On what must have been the fifth of April 1968, our principal, Mr. Dill began his morning address with the announcement that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated the day before. He then sent all 150 students of the Ivy Drive School— primarily children of French Canadian, English, Irish, German, Polish and Italian extraction—home early to mourn a black, Southern Baptist preacher that most of us had never heard of. I don’t remember what Mr. Dill did two months later when RFK was shot.
What I do remember was the seamless exchange of the summer days once the school year had come to a close. I was pretty good at amusing myself. I rode my banana bike around the block, dressed my dachshund up in baby clothes, searched for blue jay feathers and arrowheads and drew pictures of horses on scrap paper.
During the week, the majority of the fathers in our neighbourhood worked the day shift in the factories or offices of General Motors and Good Year Tire and the Bristol Brass. Our mothers stitched things together and made ends meet. They hung the laundry out to dry, dusted the knickknacks, visited with one another over coffee and cigarettes, watched soap operas and fried up potatoes and pork chops.
After supper, while our parents unwound with bowling leagues, card parties and television, we kids would pound on each other’s back doors looking for anyone willing to share some adventure in the hours of daylight that remained. We were a motley little band of desperadoes, always growing into or out of our clothes. The hips and the hems of our pants had been repeatedly taken in, up, out and down in order to fit the current occupant. Some of us had tissue paper stuffed into the toes of our sneakers.
The boys had their heads clipped for the summer. I loved the way the cropped bristles of their hair felt when they let me run my fingertips up along the backs of their round skulls. Most of the girls had pixie cuts with short, straight bangs that lay flat against their foreheads. However, I would not allow a pair of scissors anywhere near me. From the Wednesday after Labour Day through the fourth week of June, my hair was restrained with barrettes and elastics and tortured into pipe curls, but in the summer it hung long and loose down my spine, well past my waist.
When we’d gathered three or four of us together, we’d head off in one of three directions:
the forest
At the end of my street stood a lone patch of oaks, maples and birch trees that had not been cleared away to make room for one more crackerbox, colonial-inspired three bedroom, single bath house with a brick chimney. On one expedition into these woods, I noticed something wriggling in the fork of a white birch. It was a frog, completely ensnared in a thick, opaque web that was suspended between the tree’s branches like an evil hammock. The frog’s shadowy form struggled and kicked within the web, but there would be no escape from this silvery, sinister cocoon. My friends and I watched in amazement and disgust for several moments and then we left the poor creature to its fate.
the river
Around the corner from my house, a small brook poured through a rocky, mossy bed. Sometimes we would bring empty pickle jars to scoop up the cold, greenish water and catch pollywogs. It was a slippery, slightly treacherous climb down muddy clay banks to get to the stream’s edge—especially when carrying a glass receptacle—and more than once I fell into the water. If you tumbled in, it was mainly your ego that needed a band-aid. It was a long, shivery walk back home to change your clothes.
I never knew the source of the brook, but it ran under Shagbark Drive and into the heart of the neighbourhood. Once Kathy Maghini brought me down into her cellar to show me the hole in the concrete floor through which you could see the water flowing right beneath her house like a dark, silent serpent.
the mountain
Above the brook, at the edge of our housing development, there was a steep slope smothered in milkweed pods and Queen Anne’s lace that danced a lazy sway in the warm summer breeze. At the very top of the hill was a barbed wire corral that served as an enclosure for Timothy, an ancient, shaggy, mushroom-coloured Shetland Pony. Timothy was not particularly friendly, but he did accept the wilted carrots and bruised apples and fistfuls of tall weeds that we offered him.
We would spend hours up in that high kingdom and descend only when the sun disappeared in the northwest. As the sky grew charcoal, we would scramble back down to the street, covered in prickers, scratches and mosquito bites. Our clammy, wiry bodies were tinged with the scents of fresh manure and sweet-smelling sweat. We headed home to empty houses or to parents who barely noticed we had left or who yelled so loudly that the whole neighbourhood could hear.
For years, I always looked for Timothy when we drove along the road at the base of his mountain. I looked for him until one day he wasn’t there any more.
We, the youngest citizens of Edgewood Park couldn’t separate the forest from the trees. We didn’t understand that we were a part of history, but we were being swept along with it as surely as our tiny river swept under the streets of our compound. New wars were raging, fought in places with names we couldn’t spell or find on a map. Events that would carve out a nation’s experience were exploding all around us, just as the milkweed pods would soon burst all over Timothy’s mountain in the fall that was on its way.