Well,
to begin with, Pine
Nut Circle,
our new neighborhood, might be styled country living in the whimsical brochure,
but it more closely resembled camping. If
you fired a rocket from the middle of the housing development to any point on
the compass, the payload would come down somewhere in the vast countryside
populated only by cows and people who made their living raising them. On our first visit, I saw only one car on the
narrow lane during the last mile or two of the trip. After what took forever, Dad pulled the Ford off
into the grass and came to a stop, cheerily calling, “We’re here.” Out the window we could see a handful of half
built houses in a hay field. Mechanical
monsters hissed and groaned down a muddy path Buzzy had named “Monticello Avenue,” Mounds of dirt and mud were being heaved up as if in readiness for a replay of trench warfare.
Grandma
crawled out of the back seat, looked around and began to mumble to
herself. She would later describe the scene
to her cousin Mabel as “what it must be like living on the face of the moon … in
February."
Everyone
was excited about the move but me and Grandma.
I liked my neighborhood and enjoyed walking to school in the morning, sitting
in my miniscule garden in the spring and enjoying all the conveniences of
living in the Cornhill section of the city.
Plus, I’d miss the little girl in my class at Blessed Sacrament School
who sat in the fourth desk back in the third row. At age nine, I could depend only on my
feelings to tell me this move would come to no good, but I also had Grandma’s
opinion to go by. And for all her
peculiarities, when it came to disasters, most of the time the old woman called
the ball in the right pocket.
Life
on Pine
Nut Circle
turned out to be very different from city living. For one thing, no public transportation ever came
out our way. And there was no mail
delivery. Letters and packages could be
picked up only at the Post Office in the village before the 5:00 p.m. closing time. Dad didn’t get out of work in Utica until after five, so we got our mail
only when we could pick it up on Saturday, a full week’s worth. I remember the extra wait for a secret
decoder ring to arrive. It wrote
underwater and I mailed away for it using the coupon cut from the back of a
corn flakes box.
The
promised garbage removal never materialized, either, and instead the men in the
neighborhood all met together on Saturday morning to pick up everyone’s refuse,
drink beer, haul the garbage to the dump in someone’s open trailer, drink more
beer, come home acting silly and take naps.
The womenfolk turned surly by Saturday evening.
As autumn came upon us, it was apparent
the little furnace was too small for the little house. It was a high efficiency unit, we were told,
and you couldn’t get warm standing near it like the old octopus coal furnace
back in Utica.
Turns out you also couldn’t get warm cranking the thermostat up to a
hundred. I didn’t mind sitting around on
cold evenings wearing two sweaters while watching television, but to read a
book I had to take my hands out of my pockets and wear gloves. Had we been back in the city with a broken
furnace, we would have found excuses to visit neighbors or relatives and take
advantage of the free heat. But on Pine
Nut Circle, a warm room wouldn’t
occur again until July.
Dad took us out to the movies a few times
to get warm, but funds were scarce and he couldn’t keep that up. Besides, Grandma was always a problem at the theater. She would sit tsk’ing or crying or laughing
uproariously when she thought something was funny that no one else in the theater
found amusing. An entire platoon of U.S.
Marines being wiped out at Guadalcanal
would somehow tickle her funny bone when the sergeant barked out an order with
a southern accent.
We were all sorry she went with us to see
the movie "Destination Moon." Very impressionable, the old woman
believed just about everything she saw on the silver screen. All the way home
after the movie, she could be heard in the back seat muttering, "How could
they just leave him behind there on the moon? There's nothing to
eat!" And after she saw “The Sands
of Iwo Jima” she had wanted to buy War Bonds, even though it was six years
after the war ended.
Once winter set in on our windswept
prairie … the last week in September … life took on the flavor of a snow-bound
military base, just like the one in the 1950’s classic film Ice Station
Zebra. Trying to scare my 4 year old
little brother, my main form of amusement at the time, I told him to never walk
near the edge of the ice pack or he’d be lost forever in the Arctic Sea. When he refused to go outside the next
morning and told my mother why, I was labeled a troublemaker and would have
been sent to my room, but I didn’t have one.
I shared a bedroom with my older brother and he’d just negotiated an
hour for himself in there to play his Les Paul and Don Cornell records on the
small phonograph we shared.
In the village, my brothers and I marched
into a large brick school building and found the principal’s office. Ordered to wait and sit on polished wooden
chairs in our winter coats near a radiator, the stifling office felt like an
oven. I saw myself as one of those two
guys in the Bible who was put into the furnace by a nasty King. They survived by some miracle. I wondered if I would. It was the first time in my memory I had been
forced to go somewhere I did not want to go.
I was lost and anxious. I had
begun to have trouble falling asleep at night. Through the transom over the
door, I heard the principal’s gruff voice bark out an order to someone and I
was ready to run out of the office and back down the stairs and out into the
street. Maybe I could find the Police
Department and tell them I was lost and they’d take me home. Just then we were called
into the office. We found The Principal wearing
a three piece suit that had evidently been serving him well since before the
war. He seemed about as interested in
our arrival as he might have been had a toboggan salesman dropped by.
We were about to have a personal
encounter with the unholy, the profane world of non-Catholics known as Public
Schools. Attendance at this institution
mounted a terrific assault on my long held philosophy that a basic goodness
pervaded the world and the people in it. Life as a sheltered Catholic boy was
coming to an end..
My school mates swore in public and told
dirty jokes within 5
miles of the school grounds. They were disrespectful to the teachers. Had they tried any of their antics on the
nuns back home at Blessed Sacrament, they would have landed in an orthopedic
ward. Many of my new mates didn’t even
care about their schoolwork, nor how well they did on tests and quizzes. When I explained to a classmate that the “J.M.J”
I had written at the top of my test paper stood for Jesus, Mary and Joseph and
invoked their blessing on my work, she looked at me as though I was a member of
a cult. Now that I think of it, the
Irish schoolboy version of American Catholicism in the 1950’s was nothing if
not a cult.
Back at Ice Station Zebra, isolation
continued to flank us. Once Dad left for
work each morning in the family car, we were all marooned for the next 9 hours
if school wasn’t in session. On school
days, which began to feel like holidays, the arrival of the school bus in the
morning was greeted like a long awaited Coast Guard cutter steaming up to
rescue drowning sailors. Housewives and live-in grandmothers bribed
the bus driver to take them into town along with the kids. But I hated that damned bus, so full of
raucous children that it gave me a headache.
Halfway through the winter, Dad was
becoming disenchanted with our new home on a frozen slab of concrete, ten miles
from Utica and
seemingly not too far south of Iceland. The tiny ranch house was indeed small, and
didn’t easily accommodate 3 adults and 3 growing boys. Outside among the still heaped up mounds of
dirt, most of the folks living around the circle seemed strange and
secretive. Grandma had begun to keep a
list of suspicious neighbors for Senator McCarthy, who she wrote to monthly.
Myself, I missed Italians. They had constituted half the population of
the neighborhood we had forsaken in Utica. For some reason, they were not well
represented out here on the tundra. Oh,
for those golden warm days on Cornhill, with the smell of tomato sauce
cooking, black olives on a plate
spattered with oil, vino flowing across festive tables at the Villa Restaurant on
Leah St and down on Taylor Avenue at Audette’s Ristorante. Lovers sang O Sole
Mio and Italian smiles lived on the faces of everyone, no matter what their
nationality. Just to see the vegetable
man sleeping in his horse drawn wagon or the rag man singing his way up from Eagle
St.
Or to hear Mrs. Nicotera lean out from her house and scream at her 7
children playing in the street, finally sighing aloud, “Ooo fah!” and slamming
down the window. I couldn’t imagine that Tuscany was
any better.
But I put on a happy face and braved the rigors
of a future on the ice. At least we had
new surroundings to explore. On
weekends, all the neighborhood kids would walk up the road searching for igloos
and polar bears.
My baby brother wound up sharing the tiny
room with my grandmother. He always said
he was glad he was too young to remember bunking in with his first
roommate. My father’s commute to work in the morning was
bothersome, too. He worried about the
car not starting, and if it did, he worried about the coming winter and snow
covered roads. My mother missed running
down to the corner for a loaf of bread. And
she found annoying having to count the number of telephone rings which would
tell us if the call was for us or one of 12 other neighbors. She’d lose track after five or six rings, and
we were number eleven. Heat had to be
delivered in the form of fuel oil. Once
it didn’t arrive on time and Dad had to drain all the plumbing for the night
and drive us through a snow storm over to our Aunt Toot’s house. But especially grievous to my father was that
we boys couldn’t go to a Catholic school, something he felt was his solemn
obligation to provide for us, and something I needed for my feeling of well
being.
All of this soon proved too much for Dad’s
limited sense of adventure. He stopped
by the Pine Nut Builder’s office on a Saturday morning and gave back the
house. We had to be out by the end of December. My mother wanted to be settled somewhere by
Christmas. We moved on Christmas Eve,
landing in West Utica, a
mile’s walk to O.L.O.L
Even though the billboard on Whitesboro
Street proclaiming “Welcome To
Utica” was plainly visible as we snuck back into the city on the day before
Christmas, I would have been forgiven for entertaining the possibility that we
had landed in Post War Europe or a Polish Immigration Roundup. Behind Faxton Hospital, as
the terrain ran downhill toward Lincoln
Avenue, the only neighbors who
spoke English did so with difficulty. We
had dropped down into a demilitarized zone between the mostly Irish parish of
Our Lady of Lourdes and the White Eagle environs of the Polish Holy Trinity Church. Because we were technically in Holy Trinity
territory, and because Dad was a stickler for following the rules, he set out
to apply for our admission to the Holy Trinity Parish School. But when he could find no nun with a good
command of the English language … so he said … he high-tailed it up to Lourdes and
begged sanctuary for his sons. O.L.O.L quickly
took us in and happily accepted Dad’s tuition check.
My feelings upon arriving at the school on
Barton Ave.
wouldn’t have been much different than those of the Pope coming home to the Vatican
. The building was constructed in the
architectural style of a 12th
century castle and fortress that Ivanhoe would have been proud to own, and I’m
sure he would have sworn allegiance to Rome on the spot had he been offered the
keys. The hallways were darkened in monastic
reverence and the entire building smelled of sacred candles. Statues of the saints, wall mounted
crucifixes with palm branches affixed all brought back peace in my soul. All the kids were in school uniforms and the
nuns softly padded the halls in their medieval regalia. God was in his heaven as the sun shone bright
(figuratively) and everything was Roman Catholic all over the place.
At Lourdes, I quickly became lost in an ocean of
children. Fourth grade teacher Sister Clementia
managed 56 children in a classroom built for 26. That’s not a typo; fruitful Catholic
parents, heeding their Church, were hard
at it procreating in those years and the schools were bursting at the
seams. Mothers were worn out and fathers
worried about money, but the Bishops
were evidently happy.
Up until I lost
it years ago, I had a photo of our fourth grade class, Sister Clementia sitting
up front near the camera and myself way back on the horizon of the fifth row,
my finger just coming out of my nose.
The nun looks pensive as she sits there under a huge Flying Nun hat
called the Cornet, dressed as a typical
nun of the time in floor length garb that might have been considered a cute
little outfit in 15th Century France. She may be wondering if a jungle outpost in Borneo would be more to her liking than bronco-busting tens
of boys and girls each day.
I think the photo
may have been taken on a Tuesday, and if it was the third Tuesday morning of
the month, Father Fudzniak, who absolutely hated children and cared even less
for nuns, was probably then walking from the rectory over to the school to
preach at us. Without asking, Father
always chose his topic with no regard to what we were studying in our Religion
lessons. He might lecture us nine year
olds on the evils of birth control or he might summarize the major points of
the Third Lateran Council, which took place about two hundred years before
Sister Clementia's clothes were designed.
Father Fuddy was an overly serious man, having lost his sense of humor
in the war while assigned to an outpost in Borneo.
Still, I was
relieved to be back in a more militarily crisp environment where the order of
the day was set by the nuns rather than the ping-pong precepts of modern child
psychology. Little man that I was, I
appreciated someone being in control.
Whatever weapons were used …. rulers or blackboard pointers or “the back
of me hand”….. it didn’t matter to
me. What did matter was a predictable
environment I could enjoy for six hours each weekday.
At lunch time, we were all sent to the
basement to eat, a symbolism that was not lost on me. Students up through the fourth grade ate in a
low ceiling room filled with small tables seating eight, with tiny little
chairs that were too small for the smallest of us. Light streamed in the high cellar windows and
outside I could see telephone wires that I pretended was the barbed wire fence I’d
seen in the prison camp movie, “Stalag 17.” Swaggering forth like a young William
Holden, I approached the black attired SS prison guard (Sister Mary Gertrude)
and asked if I could join my fellow prisoners outside on the stalag’s parade
ground. She grabbed the brim of my hat
and pulled it down over my eyes, then spun me around twice and pointed me toward
the door, just like Pin The Tail On The Donkey.
Staggering forward like I had been on rice-only rations for six weeks, I
proceeded out through the sally port. Sister
Trudy would have had a good time in the Hitler Youth when she was a kid, I
imagined.
I climbed the stairs from the basement
and stepped out into the damp frigid air, letting my ears delight in the sound
of traffic passing on Genesee
St.
My young soul had now been saved from the remote desolateness of a small
town. Lourdes School and
its environs were to me much preferred over the eerie frozen quietness of that
other village. Here there was slush and cars caked in road salt. Even in winter puddles sometimes formed when
the temperature peeked just above thirty two degrees. Fog abounded most days, thrilling the heart
of this winterized boy. Everything was
grey and wet, damp and cold. But not
frozen solid and below zero, thanks be to God.
Most days were pleasantly balmy in the low twenties. By the time we returned, winter’s end was in
the air with the temps headed toward thirty.
I didn’t need a thermometer; spring beckoned with the smell of melting
dog poops as they began to warm up underneath the snow.
Now returned safely to my hometown, I’d
had a long trip to nowhere, a scary detour on my journey upward. As I walked the mile home after school,
slogging through slush covered sidewalks, I could not but thank all the saints
in heaven that I no longer had to ride a school bus home across the tundra and
put up with all those noisy and profane children. I could walk home by myself, and when I
arrived, feet and gloves and seat of my britches wet with the slop of winter in
the city, I would head for the cellar and change into dry clothing while
standing before the immense roaring octopus coal furnace, the winter god of my
childhood. It was good to be home.
copyright
2010 by David Griffin
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The Windswept Press
Murrells
Inlet,
South
Carolina
