Period, people, place

In my high school creative writing class, we had to write a soap opera. This, Walter, Danny, and Joanne, is why your father thought he was depriving you by keeping you in Hampton Township. Where was Mrs. Beale when I needed her? She would never have given such an assignment. If she had, however, she would have recognized my soap opera. I wrote about what I knew best. Green Valley families: the neighbor -- who taught me to put lyrics to classical music as I lay night after night in pain and unable to sleep -- whose husband kept a picture of his mistress on his dresser. The woman who could swing higher and limbo lower than any of us -- the one who stopped the robber who broke into Goerman’s by pulling her car sideways across the street, blocking the getaway car until the police came to nab the thief -- the gutsy, fun-loving woman who was stricken with a mysterious ailment that aged her decades in a day. The hill under Hart’s Run caving into weird sink holes. Other things I won’t mention (since Linda would say, “Leave it to Nancy to turn our fun into something heavy”)

My teacher's assessment was, "This is unrealistic. All of this couldn't possibly happen on one small street." Years later, I thought about that comment when I read Anne LaMott’s Bird by Bird (recommended to me by both Anthony and Linda). LaMott says something like, "It doesn't matter if it's true. It has to be believable." Thanks to a Green Valley book recommendation, I did learn something from that inane assignment.

I also wrote a sociology paper in college, analyzing our relationships on Green Valley. I wish I still had the paper, but I’ve traveled light. I remember writing about the time David and Ellen woke John by tapping on his window late one night. They told him they were eloping and asked for money. John said he gave them all he had, but later rumors questioned whether he had completely emptied his piggybank. I also remember putting Linda in the center of our web of relationships. She is still the one keeping us all connected.

I don't think our childhood on Green Valley was idyllic. The memory of cruel things I did to and with people on the street keeps it from being idyllic. Moreover, as someone who was still on Green Valley during the Vietnam War and race riots (and someone who had to go to bed at dusk every night one summer, so our parents could yell at our ‘coming-of-age-in-the-60’s older siblings), Green Valley is where I learned about injustices both big and small.

I do think our childhood on Green Valley was special. Very special.

While I've been too busy meeting deadlines to blog, I've been thinking about what made our childhoods special. Time, space, and each other were all we had. And that made our life abundant.

Time: Both the time in history and the leisure time we enjoyed. We had nothing but time, and that made us rich. Time to throw pebbles across the road, then cross the street and throw them back. Time to interview neighbors and write the breaking news: "Dan Przybylak bought a rake." Time to write mysteries. (I vaguely remember a rosewood box in Shelley's mystery.) Time to become blood brothers and sisters (during a time when no one worried about blood-borne diseases). Time to read a sappy section of Love Story on a tape recorder, again and again, until we got through it without bursting into laughter. (I remember Bill’s, "She looked me shtraight in the eye and shmiled.") Time to run in the rain, shielded by blankets and shrieking the Singing Nun’s Dominique song. Time to paint rocks. Time to learn the Camp Carondawonda songs – even those of us who didn’t go. Time to hear Meags tell ghost stories. (I remember crowding into the play house at the Lewis’ and, in the middle of a story as only Meagan could tell it, yelling at Anthony -- who was perched in the window -- to quit spitting in my ear. He denied my accusations. I put my hand to my ear and brought it down filled with blood. I ran to Mrs. Beale screaming. She sopped up the blood, and the incident enhanced the ghost tale.) Time to read Tolkien's trilogy in Shelley's bedroom until 3 a.m. Time to venture out: 7-Eleven for Slurpy’s, Baskin Robbins in Fox Chapel, The Gazebo in Squirrel Hill. Time to watch "The Avengers" at Fisher’s, then run the whole way ‘round the dark, scary bend. Time to pour glue on the road and set it on fire. Time to lie on the edge of Harts Run Road -- in the dark -- and count how many cars passed before someone stopped to see if we were dead (only to have us scramble away laughing).

In that self-absorbed way of children, I don't remember our parents giving us much time, but they did. My father took time to hose down our back patio so we could skate there in winter. My mother took time to make all our Halloween costumes, while my father took us to all of your houses so we could stuff our pillowcases with candy. Later, my parents took time to dance with Linda and me in our living room with that console stereo pumping out tunes by Andy Williams and Engelbert Humperdinck. (I remember Tom walking past the room, shaking his head at Linda and me, saying, "It's a good thing they don't drink.") Dr. Aruffo took time to make the treehouse, where we one day pledged never to grow up. Mr. Chesley took us all to Kentucky Fried Chicken. (The whole gang of us told the waitress to give the bill to "Dad.") Alan Fisher took time to describe the man who later became my husband to Jackie, because she was in bed with a migraine the first time he visited. Jackie spent time with us during a sleepover. I remember her watching me jump on that wide, sectional sofa and saying, "That's the most expensive sofa you’ve ever jumped on." I sat down immediately, but she told me to keep on jumping. Mrs. Seidel took time to listen to our teenage woes, perched on that ladder-stool by that little blocky-precursor-to-the-kitchen-island. Mr. Seidel took plenty of time giving us the most precise directions to every place we were going. Mrs. Beale took time to say the only positive thing anyone ever said about my lisp, "There's a part made for you in The Music Man." ("There ith?" I gasped.) If I'm not mistaken, there were times Mr. Beale let us tag along with him on the bus so we could spend the day downtown. Puffed up with my sophisticated knowledge of how to get downtown, I later took Lynne and Diane Joseph (who lived on Farm View before moving into one of the big houses on Middle Road, not far from the Rat Barn) downtown. I naïvely led them to Liberty Avenue and couldn't believe our luck at finding movies for a quarter. Mine was called Love in the Bathtub. All I saw was the title, before the proprietor kicked us out. I was more cognizant of losing my quarter than of taking a wrong turn somewhere.

People: We had nothing but each other, and that made us blessed. How else would Linda, with her messy room, and me with my mother's compulsive neatness, ever have hung out in each other's bedrooms hour upon hour? (Must say though, I’ve visited Linda and her family every place they have ever lived, and each home has been a place of order and beauty.) Would Tom and Tom ever have written a spoof of Sound of Music if they had places to go and people to see? Would Anthony and I ever have crawled through the woods early one morning and buried that costume jewelry (which we called a string of pearls), solemnly vowing to dig it up together some future day, if we hadn't been stuck together one Green Valley morning while everyone else slept? Would Shelley and John even have become friends if they had known each other only from Hampton Junior High School? Would Bill and Ellen have gone to that first prom if they had not lived on the same street? We were stuck together then and we are stuck together still.

Not least among the people who made our street were our parents. My children had very special childhoods. In fact, our oldest son went to a dinner party with Berkeley math people. Instead of foods, the "menu" board listed encouraged and forbidden conversation topics. Forbidden topics included Math and Politics; encouraged topics included Noah Snyder’s Childhood. With us, they entered cultures, learned languages, traveled, and met people from all over the world. Homeschooling gave us ample time us to ride bikes, read books, and do every single activity in Kids’ America and books of science experiments. My children did not, however, have what we had on Green Valley. Although my happiest childhood memories involve trespassing, I never let my own children trespass. Our parents shaped us powerfully by not exerting much force on our childhoods.

Place: "When everything else has gone from my brain…" Annie Dillard wrote in the prologue to An American Childhood, "what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that." What will be left in our brains, when all else turns to mush, will be Green Valley. On our dying beds, we will feel again the bumpy ice of Hodil’s pond frozen under our skates and smell again the dirt road we flung ourselves on when patrol planes flew overhead. We will hear the braying donkey and the dinner bell. We will taste the blackberries that grew in the tangle across from Chesley’s. Our throats will choke on the smoke of blackened marshmallows stuffed in s’mores -- our only consolation that last forlorn night of summer. We will awaken with a jerk, slobbering in wheelchairs and startled witless that we are not sitting under the Shady Tree. When the end is near and we’re shrouded in our sheets, we’ll think we are in a nest hollowed out of the long grass in Hodil’s field. We’ll look up and remember the day we discovered that clouds moved.