Three

            I grew up in Baltimore near the Woodlawn section of town.  It was typical of most tract communities lined with hundreds of white carbon copy Cape Cods, built in the ‘50s with scalloped shingles. Few people had more than one car per household. They tended to stay home a lot.  Especially the mothers who where home taking care of their children.

            We were a simple community and had the blessings and curses that come with it. A motley assortment of people, the blue collar and emerging white professionals, aspired to get out of the crab basket and seize the American dream.  One hundred sixty houses, lined up like desks in a schoolroom, only four streets, one street in front of another.  They were identical in size, not a Levitt tract home community, but on a smaller scale.

            “We’re like a giant easel,” the neighbors would say.

            Stock houses, built from one solitary plane.  Each family added their special touch just enough to differentiate them from their neighbor and to meet their individual needs. Some completed their basements with knotty pine or walnut paneling.  Most houses had a bathroom on the first floor with two small bedrooms next to it.  Other neighbors finished off the small attics, adding a room or two.  Some with bathrooms.

            Within these homogeneous Cape Cods lived a dutiful generation of people.

Nearly everyone belonged to the PTA or risked being shunned from the PTA President. Others volunteered in Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Brownies or Girl Scouts and for the fire department.  And there were many other organizations as well.  It was a generation of volunteers.  Commitment meant something.  They were working to improve their world.

             When a family wanted to complete their basement recreation rooms or pour concrete from the community concrete mixer that everyone pitched in to buy, the neighbors volunteered their help to one another.  When I was young, I thought my family special because they we chosen to store it.

            The children in the neighborhood were raised by the community.  People knew what was going on in one another’s lives.  Everyone watched out for one another.

            But one place the children could escape to was the large woods behind my house.

I remembered the short story about the Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It was James Thurber’s story about Walter Mitty, a timid person who had a two day daydreaming escapade. Walter Mitty fantasized about one exciting adventure after another.  It was in those woods I became whatever the Walter Mitty in me would allow.  There were turtles, some snappers, crayfish in the creek, skunk, muskrat, and every kind of foliage you could imagine.  A large rock pile some several miles in diameter created a limitless playground for my friends and I. 

            I’d work all day sometimes to clear the foliage to create the special little ground fort only to come back the next day to do it again. 

“You start out early in the morning when the ground is soft to pull out the greenery.  With a slight squat, you bend toward the root of the shrubs and give it a firm yank.  If you are lucky, you won’t fall backward,” I remembered telling a friend.

“There is so much work to be done.  If we do it together, we can finish early. Then we can sit back and enjoy it and we can eat our snacks.” 

            We looked a long time to find the perfect spot.  Nirvana means you find a spot near the water where it is cool even if you are only a child.  A large, brown boulder with marble-like mica running through it became their throne.  Upon it we imagined they were bigger, that we were in charge.  That we mattered.

            In the winter, the creek formed a glistening ice skating rink.  My friends and I would skate for hours under road bridges along the abutting psychiatric hospital.  No one ever worried about us.  Whether we walked along the railroad tracks, or swam in the nearby rivers, it felt safe.

            We watched with admiration the shanty across the creek the teenage boys were building.  They even had a wood stove.  They longed for a peek in the shanty, but were too timid to snatch a glimpse.  It was only when the police finally tore down the fire hazard that we saw the Playboy magazines, Camel and Marlboro cigarettes and the tiny refrigerator.  A few years later, we would learn that two of the boys, both brothers, went to prison because they broke into a convenience store.

            The woods were also next to the Seton Psychiatric Hospital.  Once in a while someone would escape.  The remains of a troubled man were found near my fort around my fourteenth birthday. He had shot himself in the head.  The Police and Medical Examiner brought his body through our back yard on a stretcher.  I never returned to the woods after that.

            It was in that community where everyone knew each other by name and although her street had some thirty houses, even as a child, I felt that I belonged.  We called her mother’s friends Miss Tillie, Miss Mary, Miss Beanie and Miss Madeline, in keeping with my grandmother, my Nana’s southern Maryland roots.         

            But in this tightly knit community, the neighborhood had a block party once a month rotating throughout the community.  My brother I relished the times when our parents hosted the event.  Even though we were eight and ten, I remember well the anticipation we had early each morning after our family hosted the parties just waiting to check out the leftovers. 

“Wake up.  There are some goodies left. C’mon down,” I would whisper in his ear.

Down we we would go to the basement.  Still left in the heavy double cement sink, where the block ice melted to water, we would find Nehi, Grape Soda and Root Beer, and a few bottles of Fresca.  My Dad and I went into downtown Baltimore the evening before to the ice house where this was purchased.  He would lie it in the trunk of the car between two pieces of leather to ensure it wouldn’t melt too much on the long ride home.

Dad’s family were originally from England, too, although he was born in New Jersey.  Most of his family immigrated to the south living in Virginia and North Carolina.

            Dad was the social organizer for the community.  He started the first baseball league in Woodlawn, an honor for which he was long remembered.  But his efforts were mostly confined to outside the family.  I don’t ever remember a closeness between our parents.  A cold war lived in the silence in our house for as long as I can remember.  Both of them would bury themselves in their individual interests. The tension was ever present and I always felt as though a storm was about to erupt.  It was like a living inside a pressure cooker. 

Dad wasn’t home much in the evening, but he was home during the day.  On occasions in the mornings, he would make pancakes before school.  They were ordinary pancakes, but because he made them they were special to me.  They were delicious.

            He worked for Metropolitan Life Insurance.  In the early mornings when most fathers were preparing themselves for work he often ,stayed in bed long after my brother and I had left for school.  Many times when we returned from school, he hadn’t moved. He wasn’t sleeping.