Neighborhood Nostalgia

Neighborhood Nostalgia

“I’ll kick your ass old man,” said my brother John like a boxer taunting his opponent at a press conference. In one sense, I couldn’t believe that I just listened to my brother use the kind of language and disrespectful attitude that would have gotten me a demerit at school. On the other hand, I thought to myself that he probably would “kick this old man’s ass,” if given the chance. My big brother was tough as a Tonka truck, and I think that in my perception he was even tougher than actuality.
My dad came outside when he heard the commotion, and this seemed to add another element to the situation. I knew my dad wouldn’t just stand there and listen to my brother cuss out this old man, but I also knew that he would be on our side when dealing with the issue at hand. Like my dad would say, we weren’t bothering anything or anyone. We just wanted to play ball in that perfect lawn across the street.

I did break a window once, but it wasn’t that old man’s house because he lives two blocks down the street, and it wasn’t even the house that he owns which is adjacent to the playing field on the north side. I told the woman in the house to the south that I was sorry and I paid for the window out of my own baseball card fund. It was her yard in which we played and she did not mind, as long as we didn’t bother her house or her wiener dog. The old man only shows up when he gets a phone call from Don, the guy we call “the jerk across the street.” This old Italian man was hunched over as he walked slowly from his early eighties burgundy Ford that looked like he either washed it every day or only drove it once a year. There was a rumor in the neighborhood that he tried to hold up the Food Market with a steak knife, but it turned out that the market sold him some bad hamburger and he just has trouble controlling his temper sometimes.

John left the scene when my dad came out and went inside the house like it was no big deal that he just physically threatened an elderly man. We could see Don peering out his window as the man yelled at us with his Italian accent-“You kids get out of here, you can’t play here anymore!” Dad calmly walked across the street in his coach’s shorts, tee-shirt and ball cap (typical summer attire), and confronted the man by telling him to leave us alone because it wasn’t his yard anyway. This is when the unexpected became reality, and the suburban legend about the food market was somewhat brought to life. “You wanna’ fight! Put ‘em up!” said the old man as he formed his best boxing stance and pulled his fists up to his chin. It seemed like I could see right through the man’s fiery eyes to his mind that was bursting with the hallucination of being Rocky Marciano.

My father really wasn’t the fighting type, and therefore nothing ever came out of this situation. My imagination ran wild with thoughts of my dad and brother pummeling the old man, along with his nosy tenant. It even got to the point of my younger brother Mikey and I joining in on the beating and getting plenty of positive reinforcement from the other neighbor kids. These thoughts never came to life, just like the dreams of being the next Ozzie Smith (except I would hit more home runs) or being the biggest rock star to come out of Monroe. I had seen many fights before in my neighborhood, and they were all made out to be such spectacular events that you would think you might get some ink in the Evening News for your involvement. My neighborhood was not by any means rough, but there were certain people that my parents did not approve of us hanging around with. In this town, everyone knows everything about everybody. I knew that fighting was wrong, because people that I looked up to, like my father, had shown me that. I also feared the consequences from my parents, because I knew they would use the opportunity to teach a life lesson. But I was well aware of the recognition I could get by taking part, and for this I blame my community. Just as my older brother John felt pressure to try to be a tough guy-football player-lady’s man, so did I. Small town values can sometimes get in the way of big time dreams.

This brings me to a cloudy day in July, after returning home for the summer from college. I did not really enjoy my classes at school, but I felt a sense of pride about getting out of this town and calling it “the place I visit for three months.” Stepping out of my car in front my parents home, my joints were aching and my clothes were drenched with sweat from doing outside maintenance work all day as my summer job. My typical schedule was to stay out late partying and drinking almost every night, then go to work on only about five or six hours of sleep. I was completely focused on drinking a ten gallon glass of lemonade, taking a nap, and waking up to find one of my mother’s home cooked meals waiting for me. I hit the couch like a load of bricks, when I remembered that I had left my car windows down. So many times had a surprise down pour drenched the inside of my car because I did not want my car to be a sauna when I went out to it later. This rain would not really be a surprise because of the way dark stratus clouds had hovered in the sky all day. I liked to make my own predictions about weather based upon observation, even though I was sometimes wrong. I would comment to others that “weather forecasters have the easiest job because it doesn’t matter if they are right or wrong.” I was confident that my predictions could be just as meaningful as those on the five o’clock news. My prediction for the rest of the day was that it was going to “piss, and piss hard” at some point. I found it hard to motivate my relaxed body when my thoughts started drifting to my childhood fascination with storms and other things, but I somehow needed to dredge up the energy to go outside, keys in hand because of power windows, and do what I should have done minutes earlier.

Outside by my car it had become dark and dreary with the rumblings of thunder in the distance. I noticed the familiar glow of Don’s television flickering in his window as I stood by my car parked adjacent to his front yard. It was at this moment that I became rushed with several memories about that house across the street. Like how we used to imagine that Don had a secret control room that mimicked the full scale covert operations facilities we would see in movies. Maybe he even had a small statue bust that opened up to reveal the red button that moves the bookcase, like on the Batman television show. In this room, he would tinker with all of his surveillance equipment to make sure that kids stayed off of his property. He was, after all, the first one in the neighborhood to have one of those motion sensing lights that would turn on even if you walked on the sidewalk in front of the house.

We also thought that if he had a control room, then he probably also had a secret storage area for all of the wiffle balls, footballs, frisbees, and other projectiles that were launched in the vicinity of his home. He was always watching, and there was never any time to propose a strategy for retrieval. The item would be gone within minutes. One time we convinced the much younger and inexperienced neighbor kid to pound on his porch with a bat and shout language that was borderline “soap in mouth” material. The outcome of that episode was never revealed, but I’m sure that Don had the incident recorded from many camera angles and the data was secure in his super-powered computer system (we always pictured the large metal boxes with flashing lights and spinning reel-to-reel mechanisms). These wild-imaginative processes were the result of a history of mystery and the fact that we don’t recall a single moment in which Don was friendly to a child. His wife, Wilma, was very nice, yet extremely out-of-touch with the reality of the neighborhood. Every Christmas she would bring over the same gift items: a box of candy canes and a box of chocolate covered cherries. All I wanted was my wiffle ball back.

It’s amazing how so many memories can instantaneously hit you at once. It’s also amazing how people, neighborhoods, and towns can change practically over-night. After closing my car windows and returning to the house, I asked my mom “What are Don and Wilma doing these days?”

She replied in a very concerned, quiet voice, “Brandon, Don died.”

“He died?” I asked as if I needed some kind of physical evidence to believe it.

“Yeah…he died a few months ago. He had cancer. Wilma lives in that house alone now” she answered.

“How is she doing?” I asked for the first time in my life.

“She is doing okay. Her sister comes to the house often to keep her company” replied my mom.

It was at this moment that I realized how much I missed the way things used to be- good and bad. I thought to myself that this must be why people sometimes get emotional just seeing something or talking about something from their past. It also made me contemplate people who don’t seem to want to let go of things, and how some people stay in Monroe their whole lives. I understand this sentiment more and more every day. In the years that followed, I spent some time driving and walking around to various places in my hometown and neighborhood. Some things were the same, and some things were different- and I was thankful for both categories. It didn’t need to be Thanksgiving (which would bring about the annual school assignment of writing about things for which you are thankful). It demonstrates how the word thankful is often like a type-casted actor that cannot find work in any other role. I was thankful for Don and Wilma, and the Old Italian man, and for the other people in my neighborhood and town with whom I spent time, and my family. I laughed, cried, and thought about how my small town upbringing taught me to have big time dreams.