I am one of those people who…

I am one of those people who still remembers how I felt in 1970, walking up the hill from the corner of Pomona and Lennane, past the house where the German Shepherd, Flicka, nipped my fingers when I wrapped them around the wire of her kennel run. I can smell the wet grass and what I imagined was the odor of long pink and purple bodies of earthworms drowned on the sidewalks. The sound of rain pattering on my plastic umbrella. The darkened bark where it was wet on the trees.

I am one of those people who thinks it is important, if I still remember it. Or, if not important, it is somehow useful. Once in a while I will bring up one of these memories to my sisters, so we can feel the chilly moist spring air coming up from Lola Valley Park together. And they will usually travel back with me. Do C and V carry the pale gravel road in weak summer sun with them as I do? Is the sound of the crickets and cicadas a meaningful buzz in their heads as often as it is in mine?

Some people don’t care to remember, and I am not one of those kinds of people. 

“I would never want to go back. I wasn’t very happy there.”

Yes, we were all unhappy in our own ways on that street overlooking the park. In one sense or another we were prevented from being ourselves. Our parents didn’t know any better.

But what I remember is hanging sheets on the clothesline in your yard, having memorized my lines and practiced the song we made up for Earth Day, and the excitement of knowing that when we emerged from behind the white-and-flowered curtain we were some other children, for a little while anyway, and not even children but performers come to these parts to entertain and enlighten. I just wanted to sing. Who cares that we only charged a nickel, and even without a nickel, anyone could come and watch?

I remember sitting in the back yard singing, “Little Tom Tinker Sat On a Clinker,” louder and louder, our voices goading each other on, bouncing from the side of Danny N’s garage and then from the side of Danny O’s garage, and back again. We sang faster and faster and faster, mixing up the words and laughing, until the one Danny’s grandmother – who only spoke Canadian French – appeared at the back screened door in a frilly white robe, frightened because she thought someone was hurt and crying. And her Danny tried to tell her we were only singing, only having fun. 

Would you trade that for anything?

I remember reading Ray Bradbury’s book about writing, in which he said that the place where he grew up was not an important one, except in the sense that he was born there. Bradbury took those autumn days and nights of darkness and made his stories out of them. No one but he could have written those books, and it was because he still remembered what he felt like back there and then. He was one of those people who didn’t throw away the way he responded to the world he found himself in, though I’m sure he wasn’t happy there all of the time.

Was any of it important?

What I really want to say is that all of this makes me hope anyone who has chosen to forget the spring rain because the dead earthworms made them feel queasy might look instead at the new blossoms coming up on the Chestnuts’ cherry tree.