Coming Into My Own: 1956

Bill                          

The Hill

In the spring of 1956 I turned eleven. During that year I began to develop an awareness of the world around me. Even though my parents continued to influence me, the complex challenging world in which I lived influenced me more.  In this blog I write about the  lessons learned, the hard truths I could no longer avoid, the insights and even some transformative epiphanies.

While 1956 is a specific year, it represents the mid-fifties, a time when America reached a new peak of prosperity, when the middle class saw more gains than at any other time in history. The United States was postwar.  People were buying things.  Houses were being built.  The interstate highway system was beginning. Jobs were plentiful.  Many people were better off than they had been just twenty years before during the height of the Depression. Still, all this prosperity had its consequences.  Even I was vaguely aware of the problems swirling around me, those concerns and conflicts that would continue to plague America and the world years into the future: depletion of natural resources, pollution from cars and power plants, planned obsolescence, conspicuous consumption, misleading merchandising, disparities between rich and poor, racial and class prejudices, and the beginning of the military-industrial complex.

There’s more.  Conservative as the fifties may be portrayed in traditional history books, the profound changes of the sixties were only a few years away. That cultural shift didn’t appear out of the blue.  It flowed from the ideas circulating when I was eleven.  How to wage war in the nuclear age.  How to include people demanding their basic rights. How to solve problems associated with dirty air and dirty water. How to deal with poverty and injustice. The undervaluing of women.  Coming to terms with the power imbalances perpetuated by white men. These were some of the issues just beginning to be discussed when I was eleven, explored in magazines that I read, talked about in discussions I had with my friends. If I looked closely, I could see them playing out in my own life. I know now I was among the many who moved the world from its fifties phase to its sixties phase.      

Whew!  That’s a lot for a kid to handle. For the most part I dealt with all those complex issues through a determined process of knowledge riddled with ignorance, action undercut by apathy, and understanding hobbled by misconception. It was a step forward, a couple of steps backward existence. Somehow it all resulted in a dim glimmer of insight.

That occasional eureka moment, that sudden flash of comprehension, led to an awareness that changed the way I saw the world. I thought one way before; I thought a different way after. Take something as simple as where I lived in Hyde Park.  On top of Fairmount Hill. 

As often as I walked up and down Fairmount Hill, I never thought too much about the fact I actually lived on top of a hill. Geologically, Fairmont Hill was the smaller brother (or sister) to nearby Great Blue Hill. Blue Hill was part of the Blue Hills Reservation, a wooded area with pathways and trails, a pond for swimming, even a ski slope. It's where the Harvard University weather observatory was as well as a granite lookout tower offering panoramic views of the surrounding area.

Many a Sunday my family would walk up Blue Hill along a paved road built to give access to the people who worked at the observatory.  A short distance away was the granite building with its round observation tower. Aside from the surrounding hills, this afforded views of Houghton's Pond, the Weymouth Naval Air Station and the city of Boston. It also afforded me an epiphany. 

My father pointed it out. "That's where we live."  It took me a moment to see what he was pointing at. Then it abruptly came into sharp focus. Fairmont Hill was an actual hill. It was a mound, shaped like a loaf of bread, rising up from the flatter terrain around it.  I sort of knew that but now from my perch in the lookout on Big Blue, the hill suddenly jumped from the background of trees into specific relief. I could see the whole thing in front of me. Fairmont Hill. I lived up there.

The Blue Hills, Bunker Hill and others in the Boston area, including Fairmount Hill, are drumlins, the debris left behind by glaciers. They tend to have a steeper north face and a sloping south face.  The walk up Fairmount was definitely steep and the walk down to Brush Hill Road conformed to the gentler slope on the south.   

From then on, the many times I walked up to the top of Big Blue, I always made a point of discerning my hill from the surrounding topography.  "On that side is where I walk down to Brush Hill Road."  "Over there is Cleary Square. I can tell from the church steeples.” “That roof. I wonder if that's Gene's old house?”  I was always looking to find familiar landmarks.  In summer, it was difficult to see anything but the trees.  Winter was a different story, especially with a pair of binoculars.

There was always an argument over who would carry the binoculars up to the top. I often ended up doing it, so I could have first chance of looking at my hill. On a relatively nice day in winter I could make out some of the bigger houses on top of the hill. I liked first looking from afar and then looking through the binoculars to see the details. I’d always hope I’d see someone walking but as good as the binoculars were at foreshortening space, such specific details were not to be. 

From that wide perspective on top of Big Blue, it began to dawn on me I was part of something bigger. Looking at Fairmount Hill from this new distance, it gives me a different perspective, an epiphany even. I live over there. That's the hill I walk down for school and back up to come home; that's where my friends live; that's where I sleep at night and play during the day.  Yet from Big Blue I can look around it and over it.  Directly beyond it are the buildings of Boston.  Mostly there are trees in every direction.  When I walk around the streets on the hill, there seem to be many fewer trees than when I look down at the hill from the lookout.  Compared to the space around it, Fairmount Hill seems a bit insignificant.

On my visits to the top of Big Blue I began to think of Fairmount Hill the way it may have looked hundred of years ago, even a thousand years ago. At age eleven I could barely discern the amount of time involved in a year, so my take on geological time was sketchy at best. My father had told me about the glaciers.  I tried to imagine being on top of Blue Hill fifteen thousand years ago.  Except there would be no Blue Hill.  In every direction, just ice.  Then the glaciers melted.  From my 11 year-old perspective this would have taken a few weeks or so, in my experience the time the last of the snow melts in spring.  I could picture the floods of water, the fracturing of the glaciers, the emergence of Fairmount Hill, slowly but surely, just like the emergence of my back yard from a winter’s worth of snow.

From what my father told me, from what I read and from seeing the hill from my vantage point at the top of Blue Hill, I felt satisfied I understood not only what a real hill was but also in a vague way how it had formed. I also realized part of my original epiphany, seeing Fairmount Hill as a distinct mound rising from the surrounding area, led me to view the hill as a physical embodiment.Then came an additional insight, seeing the hill as a psychological impediment.

Much of this new thinking developed because of my mother's issues living on top of Fairmount Hill.  She didn't drive. The nearest bus was a distance away. And in my family cabs were for rich people.  Living in Jamaica Plain all those years before moving to Hyde Park, it was a simple ten minute walk not only to all the stores my mother went to in Egleston Square, but also to the elevated train that took her into downtown Boston.  

In Hyde Park, Cleary Square was at the bottom of Fairmount Hill. The nearest elevated train was a distant bus ride away.  My mother didn't mind walking. That is what she had done in Jamaica Plain and walking down the hill in Hyde Park was not too bad. Coming back up, especially carrying bundles, was a different matter. That was a struggle. There was no bus to let her off on our street. She often stated she felt trapped where she lived.  Though it was lovely on top of Fairmount Hill, while she lived in a new house with a new kitchen and a nice backyard, getting on and off the hill was a problem for my mother right from the beginning.

Whether I realized it then or not, and of course I didn't, the hill became a metaphor to me.  My mother's anxiety and complaints about living on the hill began to have an effect on how I felt about it. Initially I liked “living above it all.” Once on top it was an easy trek to anywhere I wanted to go since everything was down.  "Down the square."  "Down to Brush Hill." "Down to the Fairmount School." Even "down the street.” But to get down you first had to walk back up.  With all the walking I did I began to have a better idea of how my mother felt.

Still, I had more energy than my mother, so walking up and down the hill was easier for me.  Toward the end of 1956 I had a bike. I never rode my bike up Fairmount Hill. I'd either try to get back to my house a different way or I’d walk it up. I began to realize a steep hill was an obstacle with a bike.  Unlike the bikes of today, my bike had only three speeds.  The disadvantage of living on top of a hill also came into sharper focus to me every afternoon during the school year when I’d walk back up Fairmount Hill after school carrying a load of books.  These experiences allowed me a certain sympathy for my mother's plight. I recognized my house was not a destination easily reached.  My mother's complaints made it seem less approachable.  Was the hill an oasis, "Above it all," as I sometimes thought or an impediment which made my mother's life and as a consequence, mine, less happy than it might have been.

My father drove everywhere.  Some evenings he'd take a walk down to Brush Hill Road, but I don’t recall him ever walking up the hill from the square. So his empathy for my mother's trapped feeling may have waned over the years.

We all lived in the same place on top of that mound of glacially displaced gravel. While Fairmount Hill may have been clearly delineated looking over at it from Big Blue, living there was more ambiguous, impacting the members of my family in distinct and sometimes conflicting ways.

The New Consumers

The more flowing side of Blue Hill had a ski slope. I didn’t ski but I often thought it would have been to great to take my flexible flyer sled for a run down one of the ski slopes.  It may have been the last thing I ever did.

Sometimes during spring and summer we’d use the slopes as an alternate walking route up Big Blue when the ski run turned into a long arching meadow.  I have another memory of it as well.  My eleventh birthday.

My birthday was March 5. The day before my birthday, a Sunday, my father and brothers took the ski slope route up to the top. I didn't realize why we walked all the way up there along the slope until I was given a present to open.  It was a kite.  That’s why we were here.  With the wind and elevation and lack of trees to snag on, a kite would have a real chance of soaring into the sky.

It may have for a little while.  My memory is hazy. I do know it was a very simple kite, a couple of hardwood dowels, a plastic wind foil and some string.  Getting a kite up in the air is always tricky but I have an image, imagined or not, of my birthday kite, fluttering in the breeze above the Blue Hill ski slope, making a hard turn down and then regaining altitude as I ran down the hill with it.  Like this memory, kites are fragile and it’s unlikely this one lasted very long.

There were other gifts too besides the kite.  It seemed a whole bag full.  Candy.  Maybe one of those elastic attached balls you’d bat around on a paddle.  Pick up sticks?  Lots of little things. I had become a consumer. 

Consumerism. Walk into any library that still has bound volumes of old magazines and take a look at Life magazine from 1955 and 1956. Those volumes take twice as much shelf space as the volumes before and the ones after.  They’re thick with advertising pages, a clear indication of the prevailing economic potency of those years.  Automobiles, household appliances, televisions, cosmetics, cigarettes, fashion, food, beer, things for kids, teenagers, housewives, husbands, the latest books and movies, products made from oil and rubber and steel, products for the house and car, for the backyard, to take on vacations. All of these and more among the goods heavily advertised in the muscular economy of the mid-fifties.

My parents were an important part of this dynamic. In 1956 they were at the height of their adult lives, in their early 40s, still considered young even by the standards of the times. It was the year my father made huge improvements to the house: hedges, new paint, a backyard patio, a new cellar room. Much of this effort documented by our new movie camera.

Our family had a degree of security. My father had a good job as an electrician in the power plant at the South Boston Navy Yard, a job fueled by the military needs of the Cold War. My mother kept the house. Food was plentiful.  Our TV was black and white but because my father had a second job repairing TVs, my brother and I had a TV up in our room as well. That Christmas I got a bike. 

My parents were the consumers at whom the ad pages in Life and Look, the Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, McCall’s, Woman’s Day, the Readers’ Digest, and so many other magazines were directed  We kids had our own magazines. Boys Life. Jack and Jill. Teen. Seventeen. Even Mad magazine with their ad satires.  All trying to get me to spend my nickels and dimes, the occasional quarter, on candy and movies, funny books, and toys. 

The magazines typically showed the middle class in their ads, at least Madison Avenue’s conception of the middle class.  I assume the people in the ads were all named Jones.  I don’t know if my family tried to keep up with the Joneses.  I didn’t know anyone named Jones. One of my neighbors was an Italian contractor, another was a Catholic firefighter, and the one on the corner was a Jewish doctor.  Stereotypes and real at the same time. 

One thing the neighbors had in common, blue collar, professional alike, was that they all owned homes and they all had kids. The yards of the houses required outdoor furniture, a shed for storage, a lawnmower for the grass; the cellars could use a workbench and the requisite tools, maybe a remodel into a rec room; kitchens required plates and spoons and pans, the refrigerator needed milk and apples and butterscotch pudding, the cabinets spices and cereal and canned fruit.  On it went.  The bathroom, toothpaste.  The bedroom, a mirror. The living room, a TV.  And for the kids, clothes, toys, stuff for school, a bed, a bureau, that Christmas bike.

I influenced my parents somewhat in their purchases.  I hated shorts. My mother knew I would not wear them so she would buy the type of pants I would wear, not jeans; I preferred khaki. Yes, a lot of them had that silly little buckle strap on the back.  Could never figure out what that was for.

Food purchases could be another opportunity for some mild extortion.  "I don't like that. I won't eat it!"  I wasn't quite that much of a brat; still my preferences were heeded.  Grape jelly was a non-nutritious sugary gel.  Still it went great on crackers and between slices of bread with peanut butter.  The grape jelly I liked had nothing to do with the jelly; it had to do with what it came in. Picture jelly jars. What? Bugs Bunny?  Disney characters?  Don't remember.  I liked the idea that once you finished the jelly, the jars had a second life as drinking glasses.  For a while I would drink only out of a Welch's jelly jar.

Meat was meat; vegetables were carrots, yellow beans, radishes, cucumbers; milk was milk.  Didn’t care.  Cookies and crackers were another matter. I even knew the brand we bought.  Nabisco. On the box the lettering was printed inside a white oval with what I always took to be a double cross or even a TV antenna on top. (The company claimed it was an early European symbol for quality.) Always in a kitchen cabinet was a box of Premium Saltine crackers.  Lots of salt on the top.  So good I would eat them plain.  Or with tall dabs of grape jelly.  Honey Maid Graham crackers were another staple.  Dubious in nutrition but still another cracker that could be wrapped in a napkin, stuffed in a pocket and eaten outside during a break from play.  Another attempt at buying something nutritious were Fig Newtons.  Originally they were sold as digestive biscuits as an aid toward stomach problems.  By the time I was eating them they had devolved into a square of sugar, cotton seed oil, sodium and sulfites.  Aside from the sugar, not things I would even consider tasting except when disguised as a cookie.  It was the fifties.  All of these things were supposed to be safe and nourishing. Even I knew that another favorite of mine, Cheese Tid-Bits, were a snack, not a food.  I liked to float them on top of Campbell’s chicken noodle soup.  Apparently I wasn’t getting enough salt from the soup.

I had cookies on the brain.  Sugar wafers, ginger snaps, Lorna Doones, vanilla wafers, chocolate chip.  Rarely, and only when company was coming and my mother wanted something to go with the tea she would serve, would a box of Nabisco Famous Cookie Assortment show up in the house. After the tea cups were filled, the rectangular box in the center of the table would be opened. The cookies would be stacked inside crinkled red paper cups.  Some were familiar.  The Lorna Doones, wafers, Oreos.  Some weren’t. Cameos, a cookie with a creme center, and the Kettle cookie, a square spiced cookie, nutmeg maybe, with an embedded imprint on it.  I loved the assortment, in part because we rarely had them in the house, but also because of their manner of presentation. A cookie for adults. Similar to a box of chocolates relative to an ordinary Hershey Bar.  Or Tom Collins mixer compared to orange soda.  If I hovered around the table long enough and became a little annoying I would get a cookie.  “Just take one,” I was told.  Oh, oh.  Which one.  Always a dilemma.

There were cookies and there were crackers. Crackers were not cookies even though some cookies called themselves crackers.  Real crackers were good in their own way as long as there was enough butter or jam.   Crown Pilot crackers started out as hardtack for sailing ships.  Also used as an important ingredient in turkey stuffing and clam chowder.  Very New England. My father had them as a kid so we did too.  Again not the most nutritious of foods especially since I ate mine slathered with a coating of butter!  The one huge difference between cookies and crackers; you never spread butter on cookies!  Sometimes a box of Matzo crackers would show up in the cupboard.  My mother bought them to go with tea during the few weeks they’d be in the supermarket for Easter/Passover.  Just flour and water but again, covered with butter, a very acceptable alternative to the usual Saltines.

I liked the Barnum’s Animal Crackers since they came in a circus wagon with the animals behind steel bars.  They all tasted the same but still I liked to trade them.  “I’ll give you a polar bear for a lion.” Sometimes I’d play with them before eating them. It was the beginning of some rudimentary knowledge about wild animals, their relationship to circuses and zoos and their value in nature.  However, to kids, they were designed to eat, the legs and head first.

The best cookie ever made was, without question, the Mallomar.  We didn’t have them often.  With the chocolate and marshmallow they were more candy than cookie.  Maybe it was the snap of the thin coating of chocolate as you bit into it, or the sticky fluff of the marshmallow as your teeth sank down toward the graham cracker bottom.  They were good.  “People would kill for this,” my father would say as he ate his favorite desert, strawberries with homemade whipped cream.  He may as well have been talking about the Mallomar.

Cookies were bad enough.  Soda was worse. There was an ad on TV proclaiming, “It’s Cott to be Good.” Cott was a locally produced soda. Soda was called “tonic” in Boston.  I preferred Canada Dry, a tonic I considered superior.  I tried to convince my mother to buy Canada Dry over what would often show up in our refrigerator, Cott, or even something like Cliquot Club, a supermarket bargain brand.   Either, however, was better than Moxie, a tonic with a dry spicy taste, or Zarex, a sweet syrup you’d mix with soda water.  Instant “tonic”. “Nice try but where is the Canada Dry I asked you to buy?”

Not all the food came from the store.  Delivery vans showed up to the house once a week. There weren’t as many delivery vans when I was a kid as in my father’s time but in the first few years living in Hyde Park, we’d get our milk from the milk truck and bakery products from the Cushman truck. 

Hood milk was delivered in a squat van, no windows in the back, just a door on either side, and a door in the back. In the summer I would awake to the sound of those side doors sliding open.  The milkman would walk up the driveway carrying a wire basket with several glass bottles of milk.  “Anything else today?” he’d ask my mother at the back door.  Sometimes she’d get eggs or some butter.  Every once in a while chocolate milk or, at Christmas, egg nog.  Once supermarkets began to increase their dairy offerings, the milkman’s visits diminished and then stopped entirely.  It was easier to buy milk at the store and cheaper too. Progress. But for a while there seemed to be a milk truck in every neighborhood, the sound of that door sliding and a milkman walking up the driveway to another house.

Cushman’s Bakery delivered in a small van.  Bread was the item of choice for my mother.  Sometimes she’d splurge and buy a half dozen plain donuts or even a small cake.  In December the bakery man would be around with a calendar for the new year. Spiral bound with quaint scenes of New England for each month, trees heavy with snow, lighthouses, summer beaches. Above each month was printed in smaller type the previous month and the next month.  I liked being able to look at the following month while checking what day it was.  It’s January 23 but there is school vacation coming next month in February. That’s just three weeks away.  I liked calendars. We always had one hanging in our kitchen.

Many of the foods I was familiar with were advertised on what in a few short years had become a dominant influence in our lives, television.  Because of my father’s second job repairing TVs, we had TV earlier than some people and had more of them.  Color TV was introduced in 1955 by RCA/NBC.  We’d watch the NBC peacock unfurl its feathers to announce a program in “living color”.  It was compatible color which meant we, and most people, saw those feathers in various shades of gray. TVs were heavily advertised in the magazines. Consoles, TVs combined with radios and record players, portable black and whites, the new color sets.  Everyone had some sort of TV.  It symbolized more than anything else the growing prosperity bestowed on more and more people.

Still, there were limits to how many consumer products my father would buy.  We never had a color TV until I was long gone from the house. I used a push lawnmower to cut the grass. With an older brother, some of my clothes were hand-me-downs. My family tried to live within their means.  My mother would talk about profligate people as those who “spent money like a drunken sailor.” Yet we had a movie camera, a washer and dryer, a cellar rec room, a patio in the back, the TVs, a new bike. I never felt I lacked anything. 

There was another economy important to me when I was eleven.  My own. I usually had some change tucked in the corners of my pockets, nickels, dimes, sometimes a few quarters, and very occasionally, a half dollar. I bought things at stores, if tonic and candy counted. I was swayed by the ads I saw on TV and in the magazines, and especially in the comic books. I’d be tempted to send away for the 100 cowboy and indian plastic figures or an army battalion complete with soldiers, guns, tanks, and cannon.  I knew, though, from friends, that the item you received two months later in the mail bore little resemblance to what was in the ad.  The soldiers or cowboys were connected to each other; you had to snap the plastic in between each figure to free them.  It never went well.  Sometimes a rifle or lasso would snap off as well.  And once undone the figures never stood up.  You’d have to put tape underneath them.  They were only 99 cents but it never seemed worth the effort to me.

When I did have money, I had to determine its value. I began to realize even something as large as that half dollar became something else, something smaller, something of lesser value, as soon as I handed it to the clerk, held out my hand and received  pennies, nickels and dimes back  It was a hard truth that once I bought something the money I used to buy it was gone. There were times of remorse.  “I should have bought the grape soda, not the orange.  Too late now.”  That became more of an issue as I got older.  “I have enough to buy one record.  This one or that one.  It’s difficult to decide.”  Invariably after playing the record I did buy I’d think, “I should have bought the other one.” Buyer’s remorse at age eleven.

At 10 and 11 when you were with your friends and had some money, there was always pressure to share what you bought.  Someone would scream out “Dibs!” as soon as you had paid for that bag of penny candy or the box of Good’N’Plenty.  I was okay with sharing but it seemed ridiculous to me that anyone saying dibs had some sort of official right to have part of what you were eating.  “Dibs.  That gives me an unqualified claim backed up by a ruling of the Kids’ Supreme Court to half of that chocolate bar.”  That’s what it seemed like.  Other issues arose if you happened to be eating  an ice cream cone.  Finicky as I was, I did not have the slightest inclination to have some other kid lap my ice cream with his wet tongue. “Stop,” I’d scream, “You’re spitting on it!”

Another part of my economy was swapping for things of equal value.  This worked particularly well with comics books which we in Boston called funny books.  Yeah, I know, they all weren’t necessarily funny.  Although looking back, even the crime comics with their lurid, sensationalized drawings had an element of black humor to them.  I preferred Batman, Superman, Little Lulu, Uncle Scrooge, Classics Illustrated and as I got older, Forbidden Worlds, and Adventures into the Unknown.

In Hyde Park there was a kid who lived at the top of Prospect Street who I’d swap with.  Every once in a while I’d gather a pile of read-more-than-once funny books under my arm and walk up to his house.  Sitting on his back stairs he and I would go through a stack of each other’s comics. 

It could be a process. “Already read this one.  Got this one.  This is a good one. Will you swap your Superman for two of my Little Lulu?”

Then he’d page through it, discover a page torn and quickly amend his offer.  “One Little Lulu!”

The bargaining continued until we each had what we wanted. 

Lots of negotiations.  Even though no money exchanged hands I always felt I made out well. I remember the anticipation I felt walking back down Prospect Street, new comics tucked under my arm, looking forward to getting home to stretch out on my bed to read.

I felt I owned the things my parents bought me  My bike, toys, a model airplane kit. I was expected to take care of them.  My father showed me how to oil my bike, adjust the brake pads, even change a flat tire. Since I rode it fast and rough at times I made the effort to do the basic maintenance.  

I didn’t particularly care about clothes.  I wore what my mother bought for me.  When I was at school or out playing, she’d search through my closet and drawers to pick out what she felt had to be washed.  A day later they would be folded or hung back up again for me to wear. 

Some things were part of the family.  I watched the TV, ate off the dishes, opened the refrigerator, drove in the car.  I never gave much thought to who owned them. Again I was expected to take care of them.  “Don’t get mud in the car.” “Careful of that plate; it might break.” “Don’t twist the TV tuner so hard.” “Don’t jump on the bed.” “Feet off the couch.”  The usual childhood admonishments.  I never felt deprived although at times I did covet something I wanted, like my older brother’s transistor radio.  

Still, even an economy as robust as the one in the 1950s was inherently fragile, subject to a myriad of conflicting forces.  The 1957 recession showed what goes up can come down. Chastened by their experiences in the thirties, my parents were wary of the optimism imbued in economic growth. When they were kids in the 1920s, there was enough work for their fathers, plenty for their mothers to buy; by the 1930s, when “times were tough” as my father would tell me, things had tipped backwards.  No jobs, a distinct sense of uncertainty, little money to spend on consumer goods. 

That’s part of the reason for the frugality my mother in particular practiced during the good times of the fifties. She’d save the tinsel for next Christmas when she took down the Christmas tree. Clothes would be patched; shoes sent to the cobbler, paper bags saved. She’d try to get as much out of something as possible.  As part of that strategy there were a number of artifacts in the house in Hyde Park  which had been carried along by my parents from their earlier households.

For example, there were these egg-shaped wooden forms that my mother would use to darn socks just like her mother had.  They’d fit into the sock giving a taut surface on which to sew.  I’m not sure I ever saw her use one.  Probably because I was using them as a toy.  They had the spherical shape of a bomb which meant they could be transported in truck caravans until of course, inevitably, they blew up.  Lots of things blew up during our games. 

While the only thing that went into my shoes were my feet, my father fit his shoes with shoe trees, a wooden device approximating the shape of the foot which would be placed inside each pair of fancy dress shows to maintain their shape. I remember them from Jamaica Plain. When they weren’t inside shoes they likewise served as a play thing for me and my younger brother.  They made great trains or large trucks.  I’d build a wall of used flashlight batteries that the shoe tree train would then crash through. I’d have to be careful though.  They shoe trees were articulated with a front part and heel part connected with a moveable hinge which could pinch my hand if I were careless.  The shoe tree’s revenge. 

There were dishes we used only on holidays, large platters, fancy bowls, our nutcracker and white glass nut bowl.  All had come from previous households.

I also liked to play with shoe horns, those little scooped metal tools that levered your foot into a shoe. We seemed to have a lot of them.   One or two of the shoe horns around our house were old, worn, not shiny, with faded letters that spelled out TRADE MARK, all in caps. Already quite old when I played with them. They may have gone back to my grandparent’s time. I’d attempt to use them for their original purpose although they were not that effective with sneakers.

Down the cellar at his workbench my father had a number of tools that had once belonged to his father. Some, like the items I’ve already mentioned, had to do with shoes since my grandfather worked for many years for Green Shoe in Boston.   Nippers, files and rasps, a tack hammer.  My father found other uses for them

My mother did not work outside of the house.  She did enough work inside the house.  Everything seemed to have a number of steps.  Today you wash clothes, throw them in the dryer, do a little touch up ironing. In the mid 50s, you’d wash clothes and then take the shirts and pants out for more specialized care.  Some of the shirts might be hung on the line to air dry before ironing.  The pants might wind up in pants stretchers.

Coming home from school I’d sometimes find several pairs of pants stretched out and rigid on top of a bed.  Inside each pant leg was the stretcher, a long rectangle form made of metal which not only was an aid to preventing wrinkles and keeping the shape of the pants crisp and taut but also helped with shrinkage.  I didn’t play with pants stretchers. Too fragile and I didn’t want to pinch my fingers where the top part slid into the bottom.  Still I loved seeing those pants extended out on the bed.  I thought of pants as something you’d crumble into a ball and throw into a drawer, the fate of my pants.  But these seemed ready to stand up and walk around the room.

Twice a year or so I’d come home from school to find my mother had taken down the window curtains for cleaning.  To dry them flat and straight she used a curtain stretcher.  I recall this as a wooden frame over which the curtain was stretched and then fastened with pins.  How my mother managed with just two hands to attach a curtain within that frame and then pin it tight always put me in awe. I barely noticed the curtains when they hung by the living room windows but when stretched I always knelt down in front of them to look closely at the intricacies of pattern and design.

Does anyone use moth balls anymore? They were to prevent moths from eating clothes. The only moths I ever saw were the ones circling porch lights on hot summer nights like crazed atoms flying around a nucleus. Apparently during daytime hours, when the street lights were off, the moths congregated in closets and drawers to feast on silk and wool clothes. Sometimes I’d come across a moth ball or two as I was rummaging around a drawer.  Naphthalene.  That was the main ingredient.  Flammable and poisonous.  We were told at an early age not to eat moth balls.  I liked the smell and may have occasionally picked one up to take a deep whiff.  Odors are intrinsically linked to vivid memories.  I’m sure if I smelled a moth ball today with its strong, pungent, even sweet odor, I’d be right back in my upstairs room, the drawer open, the clothes pushed aside revealing scattered moth balls. Along with the smell of gasoline, a ten year-old’s drug of choice.  

One way to kill moth larvae was to wash clothes in a strong detergent in very hot water.  I didn’t do any laundry as a kid.  I may have occasionally put an article of my clothing in the hamper.  My mother did the laundry.  As a young wife she used a scrub board.The excess water was removed by twisting the clothes with your hands.  Lots of effort, water everywhere.   By the early fifties my mother had a washing machine with a tub, agitator and wringer.  Once clean, each article of clothing would then be put through the wringer, two rollers through which the clothes were guided using a hand-crank or a powered crank called a mangler.  More than one pair of hands were “mangled” during the early days of this device. Then, after moving to Hyde Park, my mother had her own automatic washer.  Put clothes in, add soap, turn it on.  The only problem came during the wringing cycle.  The basket would spin so fast the machine itself might begin to shake and even dance across the cellar floor.  There were times my mother had to redistribute the load to prevent excessive vibrations.  

Before my mother had a dryer, I remember summer afternoons in the backyard with a line full of washed clothes fluttering brightly in the breeze. I’d run through them letting a wet, soap-scented sheet or towel slap against my face and then run up across my hair.  Sometimes the sheet or towel I’d be running through would fall onto the ground requiring me to finagle with clothes pins to try to reattach it.  If I couldn’t reach up that far I’d casually toss it back across the clothes line. 

In the short hallway linking the kitchen to my parents’ bedroom, there was a closet on the left in which my father had cut a small hole in the floor so my mother could drop clothes into a basket next to the washing machine in the cellar. This was my father’s solution to her complaints about walking down the cellar stairs with armfuls of clothes.  I loved having a hole in the floor.  Often I’d get on my hands and knees inside the closet just to look down into the cellar.  It was as good as the trap doors I had seen in movies.  Now I had one.

The laundry detergents in the mid fifties all came in large boxes  adazzle with colorful swirls and circles, some with cooing babies, no doubt very happy to be in just washed diapers.  It was the names of the products, though, that struck me.  Many of them had just three, four letters. Lux. All. Tide. Duz.  Not sure what the names had to do with cleaning clothes. Maybe “All” referred to being worthy of washing any type of clothing: work shirts, dress pants, wool socks, underwear, suits of armor.  “Tide” cleaned like the tide coming in and out? Duz?  Wasn’t sure about that one.  “Duz” does clothes?  Ivory Snow gave one the impression that just washed clothes were as clean as newly fallen snow.  Oxydol was always a puzzle. It was advertised as making clothes four to five shades brighter than other soaps without bleach. Were my red and blue shirts brighter?  Did I care? 

Then there was Oakite. This was an all purpose detergent.  It was advertised as a gentle, grease-dissolving cleaner.  Just as dull, lackluster clothing was anathema to housewives or so proclaimed the laundry soap advertisements, the dispersal of grease appeared to be high on the everyday list of chores every housewife looked forward to.

Oakite was used on walls, floors, tile, linoleum, concrete, glass, even to bring sparkle to a tea kettle, any place where grease might lurk.  I never cleaned with it of course. I just liked the name.  It had the word “oak” in it and the word “kite”.  That was enough for me.

Packaging in the fifties was different than it is today.  More metal and glass, less plastic.  Of particular interest to me as a kid were the metal boxes that Band-Aids came in. Not only would a Band-Aid make you feel better about a minor abrasion, once the metal box was empty you could use it to store valuable things like crayons, cards, chalk, or marbles.  I like the way the metal lid snapped shut.  Once something was inside, it stayed inside. This was of particular importance if the can was full of marbles.  Once marbles tumbled out of a container with an unsecured lid, a few would always roll to the most inaccessible corner of the room to remain hidden forever. Behind the legs of beds or couches was a particularly good spot for marbles to disappear.  I can understand how marbles wanted to escape, perhaps fed up with being banged into other marbles.  “It’s not a game to me.”

Empty cans and jars had a second life in my house as storage. My father’s work bench had rows of small grape juice cans, the ones concentrated grape juice would come in, tomato cans, mustard and relish jars.  In them would be nuts and screws, washers, nails, drill bits, pencils, even a pickle jar would be half-filled with paint or motor oil. 

The house in Hyde Park was an amalgam of bits and pieces, of the old and the new, of mine and yours and theirs, to be used and played with, to be purchased and discarded, to be part of growing up, to be cherished and taken for granted, to be integral yet nonessential, to be remembered and forgotten, to be part of that life then and the underpinnings of the memories of that life.

Distinctively Ordinary

In January 1956 I was in 6th grade. In December 1956 I was in seventh grade.   Going from elementary school to Junior High School was a significant transition. Read about it in the blog, Big Yellow School House: 7 and 8.  There were some things about school that barely changed from year to year, the walk to school, the walk back, and the meal I started each day with. Breakfast. 

I'd never see my father when I came down to breakfast on a school day. By the time I was sitting at the table he was already at work. I rarely saw my older brother who, in 1956, had started high school. He liked to get there early, hang out with his friends, and smoke cigarettes. Before she got married, my sister too was off to work before I came down for breakfast.  My father's role was to work.  The kids’ roles were to do well in school. My mother's role was to make sure it all went smoothly.  My mother was the hero in all this. She was up early every morning to see my father off, deal with Mildred, try to get Ralph to have something for breakfast, even if it was just a bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes, and then attend to me and my younger brother. I can understand her relief when she finally had the house to herself during the day.

When my sister Mildred was still living with us, my younger brother and I had breakfast at a table in the corner of an already small kitchen.  Size and space don’t mean much to a kid. Every morning, I'd tuck myself in a chair in the corner and wait to see what was on the breakfast menu. 

We had more space after Mildred married. Her bedroom became our new dining room.  But the food and the service remained the same.  Cereal was always a big deal.  We saw ads for cereal every time we turned on the TV.  I loved looking at all the cereal boxes lined up row upon row in the grocery store.  Lists of ingredients, nutritional and calorie guides, expiration dates, none of this information was required to be printed on food packaging during my childhood. Lots of sugar was added to cereals but my mother did try to find some she considered healthy.  Cheerios was a staple as were raisin bran and Wheaties. Whole grain at least. The most healthy, the least adulterated, was shredded wheat, the large biscuits, not the frosted coated minis.

The 1950s marked the beginning of the age of heavily sugared cereals.  Sugar wasn’t a hidden ingredient, it was right there in the name. Sugar Frosted Flakes, Sugar Pops, Sugar Smacks. Sugar Jets. Lots of sugar. In a prominent place on our breakfast table was the sugar bowl just in case I wanted to add more sugar.  Which I often did.

Each cereal required different strategies during breakfast. My cereal bowl was slightly smaller than the shredded wheat biscuit. You had to work it into the bowl the best you could, cover it with sugar, and then pour on the milk.   Shredded Wheat was inedible without the milk. Then a bit of a waiting game as the shredded wheat absorbed the milk. As it became more pliable, you’d use your spoon to mold the softening shredded wheat to fit the bowl contours. However, if you added too much milk, by the time you were halfway done eating it, you ran the risk of the shredded wheat becoming soggy.  No one liked soggy.  One of the reasons so much sugar was added to cereal is that the sugar coated the outside delaying the sog factor.

Those first few spoonfuls of Cheerios were so good, moist but still crunchy. But before too long they began to dissolve into the milk.  Ultra sogginess. The strategy was to take not one large bowlful but several small ones.  Each cereal had its own ritual.  After pouring milk onto Rice Krispies, you'd press your ear against the top of the bowl to hear them "Snap, Crackle, and Pop."  Trix came in colors so sometimes I'd separate the colors out and eat each color separately.  Alpha bits were introduced in the late 50s, an oat cereal shaped like letters. You'd always try to spell your name before you ate them. More difficult was to spell your name in the bowl after you added milk.  Always challenges at breakfast.

Sugar Pops was one of the few cereals I did not add extra sugar to. Even I knew when enough was enough. As for sugar, Sugar Smacks was the worst, over half sugar by weight.  More off putting than all the sugar was the disconcerting picture of the clown on the front of the box. Wheaties billed itself as the Breakfast of Champions.  I added raisins to it and lots of sugar. One cereal we never had at breakfast was Special K which was introduced in the mid fifties as something you ate to lose weight.  It likely had very little sugar. 

One of my favorites was the Kellogg’s variety pack.  Little individual boxes with perforations on the back.  You could cut the box open and eat the cereal right out of the box!   Originally the variety pack consisted of cereals like Pep and Bran Flakes and All-Wheat Flakes which no amount of milk or sugar could improve.  By the mid-50s the selections were more kid friendly, smaller versions of our everyday cereals.  More important than the contents was the fun of eating it out of the package. I loved that. It could be tricky.  The back of each little box had those perforations which were supposed to split open from a little pressure with your fingernails. That rarely worked.  I usually ended up using a sharp knife to cut the back open.  I’d fold the edges back like wings and then pour in a little milk.  If the operation had been successful I’d settle in and enjoy this special way of eating Rice Krispies or Sugar Pops.  But if the knife had nicked the bottom of the box, milk started leaking onto the table.  Not willing to give up eating out of the box, I’d just plop the box into a bowl and add milk as it leaked out. 

There were hot cereals in winter.  Oatmeal and Cream of Wheat.  Essential to both was adding enough milk to work out all the lumps and enough sugar to make it palatable. I’d make a dent in the middle of the Cream of Wheat, add just a little milk, mix it up, add more until the lumps were out.  Then add sugar and more milk, stirring it about.  By the time I ate it, it was cold! 

Of course it wasn't only eating the cereal, it was reading the back of the box.   I always liked looking at the shredded wheat box. On the front was a drawing of Niagara Falls.  It was a place I had heard a lot about from school, along with Old Faithful and the Grand Canyon.  I’d think about one day actually going there to see it. 

Sometimes we'd have two or even three boxes of cereal on the table at once. I'd arrange them in front of me like a wall to annoy my brother.  "I'm eating in private today," I'd say. "I don't want to look at anyone."  My brother would then knock the boxes over until my mother told us to "Cut it out."

Speaking of cutting it out, there were sometimes masks on the back of the boxes, although being made of cereal packaging they were never flexible enough to fit properly.  The single most important thing about cereal, however, was what was inside.  I don't mean the cereal.  Every cereal box when I was eleven had some little toy or prize inside.  When a new box of cereal showed up, you'd pour out a bigger bowl than usual making it easier to bend the box at the sides in order to jiggle the cereal around in an effort to find the prize.   Of course my mother would say, "You can't look for the prize until you eat all the cereal." But that never stopped us from looking almost immediately.

There were things like toy solders, whistles, decoder rings, scale model cars. Once we asked my mother to keep buying Wheaties for the miniature license plates that were packed inside. Kids would put them on their bikes.  I liked that they were metal and not plastic. Another promotion was a spinning toy called a flying saucer.  Wind it on a release device and it was supposed to fly up in the air fifteen feet. Super fun as the package said.  We’d try it in the house finding it super fun when the disc slammed against the ceiling. One of the better prizes was a US Navy Frogman which you could fuel with “a high pressure propellant”.  That propellant was baking soda which you placed in the foot of the frogman.  They sort of sometimes actually worked.

My brother and I always ate a big breakfast. Cereal was just the first course. Sometimes there'd be pancakes or French toast.  With pancakes, you'd stack them up and drown them in syrup. We had an odd custom with French toast.  I didn’t mind eating the crust but the pieces we cut with our forks and knives in the center were softer and tasted more like egg.  We had a name for those crustless pieces.  We called them eskimos.  I have no idea where the phrase came from.  My brother and I would have a contest to see who would have the most eskimos from a single slice of toast.  Of course, it just meant cutting each piece smaller and smaller.  As usual each piece of toast was covered in butter and syrup, sometimes jam. 

More nutritious were eggs.  I considered fried or scrambled eggs part of an adult breakfast. Besides I didn’t know the difference between sunny side up and over easy. I preferred what in our house we called a dropped egg on toast which was a poached egg placed, not dropped, on a piece of dry toast. I’d play around with it, eating the white first, trying not to puncture the yellow until I just had a little toast left. Then I’d swoop in with my knife and fork and let the yellow yoke flood over my plate. 

My favorite was a soft-boiled egg that my mother served in an egg cup.  With a spoon, you'd lightly tap on the top of the egg deftly removing the tiny bits of shell until the egg was revealed.  Then you'd dip your spoon in eating separately the yellow first, then the white.  Sometimes I'd shake in salt.

I liked bananas at breakfast just so I could use a butter knife to cut them into slices. I got good at it, the butter knife indenting and then cutting through the soft fruit, each slice landing on the cereal just where I had aimed.  Then you had an empty skin to deal with.  I'd place it near my brother, sometimes in his bowl.  "Cut it out!"

Breakfast was different on the weekends than during the week.  On the weekends there'd be bacon. My father would be sitting at the end of the table having a glass of grape juice from the big Welch's bottle. (Other times my mother would make grape juice from frozen concentrate from tiny icy cans.) "Good for the blood sugar," my father would say as he lifted the glass.  Never understood what that meant.  As far as I knew blood and sugar had nothing to do with each other.

Orange juice was another staple, from concentrate usually, those tiny icy cans again.  Every once in a while a larger can would appear at the table, punched on opposite sides on the top in order to pour out a mixture of orange and grapefruit juice.  I always thought orange and grapefruit went so well together, that combination of sweetness and tartness, in a way orange and grape never would.

Once a week or so a half of grapefruit would appear in front of me. It was left to me to cut out each section. First I’d work around the outside and then slice around each segment.  At least two teaspoons of sugar would then coat the top. Good for my blood sugar. It was difficult to avoid a squirt or two of juice as one segment or another, in spite of my best efforts, was still attached to the membrane.  Work your spoon around it.  Dig in. Squirt. At least it missed my eye.  Breakfast was always an adventure.

During a school week, aside from my mother, brother and me, there was often someone else sharing the breakfast routine with us.  The guy on the radio.  The radio was on top of a hutch in the corner.  Music, news and DJ patter floated over our heads every morning.

In the mid to late 50s, we’d listen to either WHDH or WBZ, the most popular stations among adults at that time.  Rock ’n’ roll was beginning to take hold.  On their transistor radios, a recent innovation that would have a large impact on media in the future, kids listened to WMEX or another teen station.  My mother was in charge of the radio during weekday mornings so the music was more Doris Day than Elvis.  I liked Elvis but didn’t mind the pop songs I ate my Cheerios to and cracked open my soft-boiled egg with.

I took some of the songs I heard literally. One, sung by Tony Bennett, was called In the Middle of an Island. I did wonder how he got to this island in the middle of the ocean.  Cartoon drawings that I saw of islands in the middle of the ocean were tiny with a single palm tree and not much to sing about. I liked Tammy by Debbie Reynolds.  I thought it poignant and sad. Some of the songs were odd to me. Perry Como sang about catching a falling star while David Seville’s topic was a witch doctor and Sheb Wooley warned us about a purple people eater.  There were a few I couldn’t get out of my head.  Put a Light in the Window was a rousing tune by The Four Lads while the Everly Brother bemoaned Bye Bye Love.  I also liked the story songs, The Three Bells by The Browns and Deck of Cards by Wink Martindale. Remember I am just a teenager, an age reflected not only in the cereal I eat but also the level of sophistication required to admire such songs.

In 1959 there was a song I anticipated hearing every morning and would be disappointed if it wasn’t on the ‘BZ playlist.  High School USA. In it the singer mentioned every high school in the Boston area.  “Come Friday afternoon/Bout a half past three/I drop my books and my misery.”  After “dropping coin” in the jukebox, the singer starts shouting out to all the school kids.  Kids from Southie and Charlestown High, Dorchester, West Roxbury.  Having heard the song a number of times I always anticipated my local high school, the one my brother went to, Hyde Park High.  I’d have to listen carefully or I’d miss it.

Later I found out the singer, Tommy Facenda, recorded 28 different versions of the song, each mentioning high schools in cities as varied as New York, Seattle, Nashville, Hartford and, of course, Boston. It was a gimmick but one that caught my attention. 

Carl de Suze was the voice of early morning on WBZ.  I imagine he thought he was talented; I did not concur.  He had a sing-song kind of voice, a low key geniality that housewives may have been drawn to but not me.  He talked a lot.  At the top of the hour as part of the station break he’d ask, “Aaaaarrre you theeerrre?”   “I’m here,” I’m shouting back to him in my head.  “I can’t be anywhere else. Play the high school song. Just stop talking!”

WHDH was known as the station where master humorists Bob and Ray got their start.  They had both gone on to bigger things by the time I listened while eating my cereal. Jess Cain was the morning guy on ‘HDH.  He was more my speed than de Suze, more friendly, funnier.  

Lots of news on in the morning in the mid-fifties.  Although all news stations were still some years away, WBZ then was considered the best in Boston.  Eisenhower was president, one of fourteen I have lived with or in spite of. Vietnam was in the future.  The war we had when I was eleven was a cold one of threats and bluffs, each side supporting proxy wars that served their interests.  I knew a little about all this by reading the Boston Globe and Life magazine.  On the radio I was more interested in a funny or off-beat story, a kicker that typically ended the news broadcast. A fad then were college kids, always college kids, stuffing themselves into phone booths or Volkswagens.  I’d always listen to hear if some college had broken the latest record.  I also wondered how some of the kids at the bottom of the phone booth didn’t suffocate with all the other kids piled on top of them.  Some decidedly serious stories I’d listen to intently.  The Andrea Doria sinking off Nantucket in 1956 was one. I couldn’t swim so the idea of falling off an ocean liner into the awful churning cold of the Atlantic Ocean was a terrifying thought. 

Another story on the news alarmed me. A coal mine deep in the earth at Springhill, Nova Scotia had collapsed trapping a number of miners.  Most were eventually rescued but the thought of them in the darkness wondering not if but when they were going to die, without food or water, was particularly upsetting to me.  Most shocking was a mention on the news they had drunk some of their own urine in order to survive. Not only could I not imagine me doing that, I was taken aback that something as personal as peeing was even mentioned on the radio.  The fifties were an inhibited time. The only people who might talk about drinking your pee were some of the more indelicate kids at school. For an adult to mention it, on a public forum like the radio, was astonishing.  It did, however, make very clear to me how desperate were the conditions of the people trapped in that mine.

 Markets, Super and Otherwise

Someone had to buy all the food I consumed at breakfast, and the rest of the day too.  Those Cheerios did not show up on their own. When I was ten, eleven, twelve, my mother, with my little brother in tow, would meet me after school for grocery shopping.  She obviously did not want me at home alone so I made the best of it. Our first stop was Kennedy's Butter and Egg store on River Street. Like most of the stores my mother had been going to for the past thirty years, Kennedy's was a specialty store.  The name was the store.  Butter, eggs, cheese, they even ground their own peanut butter.

At the counter my mother would order a pound of butter.  The clerk would scoop it out of a large container, plop it on a piece of waxed paper and then weigh it.  Unlike modern “butter” spreads which tend to melt under a lightbulb, butter in the fifties, loaded with fat, could hold up on a warm summer’s day during the hour or so before it finally made it back home to the cold depository of the family refrigerator. 

The inside of Kennedy’s was all atmosphere.  It was small, lit with warm light, and had a fragrance in the air.  They also sold bacon there.  Bacon, butter, peanut butter.  Maybe that's what the aroma  was.

A few stores down was Lodgens’ Market. Though not a modern supermarket, it was primarily self serve, the groceries on shelves you could reach. In the 1930s, my mother told me, clerks behind the counter retrieved the items customers wanted sometimes using tongs to reach that box of corn meal way up by the ceiling.

Although Lodgens was self serve for groceries, meat was different.  I'd sometimes wait next to my mother at the meat counter to watch the clerk weigh some pork chops or partition out a pound of hamburg from the enormous amount inside the case. Lots of white paper to wrap everything up and then string to secure it. The bakery counter was the same way.  "Give me a loaf of that dark rye.  Slice it."  When he was done the clerk would slip it into a white bag.

I found enough to do at Lodgens while my mother shopped the aisles.  Looking at the lobsters in the glass tank, I wondered how much those little wooden pegs stuck in their claws hurt. I’d look at the fish laid on out beds of ice wondering if they saw anything through those glazed eyes. If someone bought a whole fish, I wondered, did they give you the head part as well.  And what would you do with the head?  Lots of questions.  Although pickles were in jars by this time, there was often a barrel full of dill pickles somewhere next to the lunch meat counter.  There was a ladle next to the barrel which I’d use to poke at the pickles, sink some of them and watch how quickly they resurfaced.  I loved the smell.  Here we go with smells again.  Briny, pungent. Like pickles.

Mostly I’d just wander around the aisles.  I got to know the store pretty well. I’d check out the cereal, see which ones had toys or games inside like plastic cars, or, even better, plastic airplanes. Some had 3D glasses inside so you could look at the picture on the back in 3D.  There was that awesome submarine that ran on baking powder or the equally awesome frogman that ran on baking soda.  Did I know the difference between the two propellants?  Some boxes of cereal had iron-on patches enclosed but my mother never wanted to ruin a perfectly good shirt by ironing at the necessary high heat to make the patch stick on. My brother and I would plot ways to convince my mother to buy this cereal or that based entirely on the prize.

Toward the back of the store there was a cul de sac where a couple of aisles met in a corner. I liked going back there.  It seemed remote from the rest of the store. A good place to take a breather for a minute or two before going back to prowling the aisles. There’d be cleaning supplies on the shelves back here.  It’s where I’d study the names of detergents still trying to puzzle them out.

By the time I started junior high Lodgens had become too small for my mother. She now preferred a much bigger store, the Supreme Market, an actual supermarket, meat pre-wrapped, bread you could select yourself, but it was in Mattapan.  This required a bus ride down River Street.   A change in logistics then.  Even though shopping day remained the same, Wednesday, I had to be more precise in meeting my mother so we could catch the bus opposite the Municipal Building to get to Mattapan.

River Street ran parallel to, not surprisingly, the Neponset River.  There were too many houses in the way to see more than a flash of the river as I rode the bus but I liked knowing it was right over there behind those houses.  It showed up again across the street where we got off the bus. A slow stream most of the year, in March, buoyed by snowmelt, the river gained considerable speed and volume. In Mattapan it flowed behind some of the commercial buildings on Blue Hills Parkway.  At this time of year the water was halfway up some rear doors.  What ever was inside must be flooded. I always wanted to go inside one of the those buildings to look. Water belonged outside. How odd it would be, I thought, to have water filling your cellar or even first floor, glistening darkly, furniture floating by, a fish nibbling at your TV screen. 

Part of the Mattapan shopping ritual included a treat for my brother and me.  After getting off the bus we’d cross Cummins Highway and then walk up Blue Hill Avenue, past the Oriental Theatre to the Brigham’s ice cream shop on the corner at Fairway Street.

Brigham’s was a Boston institution.  A classic ice cream parlor.  The one in Mattapan was typical of the chain, a small interior, dark, a counter and booths. This was before the chain expanded to restaurant size in the early 60s.  There were just a few flavors of ice cream when we went there.  Of those I only liked vanilla or strawberry.  I could never understand why anyone would eat coffee ice cream or another Brigham’s choice, mocha ice cream which was a blend of coffee and chocolate.  Sometimes I’d see someone eating a peppermint stick cone.  Ice cream with sticky bits of peppermint candy in it.  My mother would like the butter pecan.  But I was adverse to ice cream that contained anything you had to chew.  The one exception might be the chocolate chip.

The cones were sugar cones as opposed to the plain wafer cones. Two sizes.  We always got the small ones. The most significant aspect of the Brigham’s cones were the free chocolate sprinkles the cones were dipped into before they were handed over to us. The sprinkles were called “Jimmies” supposedly named after the man who invented them, a guy named James. “You want jimmies on those cones?”  Who would say no to that question.  Yes, you had to chew the jimmies but a cone without jimmies was just not the same.  They are a significant childhood memory to any kid who ever had a Brigham’s ice cream cone.

Twice a year we would have something at Brigham’s that was even better than a jimmy-covered cone.  On our birthday’s, my brother’s and mine, my mother would treat us to a Brigham’s hot fudge sundae.  This was a scoop of vanilla ice cream covered with a layer of hot chocolate sauce, then marshmallow and walnuts.  Yes, more stuff to chew. The sundaes were best just at the point when the hot fudge was beginning to melt the ice cream but hadn’t yet turned it into ice cream soup, the nuts adding just a needed bit of substance.

This was a whole different level of dessert.  Something we would never have at home.  Eating that sundae in its shiny metal dish sitting at a booth on a Wednesday afternoon in the muted light of the Brigham’s in Mattapan was a wonderful moment of childhood.  It only happened twice a year, in March and November, our birthdays.  I wonder how my mother celebrated her birthday?

Filled with ice cream, we walked back up Blue Hills Avenue to the Supreme Market. For my mother the Supreme was about easy access and choice. It was cheaper than Lodgens as well. To me the Supreme was just a bigger store in which to get into trouble.

My mother would wheel her cart around doing the real business of getting food for us while my brother and I explored the different aisles.  I’d look through some magazines, check out what new toys might be in cereal boxes, and wonder how they stacked all those cans at the end of an aisle. I had seen enough Abbott and Costello and Jerry Lewis movies to know what would happen if someone, without thinking, pulled a can from the bottom of the pyramid.  I could imagine the cascade of cans rolling in every direction. I was tempted to try it with a stack of cookie boxes but fortunately thought better of it.

Supreme Market had a little of everything.  Some aisles were all paper products, or pet food.  Then there was the aisle that seemed more appropriate in a five and dime.  Candles, tablecloths, knick knacks.  I don’t know whose idea it was, mine or my brother’s, maybe something we decided upon mutually, maybe it was the Brigham’s ice cream talking, but on our weekly trips to the Supreme we began to consider how risky it would be to steal some of the smaller items to give people for Christmas.  No, we were not aware of the irony.

We had spotted the items we wanted some weeks before, little ceramic figurines of dogs.  I liked the collie, my brother the terrier.  Every week as Christmas approached we would plot our caper. We’d pick up the dogs and carry them around the store as if we were still shopping but really determining if anyone else even noticed.  In particular the clerk in aisle seven stocking shelves.  No one noticed.  Then we would put them back on the shelf.  Until one day we didn’t. Carrying them around the store we found an empty aisle where we transferred the little dogs, silently barking in protest, from our hands to our pockets.

My mother had not completed her shopping yet so we continued to walk around as inconspicuous as possible.  The dogs couldn’t have cost more than a dollar but I felt I was carrying an expensive diamond in my pocket. All eyes are upon me as my mother checks out.  Will we even make it out of the store?   We did give them to our mother for Christmas that year.  She was pleased with our efforts which she assumed to be honest.  For years she kept them on a shelf in the living room.  I liked seeing them there when I would visit in later years though at times I felt they might be staring at me, in an odd glassy way, to remind me of how they had ended up in our house in the first place

I liked to watch my mother unload the shopping cart onto the conveyor belt.  Sometimes a box of cereal would teeter and fall over as the belt jumped into motion.  No bar codes then.  The clerk would ring in every item. I thought them very proficient, their fingers running over the number keys barely looking at the item they were tabulating.  After a while I suppose they knew exactly what a can of soup cost or a jar of pickles.

Another skill in short supply in today’s supermarkets is bagging the groceries.  At the Supreme I saw there was a rhythmic style to it.  Shaking out the bag, gripping an item, placing it at the bottom of the bag, another next to it, lighter items in the middle, bread on top, maybe a slot left on the side where a bunch of celery would be fitted.  Bagging was like filling an empty space with puzzle pieces.  You couldn’t force a piece in the wrong spot.  A jar of mayonnaise did not work at the top; a bag of marshmallows did not belong at the bottom Often the baggers were the cashiers. The experienced ones worked in a blur, one hand filling the bag with the other reaching for the next item.

Bags snuggled in the carriage, my mother would wheel it out to the edge of the parking lot where we would wait for my father to pick us up on his way home from work  I didn’t mind waiting in the spring or fall but in the dark, in the winter, the wait was the most tedious thing about shopping. After a while all my attention would be focused on looking up Cummins Highway to spot my father’s car.  It could take a while.  Finally. I’d hand the bags to my father, load up the back of the station wagon, reverse the process at home, pass bags in through the kitchen door. Then the wait to eat, an irony that supper was always late on shopping day.  

Flashes of Time

All those Wednesdays helping (Did I help?) with the shopping, all those years of breakfasts, all the seasons walking back and forth to school, autumns darkening into winters, winters brightening into springs.  All blur in time.  I used to think it would be nice to have a movie camera in my head to help distinguish among all those bowls of Cheerios.  My father had a movie camera, a real one, which captured some of the moments as they happened.  Our home movies are now on VHS, a format as dated as the original films.  Watching them without sound, backed by sentimental music, I realize even home movies can be as ambiguous as any conclusion I take from my own memories.

The movie camera my father had, and my recollection is that it was made by Revere, was a double 8 camera. It used 16mm film but exposed only half of its width on its first pass through the camera. Then you had to open the camera in complete darkness in order to flip the spool of film so that the other side of the film could be exposed.  You’d then mail it away. My father sent it to Kodak where after development the film would be cut down the middle resulting in two lengths of  film.  The two ends would be sliced together and then rolled onto a spool to make one reel of 8mm film.

Definitely crude compared to today’s instantly viewable HD images. Once the film was exposed, my father had to enclose it in a mailing envelope, stick lots of stamps on the outside, drop it in the mailbox and then wait, and wait, until it was processed. So it was always a thrill to receive that little yellow box with the finished film in the mail.  That night my father would set his film projector up on the kitchen table. We’d all gather around to watch the small color images that would flicker on the polished surface of the refrigerator, our projection screen, the whitest surface we had in the house. 

There I am, ten years old, waving to the camera as I stand next to my brothers, or running toward the camera at the Blue Hills parking lot. The image is small, a bit blurry, no sound, but to me they are as good as any film I’d watch down to the Fairmount Theatre.  After all I was in them.

Our home movies purported to capture a sliver of reality at a particular moment in my life.  There I am as an eleven year-old in my backyard. But my memories of those times do not accurately match those quivering images. I still have to remember the scene with sound, what was going on outside the edges of the frame and what I did before and after this brief segment. Those movies may bring back a superficial memory or two but I realize the fragment of time they represent began to shift the instant the film was exposed.

There I am in the green backyard in summer running through a sprinkler.  Now the landscape is white. Its winter. I am with my brothers and father. There’s our dog, Laddie, barking silently, romping in the snow.  We have cut some of the branches from the nearby fir trees, spread them on the snow to rest on.  The camera records it all, small moments of one of the many walks we took along the trails in the Blue Hills.

Now the colors say Fall.  We are in the observation tower on top of Big Blue. I stand by one of the openings looking out.  It is so bright outside but so dark in the space that I am in silhouette. There’s a fleeting shot  of Fairmount Hill, the drumlin of both my memories and perception. The scene changes again.  A person my father works with has invited us down to his family’s cottage on the beach at Fairhaven  It would be August of 1956.  There I am.  A skinny kid in a bathing suit.  The air is hazy with blue smoke from the grill.  I am eating, smiling, standing, sitting, walking to the water, drinking a soda.  All of it flickers by.  

Is this the kid I am writing about? Is this me? It has to be. The camera doesn’t lie, does it? I look happy.  But I remember I was an anxious kid.  I look friendly and social but I know I could be moody and socially inept. I look amiable but I also know I could fly into rages.  It looks like I am getting along with my parents but I don’t want them to know very much about my life.  Still, those are my movements, my facial expressions, the place where I was on that day in August, 1956.  It happened just like it happened in the movie.  But I know the world that was happening just outside the frame was where I really lived. 

I was also behind the camera.  1956 was the year of improvements to our house. I took movie film of my father excavating a spot behind the house where the concrete patio would go. He is in his work pants and ribbed undershirt.  It is September.  Nearby is a pickaxe and a wheelbarrow. He is holding a shovel.  The trees are still green.  

A month before, August, he is perched on a ladder on the side of the house by the driveway. He is painting.  I am taking the movie from the street end of the driveway. The blue of the house contrasts beautifully with the green of the trees.  It’s about twenty seconds of film.  I remember the clicking sound as the film moved along its perforations inside the camera. My father is in his early 40s, the age I passed by thirty years ago. In the years since, that paint peeled off the house, was reapplied several times more, chipped off and faded away, until finally it was clad over with vinyl siding. But on that bit of film my father is painting it for the first time.  I wonder if he is still up there somewhere painting the sky.

The View from Here to There

The home movies offer not much more than a constricted local view of my life in the mid fifties. My world view was even more limited. Still as a kid I knew a lot more than a ten year-old from a century or two before. I knew the earth was round. I knew where the continents were relative to each other. I knew something about the bigger countries on each of those continents.  I had some vague ideas about the cultures, religions and politics of the people who lived in those countries even though much of that knowledge was influenced by the on-going Cold War which pushed me into viewing the world as black and white, us and them, good and bad. Was it that simple?

A number of things helped me to see the world as more complex. Certainly, getting older, having more experiences, was a factor. Being on my own away from my parents, at school, with friends, out by myself, contributed to my awareness there was a bigger picture.  I did page through the Boston Globe every evening.  Yes, mostly the funny pages, known as comic strips outside Boston, and the movie page.  But I did glance at the front page.  In those days newspapers had varying sizes of print to determine which stories the editors felt were the most important ones.  A third of the front page was given over to the headline, the top story, four, five, six words in the largest type, designed to grab your attention, sell the paper, get you to read more. “DEMS PICK STEVENSON.” “EGYPT NATIONALIZES SUEZ CANAL”  “GRACE MARRIES PRINCE” 

At that point my own thoughts weren’t much more than headlines themselves. I wasn’t aware of the specifics, how the various countries and the people in them dealt with, were influenced by and reacted to what I knew only as generalities: capitalism, communism and colonialism. There was still much fallout from the shattered world of ten years before when the Second World War ended. Fallout too from on-going atmospheric nuclear tests, much of which rained down on Boston and other eastern cities.   

Every Thursday I’d get help in understanding the world.  It’s the day the new issue of Life magazine would show up at the house. Every week my eyes were being opened.  At the same time every week those feelings I began to have about the world not being a particularly nice place were, more often than not, corroborated. Most particularly in the fall of 1956.

In October that year a student demonstration quickly escalated into a full scale revolt against the Hungarian Communist government which soon collapsed.  Members of the secret police, pro-Soviet sympathizers and others in the wrong place at the wrong time were targeted by mobs.  I first read about all this in the Globe.  A cold war becomes hot.  It wasn’t until early November, however, when Life magazine showed up in the mailbox, that I got my first real look at what was going on.  Life pulled no punches in their photographic coverage. One sequence showed a group identified as secret police officers with their hands up surrendering.  Members of the crowd ignored this gesture and began to shoot.  One photo depicted the look of shock and anguish on the victims’ faces as the bullets struck.  I looked at those pictures a long time.  This is what death looks like.  It both astonished and stunned me. The last picture in the series showed the bodies crumpled on the street. 

Another series showed what the caption called “a civilian collaborator”, a young woman who looked like a secretary, being dragged from a building into the street where she is struck and pummeled.  The caption says she pleads for her life.  Who was she, I thought?  What did she do?  What ever happened to her?

The most explicit picture showed a badly beaten body identified as a secret police colonel hung upside down from a tree.  A woman leans forward and spits. “They shot our children,” she says.

I looked at these pictures by myself. I didn’t talk to my parents about them, what they meant, how I felt. We didn’t talk about such things in my family.  Maybe if I had brought it up we might have, but a combination of embarrassment and discomfiture prevented me. I  felt awkward in discussing such topics with anyone. I knew so little about things that I’d never be able to hold my own in a discussion.  I felt incompetent. I did need someone to explain what was going on, to put things in perspective, to make me feel the word was a safe place.  But since I never asked, no one knew how I might be feeling.

There was a period of calm after the initial days of violence in Hungary.  Even though Russia indicated it was open to negotiations,  the interim peace was fleeting.  The Russian idea of diplomacy was in the form of that hammer they liked to pair with the sickle.  It wasn’t long before Russian troops and tanks poured into Hungary to put down the revolt.

Even though there were pictures in the next week’s Life of refugees fleeing Hungary for Austria, the lead story was that of a different conflict on the other side of the world.  The French and the British had invaded Egypt over the Suez Canal which the Egyptians had nationalized in the summer.  Israel, feeling threatened by this move on Egypt’s part, was already on a war footing. More pictures of bodies in the streets, people fleeing.  Russia, again Russia, was threatening to intervene.  Life said the prospect of World War III loomed. I remember being so taken by a photo of a woman with three children and one suitcase. In the suitcase, she said, “was everything we have in the world”.

The last week of November. Another issue of Life.  Disturbing as they might be, I still wanted to know how these events would play out.   The lead article headline said it all. “Tanks and Yet More Tanks Raze Hungary.” That brief revolution was over.

The article on the Suez Crisis led with a picture of two women threading their way through dead bodies at Port Said in an effort to find a missing loved one.  There were also pictures in later issues showing the canal blocked with scuttled ships.  It would take months to clear them with oil prices taking a hit as a result.  Not that I knew or cared about that.  What astounded me was that adults were responsible for this  They purposely had sunk those ships to block the canal.  I knew I had a temper and would act impulsively if I became angry. I guess adults had tempers too.  That’s how I explained not only the destruction at the canal but the death and carnage in Eastern Europe. It was the only explanation of why a woman would spit on a dead person. It was not an explanation that brought me any comfort or understanding.  It did however further strengthen my belief the world was not a particularly nice place.

Earlier that fall there had been another run of issues of Life that had an effect on how I viewed the world.  The issue dated September 3, 1956 began the magazine's five part series on Segregation.

I was aware that many white people did not have a positive view of negroes, the polite term used then for African Americans.  The “colored” was another phrase I heard frequently when people talked about blacks.  There were worse terms.  We all know those words are a sad reflection upon the people who utter them.  As an eleven year-old I never thought about or was aware of the benefits accrued simply because my heritage was northern European.  I certainly didn’t feel privileged.  The series on segregation was a nudge in the direction of greater insight into how people treated each other based on stereotypical perception.

The first article in the series showed how people living in Africa were taken against their will to the Americas, to toil in tobacco, sugar and cotton fields, to care for livestock, to cook, wash clothes, to weave and sew, to work building railroads, to housekeep and childcare, all without pay and regard. Life was first and foremost a picture magazine.  Most of the illustrations were paintings.  They were gruesome. Long lines of men and women, force marched, tied with ropes and chains, linked together in groups with wooden poles.  It was worse on the slave ships.  One showed a slave being force fed on the deck of a ship while just below in dark, cramped quarters others were stowed like so much cargo. Every picture featured whips or chains.  It was frightening, and bewildering.  if slaves were valuable property, I thought, why were these individuals treated so poorly?  Who would pay good money for a slave that was weak with dysentery or whose back was scarred with welts from beatings? None of it made any sense. That might have been the most frightening part. 

The next few installments talked about the origin of Jim Crow laws in the south, signs that read “Colored Only”, the doctrine of separate but equal, the voices of southern whites rationalizing their prejudice, how black people really had it “good” contrasted with pictures showing the reality of the restraints on their everyday.  It was eye-opening.

The single most vivid image in the series was of the body of a black man, his charred remains still smoking amidst a crowd of grinning, taunting white people.  According to the caption, he had been accused of assaulting a white woman.  The man had been seized from jail, hung, and then shot numerous times before his body was dragged through the streets and finally set on fire.  As shocking as all this was, the thing I remember the most about that photograph was the face of a kid peering between two adults in a corner of the crowd.  He looked my age. On his face was that same smug look of satisfaction as he glimpsed the grisly scene in front of him.  The picture was from 1919.  I got another shock when reading the caption; this murder didn’t happen in the south but in Omaha, Nebraska.

Without an adult to confide in, I’m not able to put those Life magazine stories and pictures into context. I’m taking in more information than I am able to process. The pictures especially upset me. They also astonish me. Perhaps bewildered is the better way of putting it.  Closing the pages of the magazine I didn’t want to think about them anymore.  But the words and particularly those images persisted.  I couldn’t ignore them if I wanted to.  There’s another issue of Life magazine in the mailbox next week. 

From my own experiences in school and in the neighborhoods, I knew  there were certain kids you tried to avoid. These were the kids that seemed to enjoy hurting you.  Now I’m beginning to see there were adults that enjoyed hurting other people as well. That kid in the photo was emulating the behavior he saw in the adults around him. I had thought that every adult’s focus was to be cognizant of the welfare of children.  Not just their kids but any kids.  Now I began to conceive of situations where that might not be true.  During war, certainly.  Life magazine had made that clear. But segregation was not the result of recent war.  It had been ongoing for hundreds of years.  It was strange to think of the adults in that mob in Omaha as parents, as teachers, as respected members of their communities.

The adults in my life did not seem to be aware of my struggles to adjust to growing up. They looked at me as a common little kid. I have kid status.  Who am I to begin to address the confounding issues of the times?  Am I beginning to develop an aversion to authority figures? They tell you what to do without any regard to your perspective. Or they look right through you. They don’t see you at all. 

These newly forming ideas about adults received a jolt of corroboration in, of all places, the barber shop.  It started with my input on how I wanted to wear my hair.  Zero.  It’s beginning to get warm.  That means a whiffle.  Whether I want one or not.

I am down to Cleary Square sitting in the barber's chair. I am by myself, old enough now to go to the barber alone. As long as I come back with a whiffle!  The barber was an Italian guy.  I always thought he was friendly. He seemed cheerful, greeting people as they came in, chatting, sometimes in Italian, sometimes in English. He'd ask me if I needed to "itch" anything before he continued cutting my hair.  An adult who considered my feelings, even superficially, was rare.

The day in question, my winter hair on the floor around me, the barber begins to talk to an older guy who has come in and is sitting in one of the nearby chairs.  The older guy is talking about Hollywood.  My barber responds with names I recognize, Sophia Loren and Marilyn Monroe.  I'm not part of the conversation but the barber is speaking in English so I'm happy to understand it.  I know the people being discussed are actresses, movie stars. Then my barber, still in the process of close cropping my hair, begins to speak to the other man in tones of anger and disgust.  "They're all whores," he spits out.  "Hollywood whores." I wasn't quite sure what a whore was but I knew it was disparaging to describe somebody that way. I also knew it was a word adults in my family would not say in front of a kid. I didn’t think the barber would have spoken that way if a woman had been in his shop. But I'm there. An eleven year-old kid. Since the barber started on his rant, it's as if I had become invisible. I don't like being invisible. I'm still right here!

The barber’s sudden anger left me confused, and agitated. As quickly as it started, the Hollywood diatribe is over. He brushes loose stands of hair off my neck before unpinning the barber cloth and shaking it out. Now he’s friendly again.

Walking up the hill from the barber’s, I had an image of Marilyn in my head.  I remembered the pictures of her in a recent Life magazine. I liked her.  I liked her smile.  She struck me as smart and funny. She seemed to me to be having a great life.  Now, based on what the barber had said, a different version of Marilyn began to intrude into my thoughts. The pretty Marilyn, the one who laughed a lot, faded a bit. I began to think of her a little differently.  Maybe everyone had a part of them, a secret part, that could be criticized.  Maybe even me. 

Naive or not, I didn’t understand why adults would use epithets to belittle a person. Why were kids looking up to flawed adults, learning from them, modeling their behavior? I began to realize that what an adult said was not always the same as what an adult meant. It would be smart of me to develop a wariness about these very people who are supposed to help and protect us kids. I should question what they say.  I shouldn’t be too eager to go along with things just because an adult approves or tells me its okay. Even though it means giving up some of my childhood, I know I have to develop strategic life skills in order to assess situations, to interpret not what adults tell me, but what they actually mean.

As a kid, I saw but didn’t always see; I listened but didn’t always hear. Now I was beginning to pay more attention. I am becoming more mindful of what has always been there right in front of me in plain sight: real life. It’s not easy.  I struggle to adjust to all this new-found, perplexing, at times shocking, awareness.

At age eleven, I am learning about the world but that knowledge comes in fits and starts. I still see the world in the way that someone without experience, without insight, without real loss, without real pain, does.  When I was younger, when I didn’t read Life, and if I didn’t look too closely and didn’t think too much, the world was a fun place, at least my tiny corner of it. By 1956, as this new perspective on the world unfolded, I realized this was not the protected world I had hoped it might be. There is a lot more going on.

I began to question my belief that first and foremost adults should do no harm to children.  In words or actions.  Adults are there to support kids, to take care of them, to enhance their lives, to point them in the right direction.  Even though I observed these guidelines being broken every day, every hour on TV, I still wanted them to be true. At eleven, I still held assumptions in spite of how they conflicted with reality.  Now that trust was coming undone. The barber’s tirade was another assumptive thread snapped.

Walking up the hill I feel I am approaching a precipice. My understanding of and insight into the minds of adults is in conflict. Like most kids I lack the depth of experience to place adults in perspective. The top of the hill is smooth and flat, usually a pleasant final few minutes to get to my house, but the barber’s coarse invective has left me with a bad feeling.  Perhaps I’ve already tumbled over an edge.

Gliding Toward a Future

The time I spent walking home from school was important to me, a transition from school to my house. I thought of it as zones influenced by seasons. The first zone began with the walk to the library next to the junior high.  From there I’d walk through Cleary Square over the railroad tracks and the Neponset River.  Walking over the bridge past the tracks I’m out of the square. I’m in zone 2. The river took on a particular significance depending on the season. Blue and green in September. Leaf strewn later in the fall. Icy and still in winter. Flowing back to life in spring.  At Truman Highway I transition from the river zone to the home zone, zone 3  Past Truman is Fairmount Hill. But before crossing Truman there was usually one more thing I had to do.

I walked this same route, through the square, over the river, from when I started fifth grade until I graduated high school. Seven years.  Lots of things happened on those walks to and from school.  I’ll talk about them in later blogs. At the corner of Truman and Fairmount Avenue there was a small grocery store.  Ziino Brothers. An Italian market. The one constant during all those years of walking was stopping at Ziino’s several times a week to buy a loaf of Italian bread for supper. 

Leaving the house that morning my mother would remind me, “Stop at Ziino’s on the way home from school this afternoon.” She’d give me fifty cents or a dollar bill.  What I called Ziino’s bread other people called Vienna bread. The Ziino bread was white bread with a crunchy crust.  A lot better than Wonder bread.  It had a taste to it, a texture.  It came in a white paper bag open at the top. When I carried it home I had to make sure it didn’t slide out. Buying that bread was part of my walking ritual for years. I’d put the change and the loaf of bread on the kitchen table first thing when I walked in the house.

It’s a day in April, 1956. Ziino bread tucked under my arm, homework books in a bag slung over my shoulder, I am at the corner of Truman Highway waiting for the light to change.  Nothing different going on.  I’m walking home.  Mild out.  Spring. The traffic light changes. The cars stop.  I start across.

By the time I reach the other side my mood has darkened.  I feel sad, dispirited.  Something’s happened to me. I’ve changed.  I’ve transitioned somehow from the person I was a moment ago to something different, but not something better.  I actually stop when I get to the opposite corner, wondering what has happened to me.  Now I’m beginning to feel distressed.  I look around.  Cars going by on Truman.  A man comes out of the variety store on the corner.  I hear someone open their front door to get the day’s mail.  Nothing unusual. It’s a sunny afternoon but I have crossed into a shadow. A sun shadow.

Slowly I begin to walk again. I realize this shadow has been with me, amorphous, unformed, for a long time.  This afternoon it has taken shape. I am encountering a shift in perception. I have so much yet to experience, so much to learn, so much to adjust to, but on this sunny April afternoon it’s as if I know my fate is already sealed.  Life has indiscriminately revealed itself to me.  But as a young, naive kid I don’t have any idea what to do with this new paradigm.

Am I beginning to realize every day matters?  Did I have an inkling that some days matter more than others? But which days are ordinary and which days make a difference? Might there be a day that will change everything? Or has that day already gone by?  How would I know which days mattered more than others?  These were my thoughts as I crossed Truman Highway that April day.

Some may find it difficult to believe I remember so much about that afternoon.  During all those years of walking to school and back, I crossed Truman Highway thousands of times.  Yet I do remember vividly feeling something had changed that afternoon, that I was a different person, or about to become one.  The revelation startled me.  This is The Past Remembered Anew.  I now know that afternoon was the beginning of a life-long struggle with anxiety and depression. It takes a long time to realize there is something not quite right with you and even a longer time to do something about it.  

All I knew on that April day was that I was on the other side of Truman.   And I would be for the rest of my life.

An afternoon after school in October, 1956.  I’m alone on the patio, sitting on the glider, my feet on the cement, slowly pushing myself back and forth. A glider is essentially a metal couch hung on springs.  I especially like to sit there late in the afternoon, the warm sun taking the edge off the chilly air. In winter I’d make a point of shoveling snow off the patio and cleaning off the glider just so I’d have easy access. 

The glider sat just under the kitchen window on our patio, a large expanse of concrete six by fifteen feet. Using pick and shovel my father had dug out the excavation late in the summer in preparation for a large truck which showed up one morning filling the space with glistening cement. In the far corner of the patio that day in September, when the cement was still wet, using the thin blade of his pocket knife, my father cut in the date.  “Sept. 1956”  The patio and the date are still there.

People would set up chairs and tables on their patios, a picnic table, maybe an umbrella, a barbecue in the corner.  The only thing we ever had on our patio were trash barrels in the corner, my brother’s bike propped up against the house, a leaky garden hose, and the glider.  

On this afternoon in fall, I look off into the backyard at our faded garden, at the few remaining tomato stalks, brown and wilting.  At the edge of the woods, the yellow leaves on the trees shimmering in the late afternoon sun. The red sumac bushes whisper quietly in the breeze. Closer to the house is our lone cedar tree, a bent, net-less basketball hoop half way up. 

The glider was another place I liked to think.  I’d start pondering a concept like time. Where does it go? Where has it been? Where am I positioned as it glides through my life? Lately I’d been thinking of time as a river with me bobbing along in it. Someone, a teacher maybe, or  one of the more thoughtful kids at school, may have introduced me to the concept of time as a river.  I liked the idea.  Most days I looked down at the Neponset River going to and from school. I found it reassuring to imagine myself caught up in such a natural phenomenon. Maybe I found comfort in the idea that in a river I would just move forward, go with the flow, not having to be responsible for where I am at any particular moment.

The glider has the occasional squeak.  I stop rocking. In time I will be an adult. While I may blame unthinking adults for the state of the world, it dawns on me the only person responsible for my life is me. Now and in the future. The sky is beginning to lose the light. The chill air is getting the better of my thin jacket. I think of something that happened on this patio just a few months ago.

I am hanging out with a kid I didn’t know too well. He was part of a group of kids and when they went home it was just this kid and me left. A disagreement escalated. The details escape me but it likely had something to do with my excessive sense of fairness.  Maybe he wouldn’t give me back the ball we were tossing, or he was being too rough with a toy I particularly liked.  I do remember vividly the feelings of rage that flooded over me, of injustice, of blind fury.  Since there were no ships to sink in the Suez Canal, I looked around for a weapon that suited this occasion. I spotted a stick in the grass and whacked the kid as hard as I could on his side.

The look of shock on his face was startling.  He started screaming in pain, lunged at me, so I hit him again.  My father came running out of the house to see what was going on. My anger turned to instant regret. 

My temper problems were not new.  My father had suggested that I “count to ten” when something occurred that might agitate me. I didn’t understand the concept.  As I counted I just got more and more angry. The idea was to take a time out, a pause to consider what might happen if I gave in to my outrage.  

My temper was more often directed at myself, at my lack of patience, my inability to focus. I rarely hurt someone else. That afternoon I felt immediate remorse, told the kid I was sorry and felt bad.  Was that enough?  Is it enough for me to do the best I can when it was obvious my best wasn’t good enough? I could look around all I wanted for an adult to blame but the only person responsible for my lapse of judgement was me.  After all, I am the one with the stick in his hand.

To be sure of yourself.  To have strength and determination. To have empathy toward others.  To have real courage.  To make something of every moment.  To be ready for what is yet to come. To cross a Rubicon, or a Truman, your dreams and values still intact.  That is the ideal.  I am in the river of time.  I am growing up.

The glider is silent.  My mother opens the kitchen window an inch.  “Billy,” she shouts, “come in for supper.”  It’s too late. There’s no one there. The kid that was on the glider is already gone.