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Friday, 04 January 2008

Ashes to Ashes

By Kay Richard of Letters From New England

Thoughts on a quote from Pull of the Moon by Elizabeth Berg:

"I can't be buried. What if I want to go somewhere."

In 1994, I left the house where I’d raised my children and took a small apartment in the neighborhood I’d grown up in. At first, saddened by the loss of familiarity from the years we’d lived on Spruce Street, I had a difficult time adjusting to my new space, my empty nest. Had I done the right thing? So much of OUR growing up had taken place in that small ranch house with the overgrown lilac bushes and fruitful oak tree.

During an evening of berating myself for tossing our memories onto the back of a truck, I pulled on a pair of sneakers and hit the pavement. Walking has always been my preferred therapy and what the heck, I hadn’t walked these streets in 30 years.

I traveled down Robillard Street, Wasa Street, West Street, childhood memories filling my head. On the way back, I took Coleman Street, home to my elementary school.

“Sit up straight, Class.” Miss Cora Leamy, a tall, thin woman in an ankle length tightly belted dress, maiden bun on the back of her head, was my introduction to the classroom of the 1950s. She was kind, but strict: Feet on the floor, hands clasped together in the center of the desk, eyes on the front of the room.

The school was located a short distance from my house, made shorter still by the old path between our back yard and Coleman Street. I could get to school in less than five minutes as long as I didn’t dilly-dally on the way.

It was September of 1956, seven weeks shy of my 5th birthday. The memory of that day is still as clear as if it were last week. Crying and scared, I am standing at the top of the wide, cement stairs watching my mother walk back up the hill. Hand on my shoulder, Miss Leamy ushered me into the building. The vastness of it, the smell of chalk and floor wax, the dark hallways - I shiver just thinking about it.

I learned to read with Dick and Jane, discovered that I hated math, played Farmer in the Dell on the playground - I was never chosen as the wife. We had small cartons of white milk with wax-coated paper straws every morning after pledging allegiance to the flag. I was thrilled when asked to take the chalkboard erasers outside and beat them against the building, sure that such an important task was given only to the most trusted students.

Shy and introverted, I would always seek approval from teachers and peers. I wish I could assure you that my grammar school years soon became joyful, but they were fraught with hurt and unhappiness. Incident after incident of feeling “less than” everyone else. No father, ugly shoes, dark circles. In all of my grammar school class pictures, I have no smile.

I hoped to sneak back onto Parker Street via our old path, but it was grown over and filled with a house. I double backed and headed down A Street, onto to Jean Street, then over to Parker so that I could walk past the first house I have memories of living in.

Now covered in white, vinyl siding, it was coated in peeling silver paint back then, the porch railings too high for me to see over. I have vivid memories of a nose bleed, a mouse in the back stairway and a worm in my underpants.

Oh, also Patty and Ray sucking face on the sofa when they were supposed to be making sure I didn’t light the house on fire, or fall to my death, or whatever it is babysitters are paid to do. They will be celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in 2008.

There was the time I almost choked on a rock and the time I got a lollipop stick stuck in the space between my front baby teeth. I also remembered sitting on my grandmother’s lap and being carted around in her wheelchair, but I still can't remember my mother coming home from the hospital with my new baby brother. Selective memory.

Sometime before I began first grade, we moved a couple of houses down the street, across from Aunt Lil and Uncle “Artsie”. The house of the now “legendary” garage, the house where my cousin Larry once fried a worm with a magnifying glass and we dared him to eat it. He put it in his mouth, then puked on the dandelions just going to seed. This house, more than any other, is where most of my childhood memories were born.

When I begin to miss my now deceased aunts and uncles or the dozens of cousins I haven’t seen in awhile, all I have to do is put on my sneakers and walk the old neighborhood. I smell the sweet scent of sawdust, hear the jingling of Aunt Lil’s charm bracelet, taste the stuffing from Aunt Evelyn’s Thanksgiving turkey. It is then that I spot them in the shadows, dressed in ashes and bone. They wander down Parker Street too, searching for Girois’ convenience store, Fontaine’s factory and each other.

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