Sunday, December 13, 2009
Oak Street
Oak Street was a nice tree lined road in 1964. I lived at number 41. The house had been my grandmother’s, Ellen, before my mother and father got married and moved in. Her husband, Algot, had died a few years prior to that and she probably would have lost the house if my parents hadn’t moved there.
Mom would say that Dad could do anything. He immediately set to fixing up the whole house and even put a big new kitchen off the back of the house, pretty much by himself. He was always working, but he did take time to build me a big sand box in the back yard. The problem was that, rather than pay for sand, he got pea stone gravel for free and filled it with that. Gravel isn’t as good as sand for playing trucks and building houses, so I never played in my sand box. There were some things my Dad just didn’t get. When he would ask me why I never played in the sand box, I would just shrug. I didn’t want to tell him that the gravel didn’t work.
Sometimes I would go next door and visit Mr. Peterman, or maybe it was Peterson, I’m not sure. I would “help” him work in his yard. One day we were sitting and talking on his back steps and he said, “watch this”, and he reached across with one hand, grabbed the thumb of the other hand, and pulled it off. I couldn’t believe it. He didn’t cry or anything, but sure enough when he let me look at his hand, there was no thumb. My Dad thought it was funny when I told him.
I went to first grade at the Pratt School. It was pretty cool being in school all day but after first grade I figured I was done. When my Mom told me I had to go to second grade too, there was no way. I stood underneath one of the big pine trees in the front yard and cried, refusing to get on the bus. Then Officer Riley came by and saw my Mom trying to coax me out from under the tree and just my luck, he stops the car and gets out. I don’t remember what he said to me, but I didn’t want to go to jail, so I got on the bus.
I met Craig in second grade. He lived in the first house on the Pine Street end of Oak. We used to cut through the Palmer’s property across the street and hike into the woods to the “river”. It was more like a stream, but it had trout in it, and turtles, and salamanders, and frogs. We would set elaborate traps and catch them and bring them to his house. We’d put them in a small pool. The problem was that we didn’t know what to do with them after that, so they would always die. Eventually, we decided not to catch them anymore. Near the end of the day, we’d lay down on the side of the road and watch the street light until it came on, then I’d run home.
On the other side of my house was a tall hedge. There was a space in the hedge that we would walk through to visit Bill. His real name was Wellman, kind of like William. He had a brick house, number 47. We would go over and he would cook stuff on his grill for us and sometimes Mom and Dad would play badminton with him and his wife. He had a big garden in his back yard and sometimes I would help him weed and water it. He also had a huge pear tree that I would climb and sit in. Mom liked to visit Bill, they would sit and talk and drink lemonade, and I would watch them from the pear tree. I don’t know why, but I never saw Bill’s wife anymore.
One day I woke to the sound of banging and yelling. I went into the kitchen and my Mom was yelling at the back door and trying to dial the phone at the same time. There was someone pounding on the door real hard and suddenly a fist came right through the door. My Mom yelled at me to go to my room. The banging soon stopped and I looked out the window and saw Officer Riley helping my Dad get into his police car. After that I only got to see my Dad on weekends.
When I was in the third grade my Mom and I moved away for awhile. She said we couldn’t live at house number 41 anymore. Then a little while later we moved back to Oak Street, only now we went to live with Bill. I made some new friends, named Jimmy and Joey. They were good baseball players and we would play with other kids in their yard. Sometimes, in the summer, we would walk over to Mosquito Plain and play there. The park instructor would play with us and we would always ask him to “hit it out”. He could hit a home run any time he wanted, holding the bat with just one hand.
Later on, I met the Needle brothers. They had just moved there from the city. The Needles didn’t seem to care that I lived in two houses, side by side, like other people did. They weren’t big on playing baseball though. I didn’t think they had parents because I never saw them. We would sit in their room and listen to music. Our favorite song was Louie, Louie. There was this one line in the song we would always wait to hear and then we’d all laugh about it. I didn’t really know what we were laughing at but I would pretend I did.
We went down to where the Swamp River crosses underneath Elm Street once, and met up with Jimmy and some other guys, and we decided to crawl into the big pipe that dumped into the river there. We crawled all the way in one behind the other. It was dark and we were real scared but we did it anyway. I remember looking up through one of the drainage grates and seeing cars drive over. Before long we figured that was enough adventure and we turned back. Once we got back we laid on the grass at the Mount Hope and had a good laugh about it. It felt good to be with my friends. Later on, Jimmy and I would walk up Pleasant Street and cut through the woods to sneak into the Fairgrounds. We went into a barn and pet the horses. One time one of the horse jumped up and kicked his foot right through the wall and was jumping all over. We ran out of there in a hurry. Jimmy told me that he went back one time and a man paid him money to pick up horse poop. I didn’t believe him.
I had only been in Mrs. Flaherty’s sixth grade class for a few days when Principle Connell came in and said I had to leave. When I went outside my Dad was there with his new wife, Bette, and we took a ride to North Weymouth. The next day, I was in a new school, McCulloch, and had to meet new friends. I missed Oak Street though and decided to ride my bike there even though I wasn’t really sure where it was. I made it to Bill’s house though and thought Mom and Bill would be glad to see me, but Bill said he didn’t know where Mom was. He gave me some water and pretty soon my Dad showed up and took me back to North Weymouth. I figured it would be a while before I got back to Oak Street again.
POSTED BY STAN on December 13, 2009
Click here to comment on this article.