Moving Day

Bill 

I've often thought my childhood began that day in June 1953 when our family moved from the rented apartment downstairs at 5 Adams Circle in Jamaica Plain to our new cape on top of Fairmount hill in Hyde Park. I was eight years-old.

Those eight years lived in JP seemed like a prelude to the next ten in Hyde Park.  I've written about the JP years, good and bad; there'd be more of the same in Hyde Park. As the song says, "Those were the days, We thought they'd never end". Those words can be taken to describe days of discovery and pleasure and focus; it can be taken to describe days of loneliness, sadness and introspection. I lived both kinds of days in Hyde Park.

The Hyde Park years do differ in one important way.  I am older, and will keep getting older with every year.  I remember Hyde Park in a more detailed and vivid way than I do Jamaica Plain.  Many memories of JP are emotional echoes while my memories of Hyde Park are more accurate and precise.

Age has a lot to do with it.  In Hyde Park I am moving toward being a teenager. My world is beginning to open up.  I'm receptive to things that are unfamiliar, that might challenge me. I read more in Hyde Park, become familiar with not just magazines but newspapers.  Television becomes an important part of my life.  I meet new friends, but also spend time by myself.  School takes up many hours every day: walking there, in class, the homework after. I get a bike which extends my local world in ways I could not have imagined in Jamaica Plain.  Then there is sex.  For the longest time I am ignorant of it.  That doesn't make it go away.  It's presence is always there.  It takes me with it, sometimes willingly, sometimes not.

At the center of it all is my new house.  Brand new, just built.  One of four capes next to each other. We are the first family to live in ours. It's a house, not part of a house.  My parents pay a mortgage, not rent.  I have a room I'll share with just my younger brother, not my two other siblings.  There's an electric stove, not cooking oil.  The house is heated with oil, not coal. There are windows in the living room that look out to a front lawn shaded by leafy trees. We have an attic and a cellar.  We have a big back yard with woods behind it.  There are stairs we can bound up.  There's a fireplace, cupboards in the kitchen, a bathroom with a shower. If my parents had done just one thing to enhance my life, buying the house in Hyde Park was it.

We couldn't move until school ended late in June.  There were three of us going to school, myself and my two brothers.  At the new house my older brother would be starting junior high, my younger brother first grade. I'd be starting fourth grade at a school some distance away, a new experience for me. 

My grandmother on Haverford Street did housekeeping for the builder of the four capes on Prospect Street.  It was she who told my father about them as she knew he was looking to leave JP.  In that same Hyde Park neighborhood, just down the street from the house he eventually bought, my father showed some interest in a much larger house on Fairmount  Avenue.  This was a multi-room house, so large it's likely each of us kids would have had our own bedrooms. I wonder how having that much privacy might have impacted my life. That house was older and needed work which dissuaded my father from buying it.  It's one of those "what if" situations. Same neighborhood, different house. 

I first learned we were moving to a new house early in the spring.  One Sunday morning my father rounded us all up, put us in the car and drove over to Prospect Street in Hyde Park.  Getting out of the back seat I saw it for the first time, a blue cape.  We went up some concrete stairs through the front door. 

There is that new house smell, wood, fresh paint, the aroma of turpentine, some sort of carpenters' tools in the corner by the brick fireplace.  It all looks so...new.

Right as you come in there's a set of stairs with a metal railing part way up to where a wall starts.  "It's not finished up there", my father says about the attic even though that's where my two brothers and I will be playing and doing homework and sleeping.  Earlier my grandfather, my father's dad, helped him add to the existing attic floor.  They nailed down some large irregular planks which expanded upon the boards positioned down the middle of the attic which allowed some initial access.

The house is mostly finished but my Dad plans to make complete rooms in the attic, make a room in the cellar, put in a patio and pave the driveway.  All things he eventually did. On these projects I became his chief helper. 

Someone had put down a trail of brown paper for us to walk on so we wouldn't scratch the unfinished floors.  I thought that was so great, following a paper trail through our new house.

The trail led from the living room to a hallway.  To the right we all looked into the bedroom that would belong to my parents, and then to the left, into the bathroom with its small window above the tub letting light in from the back yard.  Opposite the bathroom was the cellar door.  We all clattered down the wooden stairs.  No paper needed down here since the floor was concrete.  In my father's head he could already envision the room he would build and the area where his work benches would go, and where my mother's washer and dryer would be. Little did I know how that cellar, both the finished side and the crowded, cluttered unfinished side, would become a respite for me as the years went by.

The paper continued to the kitchen where to the left was the door to my sister's room. Small with two windows but it was hers and hers alone. In the kitchen there was the spot for a refrigerator by the back door, counters, lots of storage, and a window over the sink looking out to the backyard.  I didn't realize then, my first time in this kitchen, how often in the years to come I would stand at that sink on a hot summer's day, having rushed in from playing outside, hot and sweaty and thirsty, filling a glass with cool clear water and gulping it down to assuage my thirst.  Nothing tasted more delicious or was more satisfying.  Water dripping from my mouth I'd rinse the glass, put it by the sink and then rush out again to start the cycle all over.

Out the back door our group went to look at the backyard.  Still muddy.  The spring still uncertain, the grass yet to come.  I liked having trees in the yard.  My father identified them for us.  "A cedar.  A black walnut.  Those in the corner are eastern white pine."

A basketball hoop would stay attached to the cedar for many years.  The black walnut would drop its nuisance nuts for a long time before my father removed it, and what I remember about the white pines is that once you got that sticky resin on your hands it would never come off.

The windows were odd. Once unlocked, you used a crank to open the window out instead of up.  The one in my sister's room opened onto the driveway; it wasn't long before everyone had cracked their head on it, especially if it were open at night. They also never let enough air in the house for cooling especially up in the attic.

This is where I was going to live for the next ten years.  Unfinished cellar, windows to avoid, attic heat. I didn't care. I felt like Gin, ready for change.

Still, I'd miss Jamaica Plain.  "I've been here all my life," I thought.  It was familiar. I was just beginning to get out to discover it.  There had been times when my friend Johnny and I would walk down to my grandmother's house on Haverford Street unannounced.  We'd just show up one afternoon after school.  She always seemed glad to see us, giving us ginger ale and sometimes a cookie to go with it.  My grandfather, who always struck me as someone easily annoyed, once offered to show us the cellar.  I may have mentioned it as a way to keep the conversation going.  "Do you have a cellar here?" After telling them what was going on at school, there might not have been too many other topics between a couple of seven year-olds and a couple in their 60's. There was a cement walkway that led from the back stairs around the corner of the house to a couple of stairs that went to the cellar door.  The cellar was dark, damp, but my grandfather seemed to enjoy showing it to us kids.  My opinion of him as a gruff old man changed a bit.

I'd also visit my other grandparents at 108 School Street but always with my father.  The living room or front room was just off the entrance.  I picture it now as a dark place with heavy furniture and drapes to cut down the light.  My father would sit there to talk with his father and brothers.  I didn't stay in the room long.  Just to say hello and catch a glance of the painting that hung on the wall, a picture I always liked and which I always associated with that room.  My great uncle had painted it, my grandfather's brother. It was a scene of a winter brook in an area of Franklin Park called The Wilderness.  The area is still there, still undeveloped relative to the rest of the park. I liked the painting because the vibrant green hemlock tree was such a contrast to the bleaker snowy scene.  It was quite striking.  

While my father socialized with his family, I'd wander about the house. I liked the kitchen. Sometimes there'd be cake under a covered container on the kitchen table. From the kitchen I'd walk up two flights of stairs to the very top floor.  It seemed like a whole other world up there.  I didn't go up there that often so exploring the house was always interesting.  Way up on that top floor I discovered a small window almost hidden from view under the roof.  I'd have to crouch down to look out.  It was worth the effort.  I'd look down on an empty lot, the same lot where we would go sledding in the winter, and then over to Dalrymple Street, a favorite spot for games of hide and seek.  I'd sometimes look out that window for long minutes, enjoying this different perspective of a familiar haunt.

The cellar was even more interesting the few times I went down there with my father.  To supplement his income my father had begun a small business repairing television sets.  There weren't that many TVs in the early 50's but enough to necessitate a small work area in his parent's house.  That is where he would be sometimes in the evening.  His brother, my uncle John, a "mechanical genius" according to my father, also had a shop in that cellar.  There were several machines used to fabricate metal, along with a lathe, some sort of stamper.  I wasn't sure what any of them really did but they all looked impressive.

On one visit my uncle took a small sheet of metal, maybe aluminum, placed it in one of the machines and pulled a lever. It was a miracle. That flat piece of metal transformed into a small racing car, just large enough to hold in the palm of your hand.  A couple of holes were drilled. Wheels were attached.  Then the toy was given to me.  My uncle said I could also paint it. Not only did I love getting it I was also fascinated by how it was made.

These were some of the experiences I'd miss.  There were others. Since we were moving in June, I realized I wouldn't be doing my summer things this year, like getting free ice cream over to the school yard given out by the park department the morning of Fourth of July.  I always looked forward to that.

They'd be crowds of kids over there. We'd line up in front of tables on which were a number of stiff cardboard boxes.  When they were opened smoke would come out, actually condensation in the humid air.  It seemed like smoke. Inside were Hoodsies made by HP Hood and Sons, an iconic Boston area dairy company,  The Hoodsie was  a small paper cup of ice cream, chocolate on one side and vanilla on the other.  Each kid was handed a Hoodsie and a small wooden spoon with which to eat it.  First you had to grasp the little tab to peel off the paper lid. The ice cream was frozen solid so it took a while to dig out that first creamy taste using that clumsy little spoon.  To me it was fun, exciting, and the beginning of summer.

If it got particularly hot, the park people would attach a sprinkler to a fixture on the side of the school building.  Maybe kids could smell the water on such a hot afternoon but it seems within minutes there appeared a ragtag group of kids running and squealing as that shower of cool water came splashing down onto the hot asphalt of the school yard.  A few kids would back up into the spray, the nearer they got the harder the water beat against their backs until, with a shout, they would run to the side.

I'd run through the spray from one side, wipe the wet hair away from my eyes, and then run back through again.  This over and over.   Running under the sprinkler all I'd hear is the water spattering against me.  Coming out the other side the shrieks of the  kids would batter my ears until I ran back under the spray again.

After about fifteen minutes the water began to back up around the drain in the middle of the schoolyard.  A few minutes more and a little pond had developed.  This was even more fun than the sprinkler. There'd be more splashing as kids ran through this ever growing puddle, stood around its edges and even sat in it.  It wasn't the cleanest spot for bathing.  All the dirt and debris from the schoolyard was floating in it along with everything the kids were adding.  No one cared.  The polio scare was a few years away.  Right now all we wanted to do was cool off and have fun.

Abruptly the sprinkler would shut off.  There was a chorus of groans.  Still there was water to play in.  Kids would be there another half hour, the time it took for the pond to diminish to a very large puddle and then a much smaller puddle and then a few gurgles as it disappeared down the drain.  Just damp asphalt now.  Some kids went home, others stayed in the schoolyard playing in their bathing suits the rest of the afternoon.

That last day of school was the single most exciting day of the year; it rivaled Christmas. I'd have this one more in Jamaica Plain before we moved. That build up of anticipation, the days of turning in books, final lessons.  The day came.  We often were turned loose before noon.  Out into the warm sunshine.  No books to carry.  No school until forever.  So it seemed.

There were a lot of markers for the beginning of summer.  One of my stronger memories encapsulates those first few days after school let out when the whole summer was before me.  At the corner of Adams Circle and School Street was a fence around which someone had planted flowers.  Walking up there one morning just after school had ended, I paused for a moment leaning down to smell one of the flowers. Smell is a powerful memory stimulant. The first day of summer vacation.  It's all before me.  I'm in my play clothes.  The quiet breeze accentuates the fragrance of the blossom I hold in my hand. It's a peaceful moment under a summer morning's sun.  Then that kid is gone, the corner empty, the flowers in repose. 

They'd be future last days of school but they would all be in Hyde Park.  Like so many things here, going to school in Jamaica Plain was over. We moved just a few days after the end of third grade.

I'm leaning against the metal railing on the edge of our front porch that afternoon waiting for the movers to show up.  I am thinking I'll be sleeping at our new house tonight wondering how much I'll miss this house where I'd been sleeping so many years, right there, on the other side of that window opposite me.

That large room at the front of the house was not only my bedroom but also that of my two brothers and my older sister.  Mildred was 10 years older than I was. By the time we moved she had graduated high school more than a year before.  Even though her bed was in the far corner of the room she still had to deal with sleeping in a room with three brothers. I wonder how she dealt with that all those years.  I realize now one of the reasons for the move was for her to have her own room.

It hadn't been too bad for her when it was just she and my older brother who shared the room.  Then I came along, and then my younger brother.  My parents bought bunk beds which went over in the corner by the bay windows which protruded out to the front. When my mother first moved to the house, our bedroom had been the living room.  That must have been nice as there was a fireplace on the back wall.  (My childhood home was renovated in 2012.  Previously it had been abandoned and looked in tough shape.  Now the old fireplace is considered a selling point.  As the real estate site indicated, "Period details of a 1900's house retained.")

The old photographs from the late 40's show my brother and me in bed reading funny books, what comic books were called in Boston.  Another photograph. There I am in some sort of white night gown straddling a rocking horse, a Christmas gift from my grandmother, the fireplace, the period detail, in the background.

The wooden floor between the beds was my play area.  I'd have Tinker Toys scattered about or the metal girders of my Erector Set around me.  I'd always look at the instruction book with diagrams of some of the things you could build with the Erector Set, a delivery truck, buildings, even a ferris wheel. Try as I might I never was able to come close to building those structures.  Perhaps it's because they required a certain dexterity in attaching the various parts with what had to be the tiniest square nuts and equally small screws.  I could barely pick them up.  Then they would fall or wouldn't go in right, or I'd have a problem with the little wrench.  Then there were the washers to deal with. Often when I would finish bolting everything together there would be such a lack of rigidity the whole structure would sag.  I'd get frustrated, lose my temper, throw stuff around.  My mother would come and tell me, "You have no patience." An admonishment that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

To my parents the house may have been cramped and dark but to me it was cozy and spacious. I'd come in the back door down a long dark hallway, one end of which was a set of stairs leading up to the second floor, at the other end was the door which opened onto our kitchen.

In winter I'd take my boots off before going into the kitchen.  Once in the warmth of the kitchen I'd discard my coat, mittens, and hat.  In the corner was a large clear bottle filled with kerosine to fuel the stove which had been converted from coal to cooking oil.  Imagine a container that looked just like a water cooler.  It was on this stove my mother would put a potato inside the lid on top of the old coal box to bake. The heat from the stove must've been nice in the winter but tough in the summer.  My mother cooked at that stove for twelve years.

She also washed clothes in the sink with a scrub board until early in the 50's when she received the forerunner of a modern washing machine. On wash days she would pull this contraption out of the adjoining pantry, hook it up to the sink, and put clothes in the tub which had its own agitation. I used to love to watch the clothes go back and forth in that washing tub, the water churning, the soap getting sudsier, the water getting dirtier.  

The tub was the only automatic part.  After draining the tub and adding clean water for the rinse, she would then have to remove each item one at a time and, using the hand-cranked ringer attached to the tub, squeeze out all the water. The clothes were then hung on a clothesline which stretched from the pantry window to a corner of the yard.  Not too bad in the summer but in winter clothes would often be hung in various places in the house to dry. 

Just off the kitchen around the corner was our bathroom.  Small but adequate.  I remember my father's shaving stuff. He had a straight razor. Nearby was a small cup in which he would mix shaving soap and then apply it with a brush.  It seemed so complicated to me.  The razor scared me.  When the time came I wasn't sure I'd be able to do any of it.  By that time, of course, shaving cream was in a can and the safety razor was the norm.

Straight out of the bathroom was our living room.  The nearest wall contained an archway always covered by a heavy drape. The drape separated my parent's bedroom from the living room. My parents' room was always dark  It was the one room of the house I had no familiarity with.  My route from my bedroom to the kitchen or bathroom was always through the living room and not their bedroom.

The living room had our TV, small, black and white but a window on the world.  There was a bookcase in the corner on top of which my father had a record player.  One of his favorites songs was Some Enchanted Evening from South Pacific.  It was new then in 1949. He'd play it over and over like a kid would play the newest Beatles' song in the 60's.

It's a song about chance meetings, about opportunity taken or passed by. The music was lovely to my ears, but even then I was aware the song was tinged with sadness, poignancy, that wonderful last note filled with longing.  Ezio Pinza's voice filled the house.  "Once you have found her, never let her go".  

Just beyond the living room was a foyer/hallway and the front door.  In the hallway was a closet in which I used to hide sometimes from my younger brother.  Also a formal stairway leading to the second floor.  Since the house was now a two family it had a barricade at the bottom of the stairs preventing anyone from walking up.

Just outside the front door was the long front porch, the one I'm standing on waiting for the movers.  A cracked concrete path along the side led to the back door and to the back yard.  The porch was covered, the top of which was the landlord's open porch.  The landlord, Mrs. Costello, owned the house, collected our rent, 35 dollars a month, and sometimes would give me those funny books to read.

On the street I'd sometimes see Mrs. Costello out on her porch.  She'd be in a wheelchair. To me she appeared very old.  She had a boyfriend, or so he was called by my parents.  His name was Casey.  Occasionally he'd walk down Adams Circle, dressed up with a homburg hat on his head to visit with Mrs Costello.  It's the first I had heard of boyfriends.  I wasn't sure what it meant.  I did think it strange adults had friends like I did.  Friends played with you, ran around.  All adults seemed to do was work or sit and talk to each other.

The moving truck showed up mid-afternoon. There was a flurry of activity as a couple of men, my father, home from work early, and my mother began taking things out of the house.  Boxes.  Armfuls of blankets.  My bed went by, in pieces.  Drawers. The truck began to fill up.

As the house began to empty my father told me I was going to ride to the new house in the truck. I was thrilled.  As the movers began to button up the back I climbed up into the cab and slid across the seat.  One of the movers climbed in behind the wheel while the other sat beside me. I was just barely able to see out the front windshield but I didn't mind.  All the dials in front of me, the huge shift on the floor next to me, the noise of the truck's motor, all of this made me feel I was on some sort of space ship heading out into the unknown.

The new house was on top of a hill, Fairmount Hill, a hill I would walk up and down over the next many years and a hill that served as an impediment to my mother who would come to feel trapped in that house on top of the hill not having that easy access to Cleary Square in Hyde Park as she did to Egleston Square in Jamaica Plain.

Perhaps an indication of the efforts that hill would extract from all of us was the struggle entailed by the moving truck just to get our belongings up there.  I couldn't see very well in the front of that large truck but the trip was going along smoothly as far as I knew.  I knew our house was on top of a hill but not having any experience with hills in JP I thought we'd just go up a little bit and then be there. Then the truck turned on to Fairmount Avenue and began the ascent.

As it turns out Fairmount Hill after Highland Street is very steep, at an angle of some 35 degrees. Or so it seemed. I felt myself being pushed back in the seat as the truck began to climb.  Whereas earlier in the ride I could see houses going by, other cars, now all I could see was sky and the tops of trees.  Worse was that the truck began to slow down.  Lower gears were put into use.  At one point, just before the hill leveled out at Summit Street, I thought we weren't going to make it.  To say we were crawling those last hundred feet of incline is an understatement.

The road flattened out, we began to pick up speed, made the left turn on to Prospect Street and came to a stop in front of my new house.  I was home.

Stepping down out of the truck I felt exhilarated. This was so different from Adams Circle, so new. So many trees.  So green. I couldn't wait for the unpacking, to see where my bed was going to be. There was so much to do, to discover, to explore. I was full of hope that day. I felt good, glad to be in that special moment. I couldn't wait for the future.  My God, I'm turning into Ginny.

First there was that nit-picky reality to deal with.  My parents had arrived earlier.  Their car was in the driveway but they were not in the house.  My mother had put the house keys in her bureau drawer which then had gone on the truck early.  The keys to the house were in the back of the truck.  My father ended up breaking a cellar window to get in.

The back doors of the truck were flung open, stuff handed down, up the front stairs, through the front door.  Some to the front of the house, some around the back, some down the cellar stairs.  My younger brother tried to keep out of the way, ending up playing with his cars on the concrete cellar floor.  I watched, helped a little I suppose, but mostly wondered who the kids were that lived in the houses next to us and up the street. What was in the woods behind our house?  Where was my school? How I would get there?  In my mood at the moment none of these things worried me; my usual anxiety had morphed into hopeful anticipation.

The afternoon waned into early evening.  After supper my father and I drove back to the old house.  He wanted to give it a last once over.  

In the bathroom I helped him remove the medicine cabinet.  I didn't even know they could be removed.  Everything permanent I discovered really wasn't.  Behind the glass mirror there were screws in back of the now empty cabinet.  I handed him the screwdriver, each screw going in the sink as he removed them.  With a quick tug the cabinet came away from the wall, the space behind revealing the studs of the house.

I'm not even sure why he wanted that old medicine cabinet; we had a brand new one in our brand new house.  But it was such a symbolic moment.  The only house I had known was empty now, the evening light slanting into my parent's old bedroom, not dark anymore.  My bedroom seemed even larger now that it too was empty. Our voices and steps echoed as we walked through making a final check. Part of that echo may have been a baby's gurgle, a snippet of dialogue from an old Light's Out, kids laughing and shouting, crying, even a fading note by Ezio Pinza.

Locking the door my father and I walked along the porch to the car. The day ends.  Tonight I'll be in a different place.  I'll be on another planet.  It's all in front of me.