A Map of the World

I just drew a map of my childhood neighborhood.  So far, it's only my street.  Amazing what came back to me as I started to draw.  I started annotating houses, writing down the details about the people who lived there or what was in their backyard.  Names came back to me, and colors and features -- the berries on the big evergreen bushes next door, for example, that were red and juicy and round and looked like they would taste so good, but that I wasn't allowed to eat. 

What surprised me was the tragedy that was just a matter-of-fact part of the landscape around me.  Scott Chapman, who lived next door and ended up in prison because of something to do with guns. Bryant and David Field, whose mom died of cancer and who never went to the doctor because she was a Christian Scientist, so everyone felt guilty that they hadn't prayed enough to save her.  Eric Day, who was freckled bookish and nice but was bullied by his father and had so little self-confidence that he was more like a ghost than like one of us neighborhood kids.

And Julia Harrison, on the next block over, who had brittle bone disease that meant she didn't grow like other kids and had to walk on braces.  I remember her bedroom, sitting on shaggy carpet together doing something with stickers and listening to a Wierd Al Yankovic record.  I remember she had a mean attendant, a lady who pushed her wheelchair around and carried her up and down the stairs, and Julia told us that sometimes when she was carrying her she would dig her fingernails into Julia's skin, on purpose Julia thought.  These details came back to me unbidden, along with a memory of seeing her dad in the grocery store a couple of years ago, a couple of years after Julia died.  He looked lost and sad.  I know he'd gotten divorced from Julia's mom, some time ago.

I remembered the house on Glenwood Street where I went after school for a while when I was very young, a couple of blocks down from my house.  I can't for the life of me remember the family's last name but I remember the shade of grey-blue paint on the house and the gauzy white curtains that hung inside.  I remember the stairwell and a little inner balcony and certain rooms.  I remember the backyard.  The mother who took care of us had five kids.  The youngest one was a boy named Troy, who was my age, and sometime in my childhood he died.  My memory tells me, matter-of-fact, that he was run over by his mom's station wagon (I remember that car, definitely) but my brain protests.  How can that be?  How would such a thing happen?  I beg my memory for more information -- did it happen when I was still being babysat there?  What I remember makes me ashamed -- I didn't really like Troy, and was unmoved and totally uncurious about his death, so I don't know anything but this certainty that, yep, he died, and yep, it was an accident, his own mother, I think maybe right there on that street.  Remembering it gives me the creeps, although it never did as a kid, it was as much a part of my landscape as Julie Ridlon's house across the street, where I went for my first sleepover and ate too many Good and Plentys and got sick and scared and had to go home in the middle of the night.

The creepy part of my childhood landscape was in the other direction, the big tanbrown house at the end of the street, with the broad porch facing across to the elementary school.  I walked past it on my way to and from school, and also when I was going the two blocks up to the Rexall store to buy candy.  A man named Mr. Ball lived there, and he would sit on the porch smoking a pipe and wearing a suit.  My memory has him in a sort of tan/olive suit, but he probably wore others.  He was largely bald, with a scraggly gray combover.  And he used to talk to me.  He'd wave and I'd wave back, uncomfortable, and he'd ask me where I was going.  He used to call to me, wanting me to come up on the porch to talk with him.  He always asked me if I was going to get a frozen custard at the store.  I'd never heard of frozen custard, and wondered whether he meant ice cream, and if he didn't know what ice cream was, and why anyone would freeze custard if they could just have ice cream.  Of course I never asked him.  I just smiled a nervous frozen smile and walked fast past his house.  I didn't like him.  He smelled like pipe, and he was old and yellow and I remember knowing that he lived with his mother, who I can't recall seeing but who must have been very old indeed.  And in memory I feel guilty and undecided, just like I felt then.  He was probably a harmless, lonely old man, trying to be kind to a neighborhood kid.  Or maybe he was a creepy old man with ill intentions.  Once he called to me insistently and might have even lurched down the porch toward me.  I was going to the store -- had I told him? -- and he wanted to give me money to buy myself a frozen custard.  I was frozen there and took the money, feeling very uncertain.  He smelled like pipe and had blotchy brown old man skin.  I thanked him and walked quickly away, too polite to run, up to the store, where I bought myself two Charleston Chews and walked home a different way. 

Comments

[Yeoman]

Funny on childhood and tragedy. We often don't recognize it. Nor, on the other hand, do we recognize true good fortune.

I recall, as a child, remembering thinking how lucky I was that nothing tragic ever happened in my family. I didn't realize, at that time, that an illness in one of my parents was actually a huge tragedy. It was so much part of the norm, I just didn't realize it.

On the other hand, I didn't recognize what may be regarded, at least by me, as genuine miracles either. Referring to the same event, when it repaired itself after the announcement that death was certain, it seemed so odd and personal that it didn't seem to be the miraculous inexplicable event it was.