Wednesday, May 6, 2009

The Backyard of My Youth

I went for a walk the other day. Just to pass the time.

Just woke up and went out the door, back home from college, anxious to relax and reel back, a motion picture being rewound slowly, almost frame by frame. I wear conservative athletic shoes now, quite a ways from the converse all stars that I could almost still hear clapping cadence into the summer-dry nights of my youth. I almost always made it home late those nights, heart racing, hoping my mom wouldn’t notice. Those were the nights I ran too fast and missed the things that only come to me now as feelings. Light breezes through sparse shrubbery. Dogs, all fur and teeth, flashing in and out of sight in people’s backyards, sometimes running with you to the corners of their fenced in kingdoms. The dull yellow cones of light from streetlights, spraying down upon coolly ticking cars. Those nights I didn’t have time to appreciate the cool shadows of youth, how you savor things to look back upon later, like a roll of film you use up over a span of years nonchalantly, forget about and them come across later on those nights you can’t sleep. There were only two places I would be running home from in those days, eking out every stretched second, calmly assuring myself I could make it up by running faster. How many nights were there like that? Playing Nintendo in Nate Delp’s basement, the breeze coming in the rectangular windows and drying our sweaty palms. Or Dane Henrichsen’s basement, playing pool under the stained glass lights that gave the felt a well-watered look. The days become meaningless I suppose, but it seemed as if I was always running and only now am I learning to walk.

I walked down Elm Street, the backbone of Penbrook. Every other street horizontally intersects it and you can follow it the whole way through, past Zimmerman’s candy store, past my old house on Boas Street and up towards the edge of Reservoir Park where Dane lived. His street looped around and got tangled into Hoffer and 29th Streets, back towards Nate’s. I walked quietly, slowly, thinking hard about then and now and what exactly was in between. I remembered sunny spring days when the sidewalks were sprinkled with gravel from when the snows came down and the plows had moved through the streets, forming embankments and taking loose macadam with them. Everything seemed so ripe then, so fresh.
There were days when I just had nothing to do so I just walked around, but not like this.

The small borough is slate gray now, a cold mother with empty nest syndrome, abandoned by her children and slowly being overrun by urban sprawl. Not one kid was outside playing, confident and curious kids roaming the territory they were born into, finding the nooks and cranny’s, the escape route and shortcuts. The most secret places to smoke cigarettes and talk tough. I suppose there are still kids running around, maybe the place hadn’t changed since I was a kid. Maybe they’d simply found different places to run.

Zimmerman’s candy store looks like some monolithic atrocity now, expanded and encased in tan industrial siding. There is even a new entrance and a parking lot beside it. I hadn’t been to it since I was in high school and it probably wouldn’t have been that big a deal to watch it slowly turn, slowly expand into what it is now, but being away so long has made it a foreign and depressing thing to see. I remember a time when it was a one room little charming place, selling fresh roasted peanuts and peanut butter. They had the candy behind the counter in glass cases to be scooped out at request. They had pez dispensers and solid chocolate bunnies at Easter. I marvel at the fact that Penbrook had a candy store back then, but then again I guess it wasn’t a big deal. Communities were communities back then, they weren’t hidden away like upscale suburbs or compressed like urban cityscape, they were the places in between, the stretched out puddy to fill the cracks. Back then you knew people, you knew their tendencies and secrets. You knew that it probably wasn’t a good idea to go up into Reservoir Park at night, though you may not have known why. You knew that once summer hit and school let out your pool membership would become your greatest and most cherished possession. You’d laminate them and put them into those plastic baseball card sleeves to keep your wrinkled prune hands from slowly deteriorating it. People had porches and actually used them. They weren’t hidden away in the back so no one could spy on you, they were out front so you could talk to your neighbors, walk from side yard to side yard, the adults talking tall and cross-armed, the children playing tag and manhunt until dusk. When something bad hit like a blizzard or an electrical storm, the aftermath was observed from front porches. People grouped together and rebuilt. And nothing was more central to a kid year round than a candy store. Zimmerman’s has certainly changed, but I have as well so I can’t really fault them for that. I catch a quick whiff of roasted peanuts as I pass, however, and the scent in some way gives me hope.
Past the old day-care building with its fenced in macadam playground.

Just another haunt where the roller blade wheels still whizzed.

Past the Cippicioppi place with their eight kids and dirty backyard next to an old car storage building. The building had a nice ramp from bike jumps. Matt Cippicioppi’s dad was arrested for growing weed in a closet in a bedroom just above the day care center they ran and it was kind of disconcerting to think about the youth being exposed to such things until you think about the fact that the people they sold to were probably the kid’s parents. There was and still is an abandoned store across the alley from the Cippicioppi’s backyard. Always I thought it was just a matter of time before it was sold and renovated and used again, but it never was and will most likely end up being leveled. I spent a significant amount of summer nights talking with my old next door neighbor Tyler Kobler about breaking into the place and looking for stuff, any relic of the past that we could wear as a badge of honor and ponder upon late at night when the lights were off and the slow traffic revved by and streetlights produced patches of rectangular light onto our bare wooden floors. It’s funny how any little mundane thing can take on a mythic quality if we wait long enough to go back to it. I remember nights singing old pop songs in the shower and thinking about the first girl my age that ever moved into Penbrook, the first girl I ever really liked. These were the untold memories, the ones that, separate, were meaningless and mildly embarrassing, but compiled cast a shadow long enough to cover the tendencies of adulthood. Is any memory really meaningless?

Past the Moroski’s place.

I never knew her husband Zeke Moroski, but I used to dog sit her cocker spaniel Buffet (pronounced like the strung out beachhead singer) when she used to go up to Penn State games. Her house was huge, blue and on its own little triangular block behind my block and across the street from our bike ramp garage area. The dog-sitting came at a time when I was just on the brink of alcoholic revelation—wanting to drink, but having absolutely no means to obtain it until I found her fully stocked bar in the basement. One night I got drunk with Nate in that basement, mixing liquors together from a book we found. Mrs. Moroski also had a huge collection of Stephen King novels I still haven’t returned. She took an odd pleasure I think from lending them to me, knowing she’d probably never see them again. Around the side of her house was a woodpile that I used to hide porn under. Outdated Playboy images of women bent over, holding fake pearl necklaces so they snaked between their asses. Ripped out of magazines and folded many times over, for easy insertion into the waistband of my pants. I hid them out there because my room wasn’t sacred enough. I just felt the need to have those pictures outside, in foreign environments, not yet knowing of masturbation. I’d stare at them for hours, wondering exactly why I was so enamored by thirty something year old women pretending to be twenty something year old women spreading their overly make-upped thighs to the folds of a glossy magazine spread. Later I would find a copy of Playboy in the Moroski house and wondered what she was doing with a magazine like that. I stole the magazine, of course, but I wonder if it wasn’t a cherished possession of hers. The last remnants of her dead husbands porn stash. Sweaty handed moments of her husbands’ life she had never known.
And there, hidden away, through a rusted wrought iron fence it stood.
The backyard of my youth.

A duplex with a long, skinny backyard fenced in on one side. The back edge used to be my dad’s garden and how many hours had I seen him out there tilling and putting up his tomato stakes? He loved that garden, in many ways I suppose it was the one thing that kept him sane, what with all the young kids running under the eaves, crowding his living room, upping the volume on a thousand television shows while he patiently tried to do his crosswords. Fenced in by chicken wire, it was the one place we knew we couldn’t go.
Of course, that didn’t stop us.

Closer to the house there was a patio of cement and I’ll always remember the small gap between the back stairs that led under the porch. I’d spend hours crouched in that little niche, peering desperately into the dark, hoping to spot some old toy or something discarded years ago by my older brothers—a hand-me-down of a different sort, hidden, a treasure hunt caused by indifferent discarding. There was also a smell that emitted from that gap. Later I would associate it with the smell of the damp earth left in vampiric coffins. It had a musty, dirty smell I could only call nostalgia.

Past the patio a narrow walkway cut the yard in two and also served many other purposes. It was a raceway for my skateboard, me imagining I was in some relay race, board to knee, other leg propelling. It was a plane of battle for my GI Joe’s, each side trenching up in the tall grass waiting. But first and foremost, it was a home plate and further down second base to my little baseball diamond. I was a pretty good baseball player in my youth and I think much of that derived from my lonely (yet not so lonely) days bouncing tennis balls onto that cement walkway, hitting the ball and racing to catch the ball. In my mind the game played out perfectly, me switching sides did not change the fact that my batter was still running around the bases. I made up fictional names and fictional teams and kept track of them, so deeply saturated in my own overactive imagination.
I even announced my own games.

Looking back, that back yard was just as important as the house that went with it. More important maybe. Unlike today, where video games and more television channels fight to keep kids inside, kids my age where pushed out into the world by moms fastidiously scrubbing and dusting, tired of the little mud sneaker prints that trailed throughout the house. And we made due. Did we get ourselves into trouble? Of course, no one’s a saint, but I do think we got something deeper from our excursions, our trial and errors. I think we established an inherent perspective of our surroundings, a sixth sense of perception that has served us well even all these years later. A feeling of home turf, a proud beating in our chests. Or it could just simply be our hearts racing as we rounded the block and slowed to a walk, taking in the last rushes of air as we made our way home in the fading day.
I keep walking.

Atop Reservoir Park, the highest point in Harrisburg, I can see it all rolling downward before me. Houses nestled around patches of elms and shrubbery, alleywayed and intersected, a technical schematic of everything that was my youth. I knew the place well. I knew the people well. We moved out of Penbrook my sophomore year in high school to a house just barely in another township. The little borough had decayed inwardly by then—older people dying off or moving to retirement homes, and outwardly with the forever-growing city. The trees look lonely now, but the crotches of their forked branches once provided footholds for my size eight’s. The shrubbery has mostly died off or made way to fence, but you may still find a little arched space in the twigs, small enough for a kid to speed through in a night game of flashlight tag. It serves as a reminder that youth is a supernova that explodes and is gone before you ever thought it would be. The heat still lingers through high school and by college you are only left with the memories. But every now and then you feel like walking, slowing down, and you make your way through the hallowed ground that was your whole life, finding and retracing the steps you once made. Your steps are much bigger now, so you need patience, but in time, you may find a ghost image or two of that little kid with a Penbrook baseball cap and a freckled grin, laughing as he makes his way home.

Smiling, now lost in memories, I make my way home.

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