Past Friends

Childhood Friends

Many, many years ago we kids played cops and robbers on our bikes, and softball in our yards in the seemingly endless Midwest summers. The 1950s through the early 1960's it was safe playing outside, although there was an incident of a girl being abducted, and one girl was hit by a car and killed on a different street a few blocks away. All in all, our parents felt it was safe enough, and set outdoor perimeters we weren't to cross. All of them enforced the sacred rule of being home by dark. Stay inside the bounds of several blocks, and be home by dark, and in our own yards. Some kids had different boundaries than their friends. Listen for our parents to call to us (one could only hear the call if inside the bounds). That was it. Exceptions were made as long as they knew where we were!

I had two girlfriends on my street, one who came from a large family and attended Catholic school; the other girlfriend had one younger sister and went to my school. I will just call them Amy and Zelda. They lived next to each other. I lived at the other end of the block.

The names are changed but events are true.

Amy

Amy was 4th oldest in a Catholic family of nine, which later grew to ten. Amy was tiny and skinny, smaller boned than I; we both had dark hair. Frequently a toddler was trailing us, Amy's charge for the day. I, being the youngest of four, never had changed a diaper, babysat or kept watch over a sibling. I had been the toddler following after my older brothers, embarrassing them. These smaller siblings of hers were sometimes a nuisance.

From time to time Amy's parents used their family station wagon to round up their numerous kids. Her dad drove, while her mom eyeballed the streets and yards for their kids; then as she located one of her offspring, she pointed toward home. The kids immediately rushed back to their house when summoned in this manner.

Amy’s older sisters were mean to the kids when the parents went out on a date. They locked her out of the house. Older sisters didn’t want to be bothered with the school age kids, and also care for the toddlers and babies. “Amy, why don’t you tell your mom when she gets home, that they hit you and locked you outside?” I asked her this on her front porch as we gazed at the locked door.

“Oh no! I’ll just get it worse when my mom and dad go away again.” I was astounded and angry, but she was living there, not me. Her older sisters got a lot of sass from me, more than Amy dared to try.

When the kids were naughty, Amy's mother just pointed to a chair in the corner and said, “Do you want to sit in the chair!?” It was “time-out” before that punishment was popular, and proved very effective in their home. No one wanted to sit in "the" chair in the room's far corner with her at the other side of the room. Grounding her children to their yard with no outside friends over was another of her creative punishments. We didn't dare cross the line into their yard when they were grounded. We could talk to them from outside the yard, but no playing was allowed until the grounding time limit she set had passed. It was torture for us.

Amy’s mom could tell simply by glancing at us if we had been into the neighbor’s mulberry tree (Zelda’s house). One day, Amy tested the mulberry theory after we had been climbing on the fence to get some fruit. She told me to come with her. I nervously followed. Her mom didn’t yell; it was her quiet, steely demeanor that intimidated us.

Her mom looked up from her crossword, eyes squinting through the curls of smoke from her cigarette. “Yes?” she asked her daughter.

“Were we in the mulberries, Mom?” she asked her. Her mother looked us both up and down for a few seconds, head tilted to the side, dramatically expelling the smoke out of her mouth. She went back to her crossword, cigarette ensconced in her fingers, and responded quietly and assuredly, “Yes.” We couldn’t figure out at the time how she knew! As we got older, we realized she could see leaves on our attire, as well as tiny mulberry stains on our clothes and skin. The tree had given us up.

The house Amy lived in was a large two story at the other end of our block. It had an enormous unfenced yard with a detached garage, and a dank basement that none of us were allowed in. Only part of the cellar had flooring; the rest was dirt. Upstairs were many bedrooms (excellent since there were so many kids). The stair rails had thick newels, with square oak tops, one of which was loose. The kids would remove it and hide things inside that cubby. A large roofed, wrap-around front porch had lattice from the deck of the porch to the ground, closing off the area beneath. The ground under the porch was soft, dusty dirt. The lattice didn't keep us out, because of course, we found an innocuous way to sneak under there. We would hide, listening to the older sisters talk on the porch. When we exited our hiding place, our clothes were covered in dusty dirt that we slapped off with our dirty hands.

In those long ago days, Godzilla vs. Mothra, The Pit and the Pendulum, The House of Usher, and Premature Burial were all horror movies we watched, freaking out our young imaginations. Vincent Price, Boris Karloff and Ray Milland starred in numerous movies. These were the precursor horror movies to the more violent Halloween and A Nightmare On Elm Street. Imagine the fright young Amy and I felt while hiding in the dirt under the porch one day: we looked at the filthy basement window and saw what we were certain were finger scratch marks on the window. Oh, no! We stared in sheer terror at the window and each other. Someone had been locked up in the basement and had tried to get out, clawing at the window pane. We knew it, but the older kids just made fun of us when we told them. That basement with the dirty window was a scary dark place to our young minds, but it also served as the laundry and storage room, and the family tornado shelter. No one was allowed into it except the parents and two oldest girls.

Once Amy and I found bags of concrete mix and pretended it was flour. We put our hands in it and made handprint trails of the dust all over the walk on the concrete stairs and entry to the basement. We admired our work, but Amy’s mother didn't. She came out, and ordered us to get the broom and clean it all up. Then she told her daughter to get in the house. Pointing a long finger toward my home, she glared at me, her voice whipping me. “You go home now. You are grounded from coming here for one week!” I ran home, devastated. That week, it seemed, took forever to end.

We loved our hot summers and how the tar of the streets would squish and move under our bare feet, molding up between our toes; it didn’t stick to our feet but it was mushy, and hot. All the neighborhood kids played in the rain, and the tornado warnings were so frequent we didn’t pay attention. When it began to rain we quickly changed to our swimsuits and cooled off in the downpour, feeling that tar cooling under our feet. We experienced the electric danger in the air when storms were building, and knew to hightail it home.

One day, however, I waited too long to run back to my house. The massive clouds got darker, building ferociously skyward, a smoky dark mass of cumulus clouds, quickly turning to cumulonimbus - towers of clouds. The temperature dropped, the sky was black now, and suddenly Amy and her siblings had disappeared. I was about eight or nine. I was outside, alone, in the most colossal storm of my life. Going to the back door, heart pounding, I hoped they would open it. There was a small enclosed entry porch, yet my ingrained manners prevented me from entering without an invitation. Stranded alone, in pelting rain on the roofless back porch steps, I couldn’t make it to home at the other end of the block in this storm, and I knew it. I hugged close to the metal door praying they would let me in. The storm broke directly over my head. Banging on the door, I began yelling.

Suddenly lightening shot straight down to a tree next to the porch, splitting it. I screamed in terror.

A hand reached out from the house, grabbed me by the arm and yanked me inside. Amy’s mother had saved me! We all ran to the basement and watched the rain and lightening through the basement window. We were safe underground while wind whipped, and thundercracks deafened us. Once the storm abated, the sky turned brilliant blue, and everyone saw the tree split by lightening at the back door. Having been the taller object for the lightening to strike, that tree sacrificed itself and saved my life. No recollection resides in my memory of my mother's reaction when I returned home after that horrible storm.

Zelda

My other good friend, Zelda, and I attended the same grade school. She had lighter hair and a smaller stature than I, her parents much shorter than mine. She played the piano and had one younger sister with blond hair. Required to practice her piano each day, it frequently held up our outside game-time. I would watch as her small hands stretched to reach the keys, following her music sheet. Once, we readied to go outside, and her mother called out from the kitchen to her. “You need to practice your piano.” She looked at me, impatient for her release, and whispered, “Watch this.” She began doing runs on the piano keyboard, up and down the scale. Then she stopped. Not ten seconds passed before we heard a voice from the kitchen, “You are NOT done! Finish your practice!” She had to complete her assignment. Work before play.

Her father hated it when we climbed on the fence to get mulberries from the tree. The fence had decorative whirls of wire on the top and he always knew we had climbed it. Our juvenile brains didn’t realize we were bending the wire, a sure giveaway. We figured it out pretty quickly after getting yelled at so often. Still, we couldn’t make the wire look exactly as it should, with the lame efforts we gave to straightening the wire whirls. The mulberries were a sweet treat and no threats or punishment made us stop. All the kids ate the mulberries. We picked raw rhubarb and ate it with salt, loving the tartness. Dandelions under our chins proved whether or not we “liked butter.” There was a broken tree covered in crawling box elder bugs which we would gently capture in our hands to feel them tickle our closed palms and then we released them with no harm.

Zelda and I were rivals in school, she better in math, and I better in English. She was more proficient in softball than I, but I could climb trees higher. She had all sorts of games and toys in her basement and we spent hours there, if we weren’t playing ball with Amy and her brothers, or cops and robbers on our bikes.

Zelda wasn't allowed to watch the TV show The Untouchables. It starred Robert Stack and was about Elliott Ness, the FBI agent fighting crime during the prohibition era. Zelda's mother didn't like crime and violence in front of her girls. Oh, if she could only have witnessed Bobby violently punch us in the stomach, or the boys chasing us on the school playground and we kicking them to protect ourselves. That TV show wasn't really very violent.

My parents were older than these other parents, as my mom was thirty-seven when she had me. Unbelievable news when so young, I remember when they said Zelda’s dad had died. He was in his mid-thirty’s and had a massive heart attack. I walked down to her house and stood at the end of the driveway next to the bush that grew there. I had no words to make it better or to express how sorry I was that her dad had died. My heart hurt for her. I silently stood there, in shock, waiting and willing her to come out, alternating between looking at the ground and at her window. When she did come outside, I simply said I was sorry. I don't recall anything else about it, it was that painful. She then grew up without a father. Amy and I both had ours. It was sad.

Adolescence

Sometimes all three of us got along fine and sometimes it was like the old saying “Two’s company, three’s a crowd.” There was friendship, rivalry, fights, sleepovers, bullying by older kids, falling out of trees, sneaking past our boundaries, caring for our pets and bringing home strays. We got hit by softball bats and balls, fell off our bikes and out of trees, got punched by bullies, had dangerous bug bites and stings, some grave illnesses and hospitalizations. There was winter ice skating, snowball and iceball fights (the older boys’ idea of fun, which really hurt), and elaborate snow forts. A teenager showed us to grab the bumper on a car coming up the snowy street and catch a ride behind it. It was strictly forbidden, so we only chanced it with a lookout for adults. We played outside in the winter snow, at night in our front yard, full-moonlight glinting off the snow. Favorite times were when the snow was iced over, and we would try to walk on top and not break the sparkling crust.

We watched the summer fireflies light up the sky, and called out objects we saw in the clouds on summer days. I remember seeing when the Russian Sputnik first transversed the night sky over our house with my mom and one of my brothers - at that time it was much easier to see sky objects, without all the current space clutter and satellites.

We used a shortcut through the firehouse grounds on the way to grade school, climbed down the small hill to the alley behind it, waving at the firemen. We sat on the huge rock in the front of their station, and then when older, were amazed to see was not really that large. If we skinned our knees, the firemen were quick with a bandaid. Halloween trick or treating at the fire station got us amazing treats. We had further boundaries on Halloween. "Aunt Sarah" and her husband on our street, a childless couple, gave superb large Hershey bars.

At Amy’s house, I learned to eat bread balls made from white Wonder bread, smooshed into a ball. We also made Miracle Whip sandwiches - it was that soft Wonder bread with just Miracle Whip in between two slices. Those were snacks the kids of that large family made in the kitchen, things I would never get at home. These treats meant I didn’t have to run home for lunch; I could be gone all day until dinnertime!

Meals at Amy’s were large sit-down dinners with the entire family around a huge table. The dinner grace was said first, then a full meal of meat and vegetables was shared, fish on Fridays for their faith. Occasionally they allowed an invited friend, like me, to join.

With Zelda, I had my first visit to a working dairy farm and tasted fresh milk from the stainless cooling jug fill-vat in the barn. It was amazing to see her perform a piano concert at the downtown Conservatory even though she was nervous.

I moved away my first year of high school and those friendships and the grade school friends faded away from my life.

Some people have grade school friends forever. I have memories.