A Long Long Time Ago

Okay, you’ve waited long enough. It’s been three months since my last post and I’m sure by now you all thought I fell off the end of the planet somewhere. At least that’s the feeling I got from the slew of emails I’ve yet to answer.

You’re not that lucky. I’m still here, alive and kicking. The thing is that the world around me keeps changing so fast that it’s making my head swim. In an effort to keep pace with current trends I’ve had to kind of re-invent myself. I’m on somewhat of a massive learning curve so please bear with me.

That aside, it’s time I took a break from it all and spent some quality time with the people who hold a very special place in my heart. And you are certainly one of them. So pull up a chair. I’ll put the kettle on. We’ll have a good old fashion gab for ourselves. I’ve got somethin I wanna show ya.

Forgive me for being so colloquial as to disgrace this post with an old worn-out cliché. And that is that “a picture is worth a thousand words.” For now that I’m back home again, I have access to some old family photographs that I haven’t seen in ages. And they are unlocking a whole slew of heartfelt memories from my childhood growing up in Everett.

Let’s start with the first one at the top of the page. This picture was taken in the early summer of 1958. Now that was a year that was. The minimum wage was One Dollar an hour. Danny and the Juniors scored a number one hit with “At The Hop.” Hoola Hoops became the new fun time rage. And I joined in with Big Brother, Bob Emery, every morning to toast President Eisenhower with a glass of milk.

That’s my mom up on our second-floor back porch down on Arlington Street. Her name is Mary, but everyone knows her as Grace. She was born a really long time ago, but by the grace of God, she’s still with us on this journey. I took her out for dinner just a few days ago. It was one of the most precious moments of my life.

My mother never got her license. She has never driven a car. As such, if it isn’t within walking distance from Arlington Street, she has no idea as to where she is. You should have seen the look on her face as we headed up Route One. She swears she has never seen that road before in her entire life, in spite of the fact that she’s ridden on it at least a thousand times.

The very moment she caught sight of that giant dinosaur at the miniature golf course in Saugus, she turned to me with a twinkle in her eye and said, “I remember that. We took you kids there when you were little. They used to sell ice cream there. I remember the time you whacked your golf ball out into the traffic. You got so mad at Billy for laughing at you that you threw your golf club at him. You had such a nasty temper when you were little,” she laughed.

We’re talking about a person who is well up into her eighties. She sometimes calls me five minutes after we’ve just hung up because she forgot that she just spoke to me. When she loses something it just vanishes into thin air never to be found again, even if she hasn’t even set foot out of the kitchen. And she loses everything.

But every so often something triggers one of those fond memories she holds so dear and she’ll remember every little detail no matter how long ago it happened. That story about me throwing my golf club at Billy had to happen at least fifty years ago. And don’t worry. I’m sure I didn’t actually hit him with it. If I had it would still be wrapped around my neck.

That’s not a very clear picture, I know. I’ve lowered the resolution so it would load faster for those of you on slower DSL and Dial Up modems. Even still, I’m going to ask you to squint a bit to try to bring that picture sharply into focus. There are at least a dozen things about that picture that bring the true nostalgia of growing up in Everett back to life.

Take a look at the way my mother’s dressed. There she is hanging out laundry in a skirt. My mother didn’t start wearing slacks until she was well into her forties. Heck, I was up in Everett High by the time she wore a pair of slacks. She felt so out of sorts at first. It took her awhile to get used to it. Even to this day she combs her hair in that traditional World War Two hairstyle. Radical change was never my mother’s strong suit.

Just behind her shins you’re seeing a white wooden box. The top is a lid that flips open, and down inside is where she kept her pile of clothespins. It doubled as a kind of stool you could sit on when we all gathered out on the back porch to cool off on a hot summer night. That was our only source of air conditioning back then.

My dad built that clothespin box out of spare lumber we found at the Storm Shield factory across the street. When they closed up shop for the night we’d hop the fence and steal all of their empty boxes and scrap lumber. Some of those boxes were big enough to build a fort, or a tree house.

It’s kind of hard to make out, but you see that rope wrapped around the square post to her immediate left? That’s a spare clothesline she’d drape across the back porch whenever her other clothesline filled up. The post it’s wrapped around is attached to a fence that separated our back porch from Mrs. Forgione’s.

The reason you can see all the way down to my mother’s shoes from Mrs. Forgione’s side of the porch is because there’s a little gate there that swings open to connect our side of the porch to Mrs. Forgione’s. So whenever my mother sent me over to borrow a cup of sugar, or a stick of butter, all I had to do was swing that gate open. That way I didn’t have to climb over the fence.

Off in the distance to the far right you’re seeing the upper story windows to Henry Gray’s apartment building that faces Ferry Street. The two windows you see just beyond the clotheslines are the one’s the Irish nurses leaned out of in nothing more than their bra and panties to hang out their laundry. I’ll never forget the day that I saw one of them do that without even that. That was the day I realized that there was much more to life than whether or not the Lone Ranger could beat up Zorro.

Behind the trees off in the distance to the far left are the windows to Major’s house. We called Major the “most dangerous dog in the world.” That’s the house on the other side of that cement slide beside the pizza shop at the bus stop on Ferry Street.

Major was a wild and crazy German Shepard that they kept chained up in the backyard. For our own savage amusement, we’d jump up onto the stockade fence, and then torment that poor dog to no end until he went mental. Now you know why he was so wild and crazy. He’d eventually go so completely bezerk that he’d break the chain and leap clear over that fence after us. And we’d take off like bats out of hell in all directions to keep from getting mauled to death.

Now that’s entertainment. They’ve yet to invent a video game that comes anywhere close to the excitement you get from being chased by a mad dog with razor sharp teeth. The Everett police eventually shot Major dead after he bit a half a dozen kids. My big brother, Billy, was one of the proud and the few who got caught by Major and lived to tell the story. He had the bite marks to prove it.

That was the porch I was standing on when I saw that big giant weird thing in the sky. I was only five years old. This happened at the beginning of the summer before I attended kindergarten at the Horace Mann School. It was only days before the last day of school so Billy, Julie, and Carl were off to school that day. So we’re talking early June of 1957.

Sometime before noon that day a giant triangular object filled the sky. Ever so slowly it drifted across the sky until it entirely filled it. It didn’t make a sound. Its shadow blanked out the sunlight beneath it. All I could see was the bottom of that triangle and nothing else. It was so close I felt as though I could almost reach up and touch it. That thing was several times larger than Everett stadium. I kid you not.

It sported an intricate pattern of pipes and tubes. It also had four iconic symbols that looked somewhat like a system of hieroglyphics. They vaguely resembled the four letters, “O E E V.” I remember being so frightened that I couldn’t move. I didn’t dare.

What I don’t remember is ever seeing that object pass out of view. What I do remember is snapping out of a very confused state. And when I did, I was no longer standing on that porch. We had a walk-in closet in the back hallway and that’s where I snapped out of it, inside that closet.

I staggered into the kitchen where my mother was washing dishes. She turned around, took one look at me, and rushed towards me. She knelt down and took hold of me asking, “Are you all right? What’s wrong? You look as white as a ghost. Do you feel all right?”

Not knowing how to explain what had just transpired, I told her that I was tired and wanted to lie down on the couch to rest. I fell asleep on the couch and didn’t wake up until everybody came home from school that afternoon.

Ever since that incident I’ve had this seriously strange memory that I strongly feel is directly linked to that experience. At least I think it’s a memory. Maybe I dreamt it once and it just got stuck in my mind’s eye somehow. I’m really not sure. You know how things tend to go out of focus on a little kid so they’re not always what they appear to be? That’s what I think of this memory. Trouble is, I’ve had it all my life and the older I get - the more clearly it comes into focus.

Anyway, I have this recurring memory of lying on my back, perhaps on a table, submerged in water, just beneath the surface. I’m looking up into bright lights while many people are leaning over and looking down at me. Because I’m beneath the surface of the water, their voices sound more like the barking of a dog than they do a voice.

In this scenario, I am completely calm and relaxed. All of the people looking down at me look completely normal. There is nothing odd about them whatsoever. One of them lays their hand gently across my forehead and says something, but I don’t know what. That’s it. That’s all there is to it.

That image is so deeply imbedded in my memory banks that I cannot convince myself that it never happened. The only time I was hospitalized as a small child is when I had my tonsils out, and I know I’m not confusing that with this because I completely remember everything that transpired when I got my tonsils out. Dr. Corkery from Hancock Street took my tonsils out at the Whidden Hospital. And I do remember the ice cream. That was the best part.

That photograph also brings back two other memories that I shall never forget. Both of them involve that picket fence railing that my mother is holding onto. The first one is the very reason why I am still alive today.

This happened during the summer following my stint in Miss Nigro’s first grade class at the Horace Mann. I somehow got the notion that if I were to step off of that railing with an opened umbrella that I would ever so gracefully float down to the concrete steps some thirty odd feet below. With opened umbrella in hand, and both feet firmly planted on top of that railing, I took one step forward. My entire body leaned into a downward plunge.

At that very instant my mother came out of nowhere, grabbed a hold of me, and yanked me back onto the porch. Had it not been for her quick reaction, just a mere fraction of a second later I’d have been standing tall before the man. It was ages before she’d let me go out onto the back porch by myself again.

The other memory that comes to mind is the time that my mom and dad bought a freestanding, copper tone, two-door, metal closet. For years they went without a closet in their bedroom so my mother was tickled pink the day they brought it home. It was actually quite a looker if I do say so myself.

It stood about six-feet high, had two doors with elaborate handles that latched shut. Inside each door was a full-length mirror, and there was ample room beneath the hanging clothes to store many pairs of shoes, boxes, and whatnot. It even had a shelf above the clothing rack. My mother was giddy with excitement over this thing.

My friend Jacky’s dad owned a pickup truck because he had his own fencing business. So that’s what they brought that closet home in. Jacky lived in one of Henry Gray’s apartments just on the other side of our backyard. All the neighborhood dads got together to blow the suds off of a couple before undertaking the task at hand, which was to get that monstrosity up onto the second floor porch.

Now I don’t want to be so rude as to say that this bunch of guys weren’t the brightest bulbs on the tree, but I’ve yet to see this crowd do anything right. Perhaps they’d have had more success if they laid off the brewskies until they got the job done. I suppose that’s asking too much from a crowd of Newfies.

So anyway, they came up with the bright idea to tie a length of clothesline around the closet to hoist it up over that railing. The problem is, they only wrapped it around the perimeter of the closet once. They didn’t double it around to secure the bottom, nor did they pass it through the latches on the door.

As you would suspect, when they got it halfway up, the closet slipped through the loop in the rope and crash landed on the concrete steps below. The doors flew off in two different directions, both full-length mirrors smashed into a gazzilion pieces, and the entire frame crinkled and bent from rolling ass over teakettle down those concrete steps.

My mother’s heart was broken. And to add insult to injury, my dad looked up at her and said, “It doesn’t look all that bad. I think we can fix it.” Man, if looks could kill that man would have been drawn and quartered on the spot. It was kind of comical listening to all of the neighborhood dads down below blame each other. This was a classic case of collective stupidity if there ever was one.

My heart ached seeing that despondent look on my mother’s face. You could read what she was thinking just by looking at her eyes. Ten-to-one she was thinking that she was doomed to a life without any of the simple comforts most people take for granted. And in the background I can still hear my big brother, Billy, saying, “Who wants to hear how loud I can make my armpit fart?”

For days afterward my dad hammered that thing back into a barely recognizable form with a rubber mallet. He did get the doors back on, and they did open and close, but not with the grace and dignity that it was originally designed with. The latches didn’t click shut like they were supposed to. And whenever you shut the right door, the left door popped open.

Forget about the full-length mirrors. My dad said he was gonna replace them one of these days, but my mother knew that would never happen. She was right. It never did.

You want to hear the clincher? My mother still has that very same freestanding closet to this very day. Unbelievable – huh? And yes, it still bares the scares from the day that the Arlington Street brain trust devised their scheme to get that monstrosity up onto that second story porch.

You want to hear another story about the Arlington Street brain trust? Okay then, just take a gander at the photograph below. That’s my big sister, Julie, with one of her prized kitties. This picture was taken on that very same back porch, but this time in the opposite direction. We’re looking towards Mrs. Forgione’s side of the porch instead of away from it. So now your seeing Mr. Bowser’s house in the background instead of Henry Gray’s apartment building.

This story has to do with Julie’s kitty cat, a horseshoe, and that rowdy gang of neighborhood dads I so fondly refer to as “The Arlington Street Brain Trust.”

On summer nights the neighborhood dads gathered in my backyard to play horseshoes while polishing off a case and a half of Carlings Black Label. As the empties piled up those horseshoes landed further and further away from the pegs. The time would come when they’d shoo all of us kids out of the backyard so not to get hit with a flying horseshoe.

So I guess they deduced that the kids had a better chance of survival dodging the traffic than they did dodging the horseshoes. I don’t recall any kid ever getting hit with a horseshoe, but I can’t think of anyone who didn’t at one time or another get hit by a car. Beer logic does have its pitfalls.

During this one particular horseshoe backyard tournament, Julie’s cat dashed into the line of fire just as my dad hurled his horseshoe at the peg. That horseshoe nailed that cat at top dead center. The thump it made at the point of impact sounded much like what you hear when a knuckleball slams into a catcher’s mitt.

That cat flipped, and flopped, and spun around like a top for about a minute and a half. And then he just keeled over and stopped dead in his tracks, never to move again. Julie cried her heart out well into the night. I did feel sorry for her knowing how much she loved that cat, but I gotta tell ya something, and even Joey and Jacky would back me up on this one.

That was one of the coolest wipeouts I’d ever seen in my life. That cat did not go gracefully into the night. He spent all nine lives right then and there. You pull all nine lives out of a cat at once and you’ve accomplished something. That’s as rare as a hole-in-one in my book. Of course, boys and girls don’t always see eye to eye on certain issues. This is certainly one of them. Girls can’t help it. They’ve got cooties.

And now I’m gonna share with you one last photograph because it clearly shows some of the landmarks I’ve talked about with a little more detail.

This last picture was taken in our backyard on Arlington Street during the summer of 1952. From left to right you’re looking at my cousin, Linda, my big sister, Julie, my baby sitter, Betty, and my big brother, Billy. I’m not in that picture because I’m not old enough to crawl yet.

The building to the far right is Henry Gray’s apartment building. The house in the middle is Major’s house. Look close enough and you can make out that big wooden fence they kept Major chained up behind. Those two big poles you see sticking up behind the kids are not streetlights. They are the poles that everyone attached their clothesline pulleys to.

In that opening between Major’s house and that house on the left you can see the billboard on top of what used to be Whitehill Pharmacy. That’s the building that stands at the corner of Nichols and Ferry. And guess what? That billboard is still on top of that building to this very day. That billboard is older than I am. That just goes to show you how some things do endure the test of time.

Good gawd, look at the time. I gotta go. I can’t thank you enough for sharing this precious moment with me. Let’s do this again sometime real soon. I’ve missed this.

You can say what you want, but there’s nothing quite like sharing quality time with your family and friends. We are truly blessed to have grown up in our little corner of the world. It has added a richness to our character that few ever get the privilege to experience. We are that lucky because – “We’re from Everett!”
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