What We Did

Our fathers left very early in the morning for work and were always home in time for supper. Our mother's work was keeping house and family clean and fed. We walked to school carrying our books and played in the school yard during lunch. After school we'd play dis-organized sports in the schoolyard, go to Cub Scout meetings or, or go sleigh riding when there was snow, which there seemed to be a lot more of back then. We rode bicycles everywhere and played games of our own imagination in any of several town woods. We had school clothes and play clothes. We never wore play clothes to school, and very rarely wore school clothes for play. Friday nights we'd go to weekly Cub Scout meetings and get to stay up late to watch TV since it wasn't a school night. On Saturdays our fathers would fix their cars in the driveways, work on their houses, and/or do yard work. We'd try to help, or our mother's would take us shopping to those new towns made up of all stores. They had no streets so you'd have to leave the car in giant parking lots. We called it "going to the mall". On some days all that was suspended because we'd instead pile into the station wagon and go to the beach, or the lake, or to some far away park, always with a museum. Saturday nights we'd get to stay up late to watch TV since it wasn't a school night. Sundays the whole family went to mass and then went home to have dinner (what was called supper during the week), at what would have been just after lunch time during the week. Sometimes we'd even stay in church clothes for dinner, our mothers putting aprons over their dresses. Sunday nights we'd either have company or go to a relatives house because it was always one of many cousins birthdays or aunt and uncle's anniversaries. We'd eat (always eat) with the family, then go to a cousin's bedroom to listen to records, sometimes albums in stereo. Sundays we'd go to bed earlier than Saturdays but later than weekdays because we had to either cleanup after company or make the drive home. On Monday our fathers would get up very early and go to work but were always home in time for supper. Our mothers kept the house and family clean and fed. We'd get up and carry our books to school.

Summer's were something else entirely. We were liberated from the yoke of soul crushing oppression at the hands of dictators (well...from school anyway) and the whole world (all approx. 5.5 square miles of it) belonged to us and our imagination. From the bustling urban marketplace of the main street, to the roaring arenas of the school sport fields, to the frontier landscape of new construction sites, to the outlying primeval forest of the town woods, we swore our alliances and sought and found adventure - until September.

The Town

The town was a good place to spend your childhood. Beyond the place, it was also the time. There were certainly more exciting and romantic times in the country's history, but many, even those born earlier, are of the opinion that the 50's through the mid 80's was the best time to be an American. It was about community, and in many ways community was about local businesses. The butcher and the bakery and the produce stores were local family owned and still offered better quality YET were still price competitive with supermarkets. The customer service in clothing and appliance stores was superior to the relatively new phenomenon of shopping malls yet still price competitive. This is a broad statement, but most owner operated smaller stores on "Main Street" in middleclass to upper middleclass neighborhoods today are more of a "boutique" nature than somewhere you could shop almost exclusively to feed and cloth a family of 4 or more on a median salary, especially w/ only one parent earning while the other maintains house and home. The local grocery remained all but unchanged from the 30's through the 60's. Then... 7-11? 24 hr. Pathmark w/ drugs, hardware and auto supplies? How about 24 hour gas stations w/ milk, eggs, sandwiches and cough medicine. Again, generally speaking, now there is little reason for close neighbors to be out and about at the same time on the same "Main Street" except to gather for planned specific social and/or political purposes. Who Even Has The Time For That today when both spouses must work full time, frequently somewhere well out of the neighborhood, even the town, just to financially maintain the household? Besides business: Men would regularly gather at the local "barber shop", women would regularly gather at the "beauty parlor". People would go to work in or relatively near the town they lived in, sometimes even the town they grew up in. They'd regularly gather, unplanned, with for the most part the same group in the same places nearly everyday for breakfast or lunch. Who has time for lingering in such places now, especially on "work days" except retirees? "Classic" contemporary Americana has been redefined, and in many ways, the beginning of that re-definiton was taking place during our childhood in our town. Our parents adulthood, and our childhood, was truly the last of Norman Rockwell's America. As good as childhood was, adolescence, though relatively safe in our truly middle class town, didn't offer much to engage and inspire (though we did practically invent the garage band). For better or worse it remained fairly unaffected by the political, social, and cultural transformations taking place in the country while we read about it and watched it on the news. What I remember feeling most at that time was a certain isolation and restlessness. Or, is that just the nature of adolescence. OR.... was it just me?

The House

My mother grew up in West New York. She remembers her parents loading their 3 young daughters and infant son into an enormous Buick and going to "the country" to picnic and pick berries in the woods. "The country" was Palisades Park. The old town shoemaker (when was the last time you saw a town shoemaker?) lived in the house whose backyard abutted ours. He told me stories of growing up in Nazi Germany during WWII, prodded at riflepoint to shovel snow off the railroad tracks to make way for the cattle cars carrying his fellow Germans to what for many of them would be their final destination. He managed to escape to America. For him, this town WAS America. He was one of the original town residents who cleared the land to build his house. This was before even the nearby field was cleared to build the now ancient elementary school. The house I grew up in was already there when he arrived. We joked that it was built by elves for the original elven caretakers of that giant tulip tree in the backyard. The final residents of that house (us) moved in and settled down 1961. It was a kind of helter skelter architecture, practically all extensions (2 major additions and countless renovations added during our 38 year period) to what seemed to have started out as two rooms with a shared fireplace, built over what was more of a rockwalled cave than a basement (where we later discovered a sealed coal shoot). The outside walls weren't wood or brick but more like a fortress of poured conctete mixed with large stones which were near impossible to take down for the additions. For my father, the house was a constant and continuous work in progress. Eventually there was not one surface, inside or out that was not altered by his own hand. One time he was replacing the windows in the small front "piano room" as we called it. He pulled out rolled up newspapers from the early 20's used as insulation around the old frames. That could indicate that the house was built at that time, but it's much more likely the porch was only enclosed at that time and the house built some time before. We also found torch marks on the basement walls, and crude drawings of people wearing skins who appeared to be hunting some type of enormous furry beast with horns or tusks. (Nah, just kidding - no torches or drawings...but who knows?) In the waning months of the final century of the second millenium the last remaining residents moved out. My sisters and I were emotional. My parents were happy that they would both finally make it out of there alive. And they did. The house itself and it's tree moved out shortly thereafter. The next house moved in without a tree to look after (or any patch of green), but it does have two addresses. Progress huh?

And so I did.

My parents were moving out of the house I'd grown up in. Not only had the old homestead been sold but it was about to be torn down and carted away. We went to visit for one "Last Supper" with my parents. Myself, my two sisters, my only niece, my girlfriend and our dog Radar. Dinner was long over. My sisters and niece had left earlier. My girlfriend was sitting at the kitchen table talking to my mother. I was sitting on the stairs in the living room taking one last look, trying to commit it all to one final memory before it was all gone - forever. The room was in disarray. No rugs or curtains, nothing on the bare walls. Stacked boxes, some full, others overflowing, some with things hanging out were all about the room. As I sat there I remembered one of our first mornings in the "new" house, the first house of our very own. 38 years earlier I had come half way down the stairs and was sitting exactly where I was now. The room was in pretty much the same condition as it was now, but it was a moving in rather than leave taking process. I clearly remember thinking at 5 years old, "So, this is where I'm going to grow up." My girlfriend came to find me and said, "It's time to go. Your mother's tired and she's got a lot to do tomorrow and a big day with the moving." I told her the story, ending with me sitting in the very same place 38 years earlier contemplating that this is where I was going to grow up. I got a little choked up. She thought for a few seconds, shrugged, and said, "And so you did. Lets go." And so we did.