of those courses. I have never even seen it as it is off the road, and I’ve not had the inclination to go look. The movie theaters are gone, but the one from my Saturday matinée days is now a theater which presents wonderful plays. My sister and I have the tradition of seeing their Christmas play and then eating at that really good Italian restaurant.

My sister lives in my old town, and I don’t visit enough. The ride is only about an hour and a half, but I’m lazy about making the trip. I have to change that. When I do visit, I like to take a memory tour and ride the familiar streets. I go through uptown and check out the buildings and any changes, I go see the house where I grew up, my elementary school, the field where the park was and, on the way, I remember which friends lived where. I am reminded that it was wonderful place in which to grow up.

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“Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.”

March 29, 2012

The weather prediction is for cloudy and maybe rainy through Sunday. A couple of sunless days don’t bother me, but a string of them makes me lethargic. I loll around the house with little ambition. A sunny day gets me active and the floors get washed, the cabinets cleaned and the world looks to be a better place. Later, I’ll drag myself upstairs to shower and make my bed. They will give me some small sense of accomplishment.

We lived in what was called the project. The houses were wooden duplexes, not brick and not high-rises, and there were eleven or twelve of them on Prospect Street and up the hill around a small rotary which made the street a circle. Each side of the duplexes mirrored the other side. We had a kitchen, living room and three bedrooms. The cellar was huge, and it was where we often played and where we stored our bikes and where my mother’s washing machine stood. The big, black oil tank was against the wall on one side. I don’t remember where the furnace was. All the backyards faced each other, and all of them had below ground garbage bins with metal tops right beside the stairs and lines for laundry, three for each family. I have the memory of white sheets blowing on those lines. My mother had one of those hanging cloth clothespin bags. She moved it down each line as she hung the laundry. The backdoor was wooden, and it always slammed in the winter when the storm windows were on it. Our house was white with green trim, all of the houses were. My father kept care of his lawn and the front flower garden beside the stairs. A giant grassy hill stretched across the backyard and separated us from the duplexes on the top of it. Each of the fathers in all the duplexes facing the hill mowed his part of the grass on the hill. We used to roll down the hill so we’d get dizzy.  I remember a slip and slide one summer that everyone used.

Only families with children could live in the duplexes and one parent had to be a veteran. We moved to our first duplex, one with two bedrooms, in 1951. We had lived in the city, in a high-rise brick apartment building. After my sister was born, we were granted a larger duplex, and we moved down the hill from 37 Washington Ave to 16, and that’s where we stayed until 1964. All of my childhood memories were made on Washington Ave.

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“I stopped reading science fiction once I saw that the UFO was real. It became science fact that just hasn’t been proven yet.”

September 21, 2010

It was an early morning appointment which put me behind, an alarm setting early morning appointment. It was a shock when I first heard the radio and saw the time. I have come to love waking up whenever and slowly making my way into the day.

On the way back from Hyannis, I took the long way home, Route 28. I noticed some buildings have disappeared since I last took that road. One was a guest house where college kids used to stay all summer. A dirt filled lot sits where the house used to stand. Friendly’s has been torn down, and an almost completed CVS will replace it. Just what we need, another CVS, a behemoth with no local personality or flavor. As I was driving, I saw so many other changes and remembered what some of the buildings used to be. Johnnie Yee’s was our favorite Chinese restaurant. It’s now a buffet place catering to tourists, a squat, gray building with no personality. Fruitland was an all purpose store with a meat counter and a great variety of groceries. It was reincarnated several times but nothing lasted. It’s now an empty building. The Gay Nineties was a perfect place to take company to eat good food and listen to great music. It was right across the street from the Barefoot Trader Gift Shop. The two buildings are still there. The Gay Nineties has been replaced by an antique store and the gift shop has become outlet stores including Bass shoes and a shirt company. My parents used to bring relatives to the Compass Lounge where the waiters and waitresses would break into song, mostly show songs. Later it became a nightclub. Now it’s a CVS.

I got tired of 28 so I took the back road through the historical district. The shoe repair shop is still there, and it was open. It reminded me of the cobbler’s shop in the town where I grew up. I never saw the cobbler standing. He was always bent over one of those metal shoes lasts working on resoling somebody’s shoe. He wore an apron. A pile of shoes stretched across and filled the counter. Pairs were tied together with a tag. The shop smelled of polish and leather.

I swear we have been invaded, and we don’t know it. The aliens are disguised as workers in CVS stores across the country. The stores all look alike, these Stepford stores, and enough will soon be build so the aliens can show their hands or suction cups or webfeet or whatever it is theses aliens have. The one thing I know is germs won’t defeat this bunch.

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