Mickey's Musings

Change

When I was a little girl, we lived on Grove Street. It was a dead end block with lots of trees and other children to play with. My father would give me a dollar and I could ride downtown to Smittys and buy him a newspaper, a pack of Pall Malls and I could get a Baby Ruth bar. There was a duck pond and a train station and a really neat library and a skating pond. When Wally Schiarra went up into space, everyone in town was very proud and they held a parade for him when he came home, he was one of our own. I just thought it was neat that he and I had the same kindergarten teacher, Miss Lindstrom. My father worked part time as a police officer in town, he seemed to enjoy it even more than his "real" job as an executive. His father had been a Captain in the NYPD. It was an ideal existence. Summers we went to our summer house on the lake, where I learned to swim and did arts and crafts.

When I was 10, we moved away.

All the other children came out into the street and waved to me as we pulled away. The house was brand new, my mother had looked over plans and looked at other houses and she decided on one and they had it built, right there on a quiet lagoon that lead to the Barnegat Bay. Frankie Valli would later sing about "walking home every day over Barnegat Bridge and Bay. I don't think there is a bridge named the Barnegat Bridge though. It was desolate and cold and I had to take the school bus for almost an hour every day. But, I loved the way the ocean smelled in the Fall when I would leave my windows open at night and the sea air would waif in and I could hear the waves crashing a quarter mile away. I loved the way the wires would arc in the salt air and I loved being able to go to the ocean every single day.

When I was 18, they sold this house too and got two more.

Tonight we took the long way home along the beach. It takes us past the entrance to where I used to live. I asked my son, who's learning to drive, if he'd liked to drive around in there. There are only two streets and they are wide and almost no one parks in the street. Everyone stows their Porsches and Mercedes in their garages. As we drove down my old street I looked to see how the old house was doing. I couldn't understand how I could have missed it, but I couldn't find it. On the way back up the block, I asked my son to slow down even more and I actually looked at numbers on the mailboxes. There, where my lovely home had stood, a beautiful two story Colonial, there was now a huge adobe looking house. It seemed that the house was too far forward too and I realized then that they had down away with the trees that had been in the front, the ones where I'd had my prom pictures taken, the ones that my father had planted, the ones where our dog was laid to rest, now there's someone else's living room. My mother's azaleas were gone. The front steps where some boys I went to high school with had painstakingly left a message made from peebles, so I'd know they'd come to "the shore" to visit, was gone. But most of all, I thought of Kip, our black and white Husky. He'd gotten away from my father one night when he was walking him and my dog, Teddy, a grey and black Husky. My mother had cried and cried. I'd never seen my father look so horrible. She said it was because he was drunk. My brothers came up from the house at the shore and they took him home and buried him there in the front yard, right between the living room windows, that was over 30 years ago. Teddy is long gone. My parents are gone. Now the house that was their dream house is gone too.

Posted by Mickey at June 9, 2003 12:54 AM