Fifty years ago, two old men pulled up to the curb on Alden Street, got out of their car and began to point at things and talk. The child playing in the side yard of the house in front of which they were parked, walked up to the street to see who they were, figuring they were friends of his grandmother. They told the little boy they had lived in the neighborhood many decades before. The old men pointed to the houses and debated who had lived there and when.
“Do you know there was a community well where the entire neighborhood got their water?” asked one of the men.
“I’ll bet you can’t tell us where it was,” stated the other.
“Down by that peach tree,” said the boy, pointing toward the back of the yard in which he had been playing. “Under those concrete slabs.”
“Yessir,” intoned one of the elderly gentlemen. “That’s exactly where it was.”
“Still is,” said the boy. “Put concrete slabs over it to keep the cats from fallin’ in. You can pull the slabs apart and drop stuff into it, like peach pits and rocks. Then you slide the slabs back ‘fore momma sees ya’ and whups ya’ good.”
To that little boy, Alden Street stretched out in each direction almost as far as you cared to look. One time, when he ran away from home, he reached the end of Alden Street, up by the alley that ran through to Yecker Street, and stopped. That was as far away from home as he cared to go. And, when he stood at that end of the street and looked back at the entire expanse of Alden, it was so very far to the other end.
And when that boy stood on the front sidewalk and looked back through his side yard and all the way to the chicken wire fence on the back property line, he could imagine no wider expanse—no further vista of green. It was the yard where he had matured from infant to child.
We’ll never know who those men were. They were just like thousands of people who walk through ones life. The boy, however, was a different story. We know he grew up and became known as Jimbo. And yesterday, the Labor Day holiday, Jimbo again walked that sidewalk and street and pointed out to Jimbo’s girlfriend where the home of his childhood had been. Things are different today. Alden is such a short block one could lay the newspaper at one end, walk to the other end and still read the headline. Jimbo’s old house is gone and the yard he remembered as being so large is just a postage stamp.
There are only a few houses on the street that appear to be inhabited. There are a few houses that are open and abandoned, but the majority of the houses are gone, replaced by empty lots.
Jimbo’s girlfriend frequently commented about the total decay and squalor. She questioned how people could live in neighborhoods like these. She questioned how these kinds of neighborhoods could still exist in the twenty-first century and in the United States of America.
Jimbo, himself, had a brief feeling of having come home, standing on the sidewalk and on the rock steps leading down to where his house used to be. It was much like the tales of the old African elephants who, knowing the end is near, wander back to their place of birth, to lay their earthly remains at the foot of their childhood memories. But, it wasn’t like that at all, because we were all happy as clams when we were able to move out of that house. And, I do not grieve it nor mourn its passing. It was a dump. On the road of life, it was a start, and that’s about it.
I would have liked to stay and reminisce a little longer, but one of the locals was walking down the street and Jimbo’s girlfriend insisted in locking herself in the car for protection. I can’t say as that I blamed her, but he passed by harmlessly and no one was killed.
We drove the neighborhood for a while and past my grandmother’s old house, which is also gone and past the Spanish-style house one street over from Alden, which was always the nicest house in the neighborhood. It is still standing, as is one of my favorite buildings, Quayle Memorial Methodist Church, which is still elegant, but boarded up. I wonder if the woodwork is still intact. I wonder if the stained glass is still unbroken under the plywood.
Most of all, I wonder whether the people who inhabit these houses are better off where they are, or if they would be better off using a bulldozer to set the neighborhood in order. My old house was a shack. It has gone to a better place. It was good, however, to stand over its final resting place.
And to walk the sidewalks and streets I had walked half a century before.
A long time ago in Jimbo’s world.
