Too Many Years in the City

Today, in an effort to feel organized, I jotted down several ideas for posts.

Today, with no effort on my part, I lost the index card on which I wrote the ideas for posts.

I just spent the last 10 minutes on my hands and knee (remember, i have a knee i cannot kneel on) searching under the couch, rug, stacks of magazines, the cat, stacks of books, books I might have slipped it into as a bookmark, trying to find it. Which reminds me. I found all of the details for my mom's cataract surgery written on an index card and used as a bookmark. I'm not making quick progress in the Maria Montessori book but I am, as ever, hopeful. It was there. I found it the day AFTER her surgery. I still haven't found the card from today.

I do remember that I was going to write about the old neighborhood. This reminds me that you really MUST read Theodore Dreiser's short story "The Old Neighborhood". It is beyond excellent.

Visions in my mind this morning were of the Eastern looking grandfather who would push his grandson up and down the street every morning in a pram. Not an umbroller stroller like we had. This thing was the Cadillac of prams. The little boy was always standing up in it, while his grandfather could be heard talking to him, in a language I could not understand. It was so sweet.

And, the time someone rented a horse and carriage. Really. We lived on the tiniest most narrow street I have ever been on, yet, during one of my worst migraines, someone actually rented a horse and carriage (with bells...lots of bells...i remember the sound 'clomp clomp clomp clomp jingle jingle jingle jingle, repeat).

I remember the family two doors down who put all of their kids and every belonging they had into a tent in their backyard at the beginning of summer and they remained there until fall. How they ever slept though the nights of horseshoe playing, I'll never know. I couldn't sleep two doors down. This same family had a handicapped child who was wheelchair bound. He slept in the tent too. His brother called him 'F----R'. Like it was his name. I remember on several occasions hearing Oldest Son who was maybe three at the time shout out the window at him 'Hi F----R!' and having to explain to him that it was NOT the boys name, and that he may never do that again. To which he responded - 'It is TO his name, I heard his brother call him that!'

We drove right though the center of a major drug deal once. Me and my three kids. Happy people in cars being handed long white envelopes. It was extremely scary. Right on our street.

A middle aged white man had a drug house on our street. THGGM would walk outside with a notebook and write down license plate numbers. This annoyed me to no end, but the police said it would work. It did. His major business happened before nine and after five. Most of his clients were upper class people who looked really out of place on our street.

When a family would move out, all the neighbors we knew would keep a close cockroach watch. The other side of the street had them bad. We only had one scare, and that was when the 'tent people' and their son with the weird name moved out.

On that street I learned that families of different races were all at their core the same. They loved their children and wanted the best for them. Some of the mom's expressed this by screaming "_____ git yor a$$ in this house right now!" This caused Daughter to say to me, 'at least you say 'butt'.

Two dirty little preschoolers used to knock on our porch door early in the morning. They could see my kids neat stacks of toys out there. They would beg to come in. My kids would hide behind me in horror. 'You are NOT going to let them in here, are you?' I never did. Mostly because I would never let a kid into my house without his parents permission, and this parent was only ever seen laying out in a lounge chair in a bikini on the front four feet of grass called a front yard.

Once I saw four children from one family parading down the street with cereal boxes held over their heads. Another mom had given it to them to bring home for breakfast. Apparently, no one in the home saw fit to feed them.

An old Dutch guy, who had lived on the street for decades, was beaten nearly to death because he yelled at some guy not to park in front of his house (actually, there was no street parking at the time). I saw the pictures. An old man almost completely purple. Where he wasn't purple, he was red.

All the trouble I saw was alcohol or drug related. Not race.

Although it was awful all around us, we were surrounded by neighbors that we got to know well.
Once, my bike was stolen. Someone saw it being taken in the night. My kids thought that I'd be very upset about it. I remember saying to them 'God knows where my bike is'. The very next day, a scraggly guy knocked on the door. He said he had found the bike in his yard and asked around. Some kids told them that they knew. He brought it back. My kids wondered if angels sometimes wore tee - shirts advertising the neighborhood bar.

It was actually drugs that caused us to move. My brother-in-law who lived next door to us owed. The dealer showed up at the door of his house and threatened my mother-in-law. She told THGGM. He came home and said 'We are SO out of here."

Once, his mother emptied out her entire retirement fund to pay off one of his brother's drug debts. He had started asking us for money. Then, our kids.

His mother had nothing left to give. She said we might want to keep a close eye on our kids.

My eyes aren't that good.

We moved.