I’ve written a lot about what life was like on our street. I make it sound perfect, sublime, a wonderful place in which to grow up. The truth is that–it’s true. Well, maybe not perfect but I can’t think of anything I would change, and most of the children who grew up there in the baby boom era agree.
Life there had an aura of a kibbutz or some kind of commune. The mothers were all at home and it wasn’t uncommon for a mother to mildly discipline children other than her own. Everyone had playmates and we shared what little sports equipment our parents could afford. A rainy spell in the summer meant marathon Monopoly games on somebody’s kitchen floor. Several of us had Monopoly games but each set was missing either property deeds, hotels and houses, or pieces with which to move around the board. So we put the sets together and had a great time. If you asked the mothers, I think they all got down on their knees and thanked God when the sun finally came out.
When my mother’s health was declining she stayed in a place called an assisted living facility. Among the other ladies there was a Mrs. Field, one of the mothers from Shady Ave. Ext. I visited my mother a lot for a time and I kept running into Mrs. Field. She always said: “Leslie, you are a good girl.” The heavens opened; Mrs. Field, one of the mother/goddesses from the old days, told me I was a good girl for visiting my mother so often.
But we were a rowdy bunch of kids. There were children living just around the corner, on Landview Street, who wanted to play with us but we told them they had “cooties.” We were not nice, nor were we particularly well-behaved. We were always trying to get away with doing bad things. There was a little bullying going on also which sometimes haunts me.
The worst, most dangerous time was what I call the Time of Fire. My two friends, Arlene and Naomi, along with me, became obsessed with setting fires. We were nine or ten years old and I can remember any number of times we could have caused real damage to the houses on our block. This obsession with fire came, I think, from watching so many TV westerns. Those guys were always making a fire to cook and to make coffee.
There was a back alley that ran behind the houses on one side of the street. Nobody ever went back there so we felt free to gather twigs and small branches and have a small fire. But it escalated, unfortunately. It turned out that both Arlene and Naomi’s houses were built identically and their basements were the same. These basements had storage rooms. We found candles down there and lots of people smoked then so we could lay our hands on matches easily. Our peak fire experience occurred when one of my friends found an old, disused candle holder in one of the storage rooms with spaces for 12 candles. We had the thing burning 12 candles at one time and as we stood, mesmerized, watching this, Arlene’s mother came down the basement steps and we were busted.
We all got the tongue lashing of our lives; Arlene’s mother was enraged and who can blame her? She got our mothers on the phone; my mother came over, grabbed me, and hustled me into the house and up into my room. The funniest part of this story is that my parents were having a cocktail party for the birthday of one of my uncles, so I sat up there in my room, in absolute dread of my father coming home. But the cocktail party took place and I was never punished. We never started fires ever again.
lgmwriting 