Scenes from Childhood

Westminster Street, Worcester MA I can’t sleep. Dada. Hiss. Moon in the window. My flower undies. Rocking yellow wicker. White soft sheets. Warm. Rocking. Yawn. Creak. Rocking chair.

The whiffle ball and bat are still in the car. They are brand new. I have to practice for when I’m older and can join the major leagues. I’m not even five yet, but Mom says it’s okay to go across the street to the car and get them. Mom gives me the keys. They’re in the back seat, so I have to unlock the door in the front because there’s no keyhole in the back. I can crawl in the back real easy, which is more fun and faster than unlocking the back door. I crawl back into the driver seat and decide to put my bat and ball in the passenger seat. I’m the driver. Vroom, vroom! I turn the wheel and peer over the dashboard. The wheel doesn’t move when the car is off, but I can pretend. I can see pretty good when I sit on my knees. Suddenly I’m not pretending. The trees are moving, and I’m going down the hill. I’m in so much trouble. I’m stopped and I don’t remember crashing into the tree. I’m in the yard again but Mom’s there and she’s screaming at me.

Meatloaf had five kittens. Then she had another four later. They seem kind of dirty to me and I think they need a bath. I asked the fishies if I could use their water. They don’t mind. There is a little light at the top of the tank so I can see the kitties swimming around. They’re having fun meowing and swimming around. Mom comes in and she’s mad. She’s drying the kitties and she won’t let me pet them, even though I asked. I said please.

You can run all the way from the kitchen, into the living room, into mom and dad’s room, and jump onto the bed. You can’t do it when mom’s sleeping during the day. You can’t do it when dad’s sleeping at night. But, when mom goes to work, then we can play roll ’em! Dada rolls and we fall down if we don’t jump over him. He also has the recking-ball lemon-squeezer. It’s really just his cast and his leg. He’ll squeeze us if he can catch us, but he never catches me. I’m too fast.

When you are watching television and you turn it off or change the channel, why isn’t it the same thing you were watching when you turn it back on? Why can you do that with the movies as Grouchy Grandma’s house?

Chris said that if I pick up all his baseball cards for him, then I get to keep them. He really doesn’t want to clean his room. So, I pick up every single card, even the ones under his bed which smells like pee. After I’m done, he laughs at me and takes the box of cards. I put my hands on my hips and tell him that he’d better give me them or I’ll call the police on him. He laughs. Dada walks into the doorway. He tells Chris to give me the cards. He tells Chris not to make deals he can’t keep. Don’t be an Indian-giver.

It’s in the middle of the night and I’m creeping out of my bedroom and into the kitchen. Dada is in the living room next door, so I can see a little. I crawl onto a chair and then the kitchen table. There’s almost a whole stick of butter in the dish. Midnight snack. I make it back to my bed undetected.

When Dada helps me change clothes, he tells me to lift up my arms so he can take my shirt off. Sometimes he doesn’t do it all the way and the shirt is stuck on my head. He tells me I have a nice hat.

We live in a triple decker which means there are people living upstairs. One of the people is boy older than me. He’s as old as my brother, but he’s not like my brother. He hates my brother and together we make fun of him. Sometimes though he plays with my brother instead and they make fun of me. They can both say the alphabet faster than me. They say that means that they’re smarter.

I’m playing pretty ponies and little people when my brother opens the door and farts. He closes the door and runs away laughing.

Every once in a great while my dad smokes a cigar. I don’t like the smell, especially when it gets in my room, but it’s funny when he puts it in the plastic Halloween pumpkin’s mouth. The pumpkin looks funny smoking.

On one side of the triple-decker there is a bank-in. It’s steep, with trees, but then gets flat again at the bottom. We’re not supposed to play there, but we do. We even have a fort. Chris doesn’t play fair, though. Chris only has fun if I’m not having any. He’s laughing in the bank-in. I’m at the top. I’m going to go tell mom and dad, but they won’t do anything. If I scare him so we won’t laugh at me again. I find a rock I can barely lift. I throw it next to him, down the bank-in. It’s heavy, but the slope helps. It hits his head. He falls down. He screams. I stand at the top of the bank-in. I just watch him scream. My parents come and take him, yell at me. No one believes that I didn’t mean to hit him.

We have a stone wall in the back running along the apartment. It is between the side of the yard where the swing set is and the side of the yard with the bank-in. The wall has a bit of ground at the top of it, then a fence that separates us from another apartment. Sometimes we climb up and sit there. Is being off the wall when you are on the wall and jump off? The jumping doesn’t last very long and it’s not very high up. I don’t get it.

Mom says that we are human beans. God is not a human bean, though. He is just a bean. I don’t think that makes sense. I think he’s kind of like a cloud that looks like the face of a man, the man in the moon. What do we have to do with beans? What kind of beans?

When Chris is mean to me I tell him I’m going to call the police on him. Sometimes he believes me and stops being mean. He doesn’t believe me this time, so I pick up the phone to call the police. I put it to my ear and a man’s voice says, “This is the police.” I scream and put down the phone. Dad comes in laughing. It was him on the other phone. I didn’t know you could do that.

Childhood in Uxbridge

It was Thanksgiving. After a morning of running around breakfast, putting on our showers, and gulping down our getting ready, we managed to get everyone packed in the car. Dad drove us around Uxbridge.

Uxbridge was an old mill town perpetually trying to stay an old mill town even as everything around it changed and grew. People lived in places parted by inched lawns nestled side by side, trimmed guardian bushes, and trees out back. Many lived in large houses at the end of winding dirt roads unseen by any neighbor. The only landmarks to their house would be trees and maybe a mailbox, probably camouflaged in green on a wooden post.

The town had the air of things passed. It had different areas, down town, north, south, but no one would refer to any part of Uxbridge by saying so without a slight sneer or bit of sarcasm. Saying Uxbridge had a down town was pointing out a gas station, a liquor store, and the bank and calling it the big center of it all.

Then there was the river and it’s canal that flowed through the town, including the down town, where it cascaded into a waterfall right outside of the liquor store waiting to catch those who would not wait to return to their homes. This valley clutched to the idea of people coming together around the river out of necessity. In more recent times it was a smelly, sewage line through the town with walkways along side it so people could walk their dogs and try to catch sight of the mutated frogs. Sometimes you’d catch a brave soul canoing. You’d stare like a redneck at the NASCAR race track, waiting for the boat to capsize so you could have something to say around the dinner table that night or chat about on the ride to Grandma’s house in this case. You could take turns predicting what terrible diseases they could get. My money’s on leukemia. Chris says cancer. I say leukemia is a type of cancer. Chris says it’s not. We are silenced by a twisted figure in the passenger seat pointing a finger dangerously.

“You better shut up, right now!” threatens my mother. We revert to arguing in glances.

“Would you relax, Ann?” my dad mutters. This only makes mom angrier.

“It’s awful to be saying things like that about people! The river is fine! All sorts of animals live by it. You remember Jeremy? He used to go canoeing in it all the time, and he’s fine. It’s not nice to joke about cancer! Would you rather we still lived in Whitinsville? Or Worcester?”

“Oh, they like it fine here, Ann,” said my dad as patient and cheerfully as he could muster, “They’re just joking around, right?”

“Sure,” me and my brother both intoned, surprised to find ourselves in agreement. I knew that wouldn’t do.

“It’s a bit isolated,” I admitted, daring my mother’s wrath, “We have to drive at least a half hour to get anywhere. There’s nothing to do really.”

“Nothing to do?” my mom asked incredulously, “What do you mean there’s nothing to do? I’m sick of you two always saying you’re bored.”

“I didn’t say anything,” said Chris.

“You just did,” I told Chris.

“Well you can travel where ever you want to and live where ever you want to live when you’re older,” said my dad, the diplomat, “You’ll come to realize that exciting places have bad things about them too.”

“Yeah, but I bet their schools don’t suck as much,” muttered my brother.

“Don’t swear!” screamed my mother, rounding on him with the finger.

“What? I didn’t swear! What swear did I use?”

“Yes, you did. You know you did. You said it sucks.”

Hating to side with my brother, but needing to be honest, I came to his defense, “Mom, sucks isn’t a swear.”

“It’s not a nice word! And I don’t want to hear it again!” yelled my mom resolving the matter, “Besides, you’d belly-ache about school no matter what school you went to.”

“Yeah, school sucks.”

“Christopher!”

“Oh, right. School blows.”

Nobody answered Chris that time. I was amazed my mother fumed silently. She did this very seldom.

Finally my dad pulled over at one of the nature preserves for the river and got out his camera. He wanted to let us run around a little and take some pictures. My dad was a carpenter and car guy, but underneath that with his manual 35mm Minolta in hand, he was an art-tist!

Late at night when he’d had a few beers in him he would take out boxes of pictures he had taken all over the country. He said they used to be in albums and packets, but my mother had unsorted them all on various occasions wanting to make new albums but never finishing. My dad would tell me of an ancient time before I was born.

“Here’s one of my hotrods,” he said, then going on to say what specific car it was and what it had to make it go so much better than other cars, “This one I crashed while I was tripping.”

“What happened to the other ones?” I asked, eyes scanning the shiny red machine.

“Kids. That’s what happened. I met your mom. I sold my hotrods.”

It was a sad tale. I bowed my head in respect, then thought of another question, “What happened to the camera that you took all of these pictures with?”

“Your mom. That’s what happened to it. Every time I take it out to go shooting she takes a bunch of crap pictures that are out of focus and over or under exposed. When I try to explain it to her, she gets mad at me. If I tell her she can’t use the camera, she gets mad at me. So, I keep it hidden away.”

It was a sad tale. My dad would continue on to other pictures.

Now he had a generic automatic Kodak camera that even my mom could take pictures with. You could still always tell which ones my dad took.

“C’mon, let’s get a group shot by the river.”

We all went off next to the Blackstone river, pretended to like each other enough to get closer, closer. Mom smelled like stale cigarettes, my brother like piss.

“Chris, put your hand down and stop being a wise ass. Now everyone smile!”