On the west side, the houses hadn’t given in to their sighs of mid-summer. Mostly everyone’s house was well kept and the ones that weren’t, even their families mowed the lawns under the sagging eaves and drug out ladders with cob-webbed rungs to add fresh paint. The kids played in the streets making makeshift ramps from phone books and leftover boards, setting fireworks off at the edges of driveways in July, and in August, sitting on basketballs under shady overhangs just staring at the baskets and never breaking the heat more than two or three times to take a shot. One lawn was perfectly manicured – poisoned evergreen bluegrass, thick and Catholic lawn mowed and raked and the lawn mower and driveway washed extensively afterward by the holy man of sorts, the caretaker, Mr. Crandski, who’d waste gallons rinsing the dirty blade and clearing pavement. He’d smoke when he was finished with the yard and had the hose in hand, post coital almost, or maybe like he would after a big meal, the high-pitch and thudding all the same spray sound wash, wash, washing down the drive. We kids used to love him smoke and wash his driveway. His sons were good boys, older than us by just enough grade levels to separate our groups. They’d end up in the loudest, filthiest fucking arguments you’d ever heard in the middle of the day, the boys walking out in the summer sun on the clean driveway, yelling in adolescent voices right into their dad’s big sound, almost a roar. Crandski was a big man, with big lungs and good sized pants. His sons would walk off on him after they’d drawn the neighbors to the windows.

These fights were among the more interesting events of the summer. The others generally happened in the same place, down the street and up a hill, past the trees and chain-link fence to an old graveyard. The headstones were perfectly looped by a gravel road, and some more headstones were outside the circle, on the edges. The loop made a perfect race track for kids on bicycles, about 1 and 8 of a mile around. The races always started at the far end, the northeast corner. Someone would yell go, usually someone in the race and looking for a head start. Smooshed socks and worn shoes would kick the pedals down and after the first long, slow pushes, the feet would move faster, the pedals lighter, around the first corner and full speed down the straightaway. The first corner was the toughest. Some riders would lose it there, take it too hard. Their expressions would change. Smiles would turn to “oh shit” circles, like guppies, then the bike frames would waver, then a scream an actual oh shit, and that rider would go careening off into spaces between headstones.

The others still in the race never looked back. They kept on, pedaling fast, the third curve on a glide, then and all out break for the finish, the long strides suddenly back, the bicycle chains tearing through the teeth like loud coats being unzipped. Zuh-oom. Zuh-oom. The sound coming after every step. Zuh-oom. And there were almost always two bikes neck and neck. There was never a lone winner. But anyone could win there. I won a few times, but I don’t remember it. My friends did, too, and I would guess they don’t remember either. I was always the thoughtful one, who didn’t want to let go of the moment, even then, so it’s surprising I’d forget who won the race. I don’t know, maybe I didn’t win.

There was a place on the cemetery’s edge, a clearing overhung with 60-foot trees, where the older boys would take girls. We’d hide there on occasion, too, when it was clear, and throw rocks at the mailman who’d stop at the box through the trees at the bottom of the hill. I remember one girl, older, she lived a street over which might as well been a foreign country, which is why don’t remember her name, she was gorgeous, a perfect blonde with a tan and preppy clothes and the teasy feathered hair – could have been pretty in any era – she went up the hill with a boy her age, a plain boy like us, nothing special about him at all, and they laid down in the tall weeds in the shimmering light let into the bottom of the fishbowl by the tree arms, and nobody bothered them there. They were safe, it was private. No one wanted to spoil it for a boy like us. There was hope on the west side. We could be like this boy in the hope summer. We could dream and imagine, we could make the houses better than what they were and the neighbors into celebrities. No one made us into anything.

Funny, this might be one of the most personal additions I’ve made to this blog … but personal in a different way. I was actually hoping to get away from the extremely personal nature of what I’ve been writing lately, and by looking a little deeper, this did the trick. Sometimes I pretend I am participating in a junior college creative writing course and the instructor has written some opening words or a concept on the dry erase board – in this case, “Write about the place you grew using words as your map”. As the room fills with marker smell, I roll over the cover to a beaten spiral notebook and write in a flourish for 10 or more protected minutes (unprotected minutes must be the on-deadline words written for publication, exposed, like these, with thigh bruises and knobby, skin-scraped knees). Is there any time more sincere than the 10 or so minutes spent writing in class? Everyone has their head down and the most amateur writer can come up with something brilliant – the plain English that everyone is striving for – the perfect description of something, not poetry but exactly how it is. Beginners can do this because they aren’t trying to impress anyone. They are just trying to write from memory.
My junior year at Park University, a soccer player who had taken creative writing as an elective wrote a genuine piece about where he grew up during a morning free-writing exercise. He wrote a passage about a beach in the Bahamas. He described the long palm trees like straws stuck in the sand, the wind lifting up their arms so the sun could shine on the abandoned, imperceptible seashells on the slanted shoreline. He wrote something actually beautiful, though, that he lived, that wasn’t derived from a Corona commercial, a magazine ad or my own limited experience on beaches. Living it is the key. I’ve done more living than writing the last few weeks. But you can’t do one without the other. I’m starting to think that’s why I chose this profession. The living comes easy. Your work is only as interesting as you live, so it’s best in the few moments you have to write about it, you’ve done something worthwhile. I had a fun childhood. This piece was the beginning of a roadmap to the square mile where I once knew every unlevel sidewalk block, cut through and tree that could be climbed. Those were the best days of my life.

Low expectations are expectations, though. Since most of us were going to survive, we did our best to keep our lives going. Other kids would still crack. Every so often in elementary school, a kid would lose it at his desk and be dragged away from class clawing at the teachers and crying. We’d never see him again. That only seemed to happen to boys.

Everything about where we lived was hard. The Cottonwood beside my house was an 80-foot tall tree-dumper that shed leaves on our rooftop year round. In the fall, the backyard was matted with wet leaves. The leaves would tangle together to make a rotting blanket across the dead grass. In the summer, cotton pieces that worked loose from pods would float over home plate during our baseball games. We’d all stop and look at it in wonderment.

“Look,” someone would say. Someone would chase it down, pull it from the air and smash in their palm so it couldn’t go on being pretty. No one else would say anything. Then the ballgames would go on.

Our house started out green. It was green when my parents bought it. When it got too much of a pain to paint, my parents paid to have it covered in beige aluminum siding. The siding was a pain, too. It came loose around the windows and warped on the front of the house, which was in the direct sun.

Our house was ranch-style, but there wasn’t any ranch. The front yard was average-sized for a typical city home and was mixed with dandelions and thin grass. The back was a green space about 40 yards wide and little longer. There wasn’t room for any horses or cattle. My parents didn’t even like pets. And pretty soon, my mom even split with my dad, so there was one less animal around.

The house was split, too, into two parts. The garage, living room and dining room were on one half. The other half was a hallway with two bathrooms and three bedrooms. My brother and I never took our shoes off in the house. We’d worn paths in the carpet from where it began at the kitchen all the way to the back rooms. After my dad was gone, when things broke, they stayed that way. My dad wasn’t handy with tools. But he could afford to pay people to come fix thigns. I think of that carpet as divorce carpet because it couldn’t be fixed thanks to a marriage that went bad.

I had the smallest room in the house. It was a perfect square, but wasn’t perfect any other way. By the time I was 11 or 12, I could stretch out on the floor and touch the walls with my feet and toes. Before I was born, my mother had painted the walls yellow and installed fire-colored carpet and it stayed decorated that way until I was in high school. For a birthday present, I chose to paint it gray to compensate for those years of sleeping in a lake of fire.

My bed was single-sized, a little wider than an Army cot but just as flimsy. My brother and I had bunk beds for awhile. But the beds were eventually split apart. I kept mine until it dipped in the middle and my posture bent with it.

I drive by the old house sometimes. I never get out, just drive by. Someone new lives in our house now. My mom sold it about 10 years ago to a guy who was going to flip it. His plan was to fix it up and sell it in a year, maybe two. It took him eight years to get it to a place where it was sellable. The Cottonwood tree’s roots had grown under the house and caused issues some serious issues with the plumbing.

These are ugly memories. All of us from the neighborhood have them. These are mine. And I have to remember them sometimes when I am in the middle of this race to succeed. I never had it in me to pull the cotton from the air and then pick it apart. That’s success enough for one lifetime.

During the spring, several birthdays belonging to nearby family members were celebrated, but those events were brief and poorly attended, an afterthought without nearly as much gusto as the major winter holidays. In the summer, the grandchildren were left to the grandparents for the day in this house, and the place under the table became magic, a private world where the littlest boy among the cousins being watched could dream up adventures for his solider and space figures, color and draw and imagine himself in the cuckoo clock that hung on the wall above or roasting in the afternoon sun on the carpet spot that the sun warmed through the house’s back windows. The grandparents used the tabletop as a collecting place for the day’s mail that turned into last week’s mail, newspapers, coats, hats and other items that gather in level dead spaces. This layer made the ornate table easier to walk past without noticing and hid the boy deeper in his fantasy world.

Every year, when the winds came up and the days shortened, the tabletop was cleared a few days before the gatherings when as many as 50 people would show up and throw heavy coats in the master bedroom, the presents were set down in piles against the wall and near the fireplace, and the plates and silverwarwe were brought out so that the table could be used for its true purpose. Adults mistook the curvy stabilizers to be footrests. They put up their feet on the wonder the boy knew and he smiled – his own parents seated at the table – because he knew they weren’t children anymore and if they were, they still wouldn’t see the seclusion as he did.

His older cousins were just older enough that he was excluded from the group. There were three others, all older, closer in age, at 12 and 13 ages, and they often inadvertently did not include him. He came to the table to sulk, but he was too little to know that’s what it was or how it might impact him. Hidden in the winding wood, in the shadowy trunked legs that cast perfect rectangular darkness, he found his creativity, a sweet world that was all his own, and yet inclusive, dream-lke but present under the table and all its flaws, its hinges and nails stamped through the corners.

The wood was slickly finished and well preserved. The boy is nearly 34 years old now, and the table is in the same place. His grandparents are gone, but family owns the house and the table. Thw wood is still well mainted and buried under the same usual clutter, and it seems that the memory of his childhood can be the same way.

I could smell burning leaves. The smell was coming from all directions. Cars passed with windows open so I knew it was not just my own warm blood or wishful thinking children who had determined the day to be warm. Autumn, at times, seemed to be the season at hand rather than spring since the following week forecasted to slip back into freezing temperatures. February usually brings the worst weather, a few more snow falls or ice storms waiting in the clouds, and it all seemed so impossible sitting on the back deck that the sky could become overcast and send ice sheets down to snarl roads and trap people in houses.

The rose bushes swayed on ends that would be clipped clean in a few weeks. Strong train whistles tore through the leave-less trees and wind started to clear away the worthless limbs left dead from the winter. Motorcyles accelerated in the distance, passing cars whooshed, children laughed and a little girl started crying a street over. And the weather and the sounds reminded me of a similar day when I was in fifth grade.

I met some girls on a street a few blocks from mine on a Saturday morning. One of them had an older sister with a car and she drove us to the lake. The intent on the younger sister, Kim, was to grant me face time with Heather G., who was the most beautiful girl at Bethel Elementary School. There were many attractive girls there, though I remember them all to be in different stages of interest and development. Some were still into My Little Pony and horses, still very imaginative and airy, and a few stayed that way going on the become fashion designers and artists.

Heather was advanced, though, not in terms of experience of her appearance, but in the way she carried herself. She was womanly at 10, very knowledgeable of what drove boys or should drive them and intelligent about relationships. I am not sure I remember how or what children see in each other at that age, but it seemed that our interest in each other was rooted in the physical, and in that respect I am sure that I wasn’t much more than boy.

Kim’s sister drove us through the lake’s winding roads overhung with trees, and the shimmering shade and it all felt so secluded and secret. She let us out at the play equipment and almost immediately we were running up a narrow path on a hill. We were about to come down for the first time and while we were stepping around the weeds, Kim told me that Heather wanted to hold my hand.

I was a happy boy, about as bright as the yellow, bowl-cut hair on my head, but I still managed to have a low opinion of myself. I couldn’t see how anyone would want to hold my hand and I was scared that I couldn’t handle what it brought next. I didn’t want to hold Heather’s hand. I was terrified. And we stood there in the glorious sun looking down on the play area my parents had brought me to before I could barely walk, had slid me down the slides, had held my hands up on the monkeybars, had balanced me on the teeter totter and spun me on the merry-go-round, and I felt this new era coming on, a new feeling. Nervousness was always something I felt about the world. I was often afraid of what my father might do to me for misbehaving or being clumsy, which I always managed to be around him. On the hill, there was something happening just as innocent as play time with my parents and yet, I felt darkness in it – and poor timing.

Heather was beautiful, her skin a shade darker than the other girls and her eyes exotic, her hair dark and long with a curl in it, and she deserved a boy her age to hold her hand. She’d find one the next year and the girls really wouldn’t come back to me until three years later when the magnet school had taken the ones they’d been interested in when we started middle school.

That moment passed 20 years ago and I sat there with the sun on me in January of all months and I was back there at the lake park, in the dreary few hours that followed my neglection of this beautiful girl’s offer. We sat on picnic tables and the girls questioned me. They wanted to know what I was scared, why I wouldn’t hold this pretty girl’s hand. The offer was never extended again. The damage was done. Heather was hurt. When she found out, Kim’s sister chastised me. I remember the relief that came when they dropped me off that afternoon and I could walk home in quiet, alone finally, a boy back in his familiar neighborhood and no one to disappoint by myself.

I was glad to hear the summer sounds back again today, but I am also glad that they sometimes disappear and the seasons move on to new ones.

Each petal was sheeted plastic, made to withstand the weather at windblown backyard cemeteries like this one, but this gulley was made beautiful by surprising accident. The artist was the beaten down groundskeeper who, as far as us neighborhood kids could tell, was the only person left alive that remembered about the cemetery. He tended to it once a year – more out of nagging responsibility than love – on the day after Memorial Day. The rush hour for cemeteries. And every summer, the morning after the crowds had loaded back into their cars, circled back through the gravel lot and beyond the black steel gate, he’d come and cut the grass, empty out all of the vases and clear off the headstones and grass patches. He’d throw all of the decorations over into his big pile beyond the graveyard fence. Lying against a canvas of green or brown (if the spring had been dry and the sun especially warm for the season) would be this phony flowerbed with these vivid colors and, every so often, a grave decoration turned on its side with worlds written across like it the lettering on some unfortunate beauty pageant ribbon: “We’ll never forget you” or “Happy Birthday”. Those brought a somber mood to his creation. He worked in color and plastics, striking a balance between man-mande objects intended to last and the natural – the temporary or fleeting items that grew on the hillside where he made his piece. An art critic might interpret it differently, but to us kids who ran these hills behind the graveyard, most of whom had never stepped foot into a museum at any part of their lives, it was beautiful.

The biggest frequenters to this place were, of course, young lovers. Most would come here for privacy, but also to fulfill a sense of exploration. I always imagined that they had tired of the backseats of cars and wanted to find someplace where kisses could be sneaked without the risk of parents opening the door on them or coming down the stairs. So, inevitably, there would be a couple that would break away from the back – if they were hanging with a larger group – and they’d head off holding hands up the hillside, waist deep in weeds that were the same color and shape as summer wheat.

The treeptops acted as a roof here and a filter of sunlight. In the midafternoon, the ground there could be mistaken to move as the branches swayed in the breeze, the cracks of light dancing on the rocks and dirt. And, the lovers would lie there, on this shifting ocean of dirt, as the waves of sunshine would rock them through from gentle kissing to something much riskier.

The groundskeeper would catch them back there at the beginning of summer, before he lost the will to follow up on the place. He moved quietly, slowly about his business. He was an old man, and except for the occasional bang of trash can lids – which was accidental – he was silent. All his tools were kept in a white shack that was adjacent to a cement porch burial ceremonies were once held. The far corner of his worker’s shack was the nearest to the gulley and the heap of grass and flowers, where the lovers would grind themselves silly into the dirt. He’d catch them there, by accident, while putting some tool away or taking one out. He’d hear the unmistakable sounds of love making. There they’d be, tangled up together in the thickets and in his grumbliest voice he’d holler over the fence. He’d surprise them. Watch them at once try to pull together themselves together and their clothes back on, the whole time trying to figure out exactly what it was that was happening.

He took no pleasure in it. His sense of humor was faded as his uniform that he wore by choice, not out of obligation or a sense of duty. He was who he was and he enjoyed scaring the kids getting laid.

His other tormentors, who like the lovers really weren’t tormenting him at all, were the neighborhood children. The cemetery was built just over the hill from our middle class subdivision, where the money was only enough to pay the mortgage, not swimming pools or childcare. We had nothing better to do went school let out. We descended on the cemetery for the driveway that made a loop perfect for laps and bicycle racing. Other than an occasional speed contest or quick lap, we spent the majority of our time just outside its boundaries, under the treetops that gave them as much privacy as they wanted. Under the goliath trees – maples, oaks and cottonwoods – were hills exceptional for camping out, games of hide and seek, and war.

Camping was somewhat of a chore for a couple of reasons. First, even in the clearings, the land was thick with underbrush or, if not that, rocks. And second, these hills were once a major passageway for coal-burning freight trains, whose burned coal had been discarded along this route and had now mixed in with the topsoil. So the ground was lumpy and polluted by the hollowed shells of burned coal and plastic and lace flowers, which made it an odd, nonsensical place that somehow was so backward, it made perfect sense to its frequenters. It made sense to the lovers for its softness in those first moments spent intimately with another person. And it made sense for us, a group of boys who thought a place radiating so much color was perfect to hide from a world with adults who had forgotten how easy it was to realize the beauty in nature and other accidents.