The Past Remembered Anew:
How Childhood Moments Reveal
Who We Are Now
In Surroundings, Bill wrote about the neighborhood where he lived as a kid. He offers a coherent image of his corner of Jamaica Plain. For me, my childhood neighborhoods were disconnected. In Pittsfield, my parents moved frequently when I was a kid, living in a number of different places before finally settling into the house in which I would live until Bill and I married.
As a child, the area in which I would play, my neighborhood, was limited to some few blocks around wherever I was living at the time. I was familiar with those streets but I could never connect them with the places I had lived previously or the next place I would eventually move to. To me Pittsfield was like a map torn into jagged pieces with some parts missing. This doesn't mean I felt lost. In each of my neighborhoods, I knew where the corner store was, how to get to the playground and different ways to walk to my school.
It was only later I was able to piece these neighborhoods together with no gaps. When I did this, there were surprises. Once I took Bill on a tour showing him some of the places I lived as a child. During that tour I noticed the house I lived in when I was in 6th grade was just a few blocks away from where I lived in 3rd grade. I was shocked to see just how close they were. I could easily have walked between them, but they were as far apart in my memory as if they had been in different cities. The friends I had in 3rd grade were totally different from the neighborhood friends I played with in 6th grade. Though practically next door, these third and sixth grade neighborhoods had no overlap. I had no sense at the time they were so close.
The first house I lived in was on Winship Avenue, a still quiet, still rural street past Pontoosuc Lake in the north part of the city. My first move was to Beech Grove Avenue when I was two. I don’t remember this move myself. However, there is a family story about this move, one often told. Likely in the telling, it became altered just a bit each time, shaped to get a reaction from the listeners or to highlight the reason this particular story was told at the time. In any case, my parents were wondering, worried even, about how I would accept this move. They were quite pleased when I seemed to settle into the new place, happily playing in my new room with my dolls and toys. Near dinner time, my parents were taking a break from unpacking, likely having a glass of sherry, when they noticed I was piling up my stuffed animals, toys and books at the front door, emptying my new room. They surmised that I figured now that it was getting dark it was time to go home.
Sometimes this story was told to show how cute I was; other times I was compared to one of our cats who wouldn’t move with us and kept returning to our older house rather than live in the new one, and sometimes my mother told the story as an example of a phrase she used, “We didn’t bring you up. You brought yourself up."
Like many family stories this one seems to leave out more than it tells. What was my reaction when they told me we were not going to go back to what I thought of as home? How many of my things had I actually moved to the front door? Didn’t I notice all the furniture we owned was in this new place? Did I do this again the next evening? I must have listened to this story a hundred times and never thought to ask any of these questions. Didn’t I want to know more? Why was I content accepting the story in the context in which it was told? Family stories like these just assumed a place in the background of my life; they only stand out now in relief as I ponder the questions they raise for me.
Here is another family story complete with all its missing pieces. I suspect it was Beech Grove Avenue, the house on the west side of Pittsfield, the only time we ever lived in that section. I was three. I had been playing in the yard when my mother noticed I had wandered from her view. I recall picking flowers and following a trail from one patch of flowers to the next not very conscious of how far I had gone. (Do I really remember following this flower trail or did I come up with this reason for wandering off during some retelling?)
I don’t know how long it took my mother to realize I had left the yard. She seemed to know what direction to take feeling great relief when she spotted me sitting outside an old shed with an even older and bearded man. As my mother neared she somehow realized I was in no danger. It turns out this man was a violinmaker and the shed was where he worked. Violins in various stages of completion adorned the walls. My mother’s love of music made her believe that any man who loved violins and could create one from wood wouldn’t cause me any harm. My mother told me later the man was a hermit. For many years I associated the word hermit with violins without realizing what the word meant.
I wonder now was this man a neighbor? Did my mother ever talk to him again? What was he doing making violins in the woods in Pittsfield! Sometimes I wonder if this really happened. A great story but with missing pieces.
When we lived at Curtis Street I was still too young for school. In this neighborhood, my third, that would have been the Rice School. In Pittsfield at this time, kindergarten was not yet mandatory and so school began with first grade at age five. I still remember how strongly I felt about wanting to go to school. I really didn't know anything about school but I still wanted to go. I do wonder what I felt was so appealing about school? We didn't have a TV so Ding Dong School wasn't a factor. Whatever I thought it was, I wanted to be a part of it.
I am looking at a family photo. It shows my mother and father, my older brother and me standing at the entrance to Rice School. We were out for a Sunday walk. As I contemplate this image, a feeling comes over me, anger. I remember now that I was so mad at my brother that day. Angry, because he was going to go to this school the next day and I wasn't.
My yearning, my readiness for school did not go unnoticed. Both my parents knew it was the best thing for me. There was, however, the bureaucracy to deal with. To attend first grade in the fall, you needed to be five by February 1 of that year. I wouldn't be five until the end of March. That meant it would be a whole extra year before I could get into first grade. Yet, when September rolled around, there I was, a first grader at Rice school. It wasn't until years later I found out how my mother had made that happen.
Flash ahead to when I was sixteen. My next door neighbor had a part time job at a local movie theater. She told me the owner was looking to hire someone to work the candy counter. I went to city hall to get working papers only to discover my birthday as listed in their school records was January 30. That's odd. I'd been celebrating on March 30 for the past 16 years. I showed them my birth certificate with the March 30 date to enable them to change their records. I walked home wondering how they could have made such an error. I had my working papers but what was on my mind was the city's mistake. I went on and on about it at home. My mother kept trying to dismiss it. "Someone just wrote the wrong date, that's all." But I kept peppering her with questions. "Don't they check things out? How come no one ever noticed?" Finally she turned to me in embarrassment. "I lied to them. It was important for you to start school earlier than they allowed." I was astonished. My mother told a lie. To the government no less! I only knew her to be gentle, kind, and truthful. This was amazing to me, but also clearly upsetting to her. She didn't want to admit it even to me.
So, thanks to my mother's intervention, I did enter first grade at the Rice School but ironically, after all that, I recall nothing about it. In fact, for years I misremembered that I had even attended Rice School assuming I had been at Crane School for first grade. However, the evidence, a musty yellowed report card from Rice, belies that memory. Why is it the memory of my anger that day at my brother is so vivid that I still feel the emotions I felt at the time yet I spent an entire year at Rice School after longing for that experience yet remember nothing about it. I do have that photo to stir my memory, a photo which I've looked at numerous times, each time reinforcing the emotional memories of that Sunday. I often think if my family had taken more photos, I’d have more memories.
Stanley Avenue, where we lived while I was in second and third grade at the Crane School, marked a great time for me. We lived just up the street from the school. Next to the to the schoolyard, there was a city-run playground. I felt a strong sense of community in this neighborhood, a kind of Father Knows Best feel. Perhaps it was a combination of the place and the times when the clichés of the 50's seemed real. To me it was magical.
On summer evenings, there would be movies to watch at the playground. I'm not talking Gone with the Wind here; I remember cartoons and short subjects. My favorites would run along the lines of a Casper the Ghost short and a Ma and Pa Kettle feature. Every once in a while we convinced the person running the projector to run one of the short subjects backwards; watching someone propel themselves out of a swimming pool and land perfectly on the diving board was hysterical.
I didn't go to movies on a regular basis so this was a particularly exciting event in my life. There was so much to do to prepare. The whole neighborhood would take part. Parents would make cupcakes, popcorn, brownies and then sell them to make money for the next playground event. It's funny when you think of it. They would make the cupcakes and then give us kids money to go buy them. Not much of a business plan but it seemed to work. There was this sense that everyone would talk about this for days, my friends, our parents, everyone busy preparing for the big night. Even the people who lived downstairs who had no kids would get involved. I'm sure the sound was tinny and the projected film flickered and maybe even broke but to me those summer nights at the playground in the dark, watching and eating and laughing, were some of the highlights of my days at Stanley.
The city hired college students to be counselors at the Crane playground for the summer months. The counselors would set up games, supervise special events, and organize arts and crafts. When I told Bill about these activities, we both laughed at the memory of gimp. There was gimp in his childhood playgrounds as well. What the heck is gimp anyway? Gimp is a thin plastic strip, brightly colored, used in arts and crafts for lacing projects.
There was always one counselor who seemed to specialize in gimp. A group of us would sit under a tree working our little fingers braiding lanyards and bracelets. The counselor was there to help out, especially at the end when you had to crimp what you were working on so it wouldn't unravel. I really wasn't very good at it. I only mastered one kind of weave, braiding. This meant I could only make lanyard after lanyard after lanyard. Before that summer, I didn't even know what a lanyard was and now I had tons of them. How many people did I know who wanted to wear a whistle around their necks? If we did other arts and crafts activities besides making things out of gimp, I can't recall. I recently Googled gimp. It's still available, more in Europe than here in the US, but I suspect that children who go off to summer camp will be enjoying the gimping of lanyards for years to come.
I was thrilled at being trusted to walk over to the Crane playground by myself. No need for my older brother (who would have thought I was a bother in any case) to take me. I am seven. I can walk across the street to the playground on my own. To make this work, my mother and I had a system. When she pulled the shade down halfway in the upstairs bedroom window, that was a sign for me to come home. I loved the sense of freedom that gave me. However, on that tour I took with Bill showing him where I lived as a kid, we realized no part of the house on Stanley was even visible from the playground. So where does this leave my memory of looking up to see the shade pulled halfway down and knowing it was time to go home? Did I make up this idea because I liked the sense of freedom? Did I just go home on my own imagining how neat it would be to have such a signal? It might have been possible to see the shade if I walked over to the adjacent Crane schoolyard. I grew up telling people this story about the window shade so at one time I believed it. With the way memory works, each time I told this story the more certain I was it happened. But today looking toward Stanley from the site of the playground it's clear it's not physically possible to even see the house. It really is a cool memory but it may not be an accurate one
I’ve written a lot about my life at Dewey Avenue. Check out Teachers, Excitements and Neighborhood Cultures for more. The move to Dewey from Stanley came during a tough time for my parents. While the house we were moving to had more rooms so my brother and I didn’t have to share, it was in a poorer section of Pittsfield. A strike at the GE where my father worked had lasted two months; money was very tight.
My mother disliked the idea this new place was a six family house, a triple-decker. At Stanley we rented from a family who not only owned it but also lived there. This gave us the feeling we lived in a home, not an apartment. This new place on Dewey was too much like a big city tenement building for my mother. There was no grassy yard, just gravel around the house. I don't remember her complaining about these new living arrangements but I picked up her sense of disappointment. I did check out the neighborhood playground once or twice in the summer but unlike at Crane there were fewer activities with only a handful of kids participating.
There was an activity I do remember; in fact, I still have the award I won. One day I read an announcement on the wall of the little supply shed at the playground that there would be a doll contest the next week. I immediately went home to peruse my collection. I realized most of my favorites were not dolls but stuffed animals which I felt did not qualify. I did have one fairly traditional doll, dressed a little bit like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. I asked my mother, my consultant in this matter, to iron the doll's dress while I tried to fix her hair.
Came the day of the event I carefully carried my red-haired doll with her blue bow and blue dress to the playground. We all arranged our dolls on a picnic table that had been commandeered for that purpose. I don't remember much about the competition. I do remember my excitement when they held up my doll and announced that it had won for being "the prettiest scarlet red-haired doll with the prettiest blue eyes." It took me years to realize the counselors made up certificates so that each kid who entered the doll contest received one. Probably some girl won an award for having the tallest doll with black satin shoes. It was that specific. At the event I don’t recall feeling my award wasn’t special enough. I didn’t even notice that everyone won one. Even though I was happy enough with my certificate, I eventually lost interest in the playground; my new focus was now on roller skating and jump roping on the streets near our new house.
Living on Dewey had an impact on both my brother and me. We reacted to the same set of circumstances, our parents' financial hard times, in very different ways. I developed a sense that people should be given the benefit of the doubt rather than being judged by where they lived or how they dressed. When I looked around my 4th grade classroom in this poor part of the city, I became convinced the only thing we all had in common was lack of money. As opposed to the impression my teacher gave us, we weren’t lacking in character or morals; our future success and happiness was not determined by our present unfortunate circumstances. Obviously a 9 year-old isn't able to conceptualize this kind of social attitude but I am thinking now the seeds of such a life philosophy were planted then.
These same hard times affected my brother differently. Whether it was because he was older or male, I don’t know. He made decisions based on what would provide financial security. I can imagine him thinking, “I am determined to make enough money to take care of my family, now and in the future, so they don't have to live in a place like this.” As a fourteen year-old my brother actually lied about his age in order to get a part time job. Evidently a family tendency. From then on in his life he always had a job. His interest in feeling secure can be seen in the important decisions he made. When the time came to apply for college he pursued a career as an electrical engineer rather than following his interest in liberal arts. While living in the poorer section of Pittsfield may have contributed to my liberal social beliefs, the same situation contributed to my brother's more conservative philosophy. As we got older and became adults and parents ourselves, these differences showed up not only in our political choices but also in the ways we raised our children.
My life on Dewey lasted two years. In the summer of 1955, between fifth and sixth grades, we moved to Plunkett Street. We were all up early to get prepared, anxious to get started, but the truck did not show up as expected at 9 that morning. By 10 o'clock my mother wanted my father to call his friend which my father was reluctant to do as the friend was doing us a favor by moving us. "He'll be here. Just wait a little longer," my father said. Eventually my father did get in touch only to find out the move would be delayed until sometime that evening. I remember standing out in the street waiting and waiting. The lateness of the move made it particularly difficult for us since everything, dishes, food, was all packed away.
My mother had a different concern, that the neighbors would think we were skipping out on the rent, moving like this after dark. A situation not unheard of in this neighborhood. Once we got over to Plunkett, we did some initial unpacking. I felt very grown up because my mother put me in charge of setting up my baby sister's crib. My mother told me she was so tired that night the flower pattern on the wallpaper in the baby's room seemed to be moving. "It was like a 3-D effect," she told me. "The flowers were floating in front of my eyes."
One of the best things about the move to Plunkett was that I was back at my favorite school, Crane. You can read about my sixth grade year in the blog entry, Teachers. Walking there was a much longer trek than it had been when I walked there from Stanley. The walk to school from Plunkett involved negotiating a steep hill, steep to me anyway, then along the sidewalk five or six blocks. We never had lunch at school, but went home at noon and were expected back at 1:30, so I did this walk four times a day in all kinds of weather. Interesting to think now the entire city school schedule was dependent on mothers being home to give their kids lunch. On bad weather days, the school system had a policy of never calling off school, simply saying if parents felt it was unsafe, keep your child home. I don’t recall ever staying home in bad weather but surely with Massachusetts' winters being what they are, I must have.
Even though I was back at the Crane School, the playground situation and sense of community I recalled from earlier times did not excite me like it once did. Maybe I thought the playground was too far away; maybe I avoided the hill when I didn’t need to walk it; maybe I was old enough to be interested in something other than gimp. I found I liked going to stores at this point since I was now old enough to be on my own, For whatever reason, I spent my leisure time moving in a different direction—down the hill, across fairly busy Tyler Street to a commercial area that had a few stores, an ice cream shop and a neighborhood branch of the city library.
I loved the building the library was in. From Tyler Street there were two doors into a large reading room. (I'm thinking it must have been a commercial block at one time.) The reading room was large since there were no stacks; the books were in shelves along the side walls and in back. I liked this space, especially what I considered my spot. Between the two doors was a built-in bench, a window seat looking out onto the busy street. I loved sitting in that window area with a book whiling away the time, half reading, half watching people go by.
The other reason I didn’t go back to my old playground was that the Plunkett house was right next door to a Catholic school with its own schoolyard in which to play. I was home from school at roughly the same time as the Catholic school let out so I had this whole area to myself. I used to do ball games and hopscotch. I very much enjoyed the challenge of the solitaire ball games. With each bounce of the ball off the school's back wall I needed to do a different movement. "...one foot, the other foot, front claps, back claps...salute, curtsey, and away we go..." This involved a whole lengthy sequence of things I would do while catching the ball. If I dropped the ball I had to start all over again. And when I was done with the first sequence, I'd do it all over again with one of the movements fixed throughout the whole next sequence. I was so involved in this game I could do it for hours. I would sing out the motions as I played. Later when I told Bill about it, he thought the best part of it was the "tweedles and twaddles" sequences, rotating your hands in front of you one way and then the other, and he only liked it because it sounded like characters from Alice in Wonderland. He admitted to me much later that he also did tweedles and twaddles in some of his games but never knew that's what they were called.
What I considered my playground wasn’t just a school, it was a whole complex: St Mary's, a school, a convent, a rectory and a huge church. In 1955 the Catholic Church was an major part of Pittsfield life. This area was busy every day. School kids. Church goers. Weddings. Nuns. Priests. Now, in 2015, it is literally abandoned. There are plans to demolish it to make way for a drive- up restaurant. In visiting the old church complex with Bill, he noted how expansive the area was with different levels, stairways connecting the various grassy areas and buildings. "This is a fascinating place," he told me. "It's like a museum. It's sad in a way the purpose for it being here, religious community, has dissipated." He was also intrigued by "my" playground, now a broken expanse of asphalt, weeds struggling in the cracks, the sounds of the parochial school kids playing, my playing, long faded away.
I suppose when I lived next door, had I been more adventurous, I might have explored that church area more, but I was unfamiliar with any kind of religious community and definitely intimidated by Catholic sisters and priests, unsure how to act near them. I wasn't even sure if I should be singing at the schoolyard while I played. So I didn't venture beyond where I spent my after school afternoons tweedling and twaddling.
The one member of our family that didn't seem to like Plunkett was our cat. All our cats spent a lot of time outdoors. Each morning of those first few days at our new house we would call her to be fed but she was nowhere to be found. On that first morning of our move we received a phone call from a neighbor back at Dewey telling us our cat was at our old back porch. My brother took his bike back to the old house, picked up the cat transporting her back to our new place. But the next morning, calling her for food, she was missing again. She was back to Dewey. After three days of this, my brother refused to go back on his bike to get her. "What's the point!" he exclaimed. There wasn't much we could do. Our cat cared more about her territory at the old house than she did about the people feeding her at the new one. We ended up giving the cat to a willing neighbor in the old neighborhood. At least that was what I was told.
After only a year at Plunkett, we moved again in October. This time to Montgomery Avenue, the house we would live in until I went to college. For me it was the beginning of seventh grade. I had been taking the bus to my new school, North Junior High. It was the first time I'd ever taken a bus to school; I had always walked. But the new house on Montgomery was close to the junior high so I'd soon be walking again.
This move was the first time I connected an old neighborhood to a new one. On Saturdays that fall, shortly before we moved, I’d ride my bike from Plunkett over to Montgomery. I loved the idea I had my own first-hand impressions of the house and the street. I didn't have to rely upon what my parents told me about our new place. I could go see for myself. It was as if I had some special knowledge.
My seventh house was a two-family side by side duplex with a screened-in front porch and a large back yard adorned with a huge weeping willow tree. The street dead-ended at a field. Our side of the street had about twenty houses, mostly two-family; the right hand side had more modern one-family capes. I was now able to connect my old and new neighborhoods. As I traveled back and forth between them, I put together at last that torn map of Pittsfield.
So you see, my family moved a lot between the time I was born in 1945 and the fall of 1956. I don't remember these changes as being upsetting, but rather as opening new possibilities. What would my new school be like? What route would I take to walk there? What new friends would I make? What would the playground have in it? What path would we take to the lake? What route would lead us to the Fourth of July fireworks? What branch of the library would we visit? What streets would we walk to go to North Street? What corner store would we use? Somehow, instead of feeling unsettled by such frequent moves, the experience made me look at change as positive. I wasn’t thinking about what I would leave behind or miss. I was anticipating what new things I might encounter or find. I don’t know if this was an inborn tendency on my part or if my parents interacted with me in such a way to make this point, but I do know I always looked at the next move as an adventure.
