Long ago, I was visiting Connecticut and I drove through the neighborhood that we had lived in when I was about 7 years old. I hadn’t seen it in at least 40 years. Nothing had changed much, except that everything seemed a great deal smaller than I remembered it.
The t-shaped metal clothesline posts were still there, embedded in concrete mixed with gravel. There used to be a swing on one end. I know, because I fell backwards off of it and cracked my head open on that hard, lumpy base. I heard my mother scream, and I started running because I thought I was in trouble. I don’t remember anything else about the incident, but I was told there was a lot of blood and an emergency room visit, and I had an odd little lump on the back of my head well into adulthood.
The house was a duplex that sat on a corner lot with a diamond-shaped front yard. The older kids in the neighborhood used it to play baseball as I watched through the screen door. I remember wishing I was older so I could play, too. I always recalled that yard as being as big as an actual baseball diamond, but of course I was mistaken.
When we lived in that duplex, there was a teenaged boy living in the other half who used to play drums in the basement. He fascinated me because he was my oldest sister’s first boyfriend. He was the first person I ever heard described in that way. Before that, for me, boyfriends didn’t exist in the world.
I’m sure he had parents, but I have no memory of them. Charles Schulz had it right when he left adults behind the scenes in his comic strip. They were peripheral.
My sister looked up that old boyfriend decades later, and it turns out he was in prison for serial rape. Apparently, he grew into someone who liked to pick up women in bars, drug them, and tie them up. I wish he was still behind bars, but no. I just found him on the sex offenders’ database. He’s 72 now, and still lives in Connecticut, just 6 short miles from our childhood home. He hasn’t aged well. He lives in an apartment. Apparently, he’s married. I hope he never had children.
But back to lighter memories. Right near “first base” in the front yard of that house, my mother had planted a lilac bush. She loved lilacs. This was a bold move, I thought, as we were only renters. I remember being really impressed by her courage.
During my visit all those decades later, I was delighted to discover that the lilac bush was still there. It wasn’t thriving. If we used lilac bushes instead of Christmas trees to celebrate that holiday, this would be a bush that only Charlie Brown would have chosen.
But still, that lilac bush was there, soldiering on, probably pushing out 3 or 4 blooms a season, if that. Seeing it through an adult lens, I wasn’t nearly as impressed by my mother’s act of rebellion as I was by her desire to create beauty in a place that was so obviously just a way station, a brief pause, before she attempted to marry our way out of poverty, which sent our lives on an even worse trajectory. But as she liked to say, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
On the day of my visit, the neighborhood looked deserted. Kids today don’t play outside like we baby boomers did. And of course, I no longer know anyone in the area. Too much time had gone by.
I looked at that pathetically determined little bush, and realized that if anyone even took note of it these days, they wouldn’t know its defiant history, and the part it played in my childhood. To them, it would just be a bush. To me, it’s a part of my mother’s silent legacy.
We all blunder, unaware, past silent legacies every day. Everywhere we look, we are taking in things that come with stories that we will never be privy to. People long gone have planted trees, built houses, and paved the roads that we now take for granted. We lack the details that would sharpen these images for us. What we see are mere shadows shaped by ghosts. It’s a curious way to look at the world.
I’d love to be able to say that the lilac bush was there still. You would think that digging too deep and uncovering a serial rapist where a relatively unremarkable teenage drummer once stood would remind me that some memories should not be disturbed. But no.
I just looked up the address on Google Maps. The bush is gone, as are the bloodthirsty clothesline posts. The baseball diamond in the front yard is now a landscaped oblong that would never inspire a child to play ball. The building appears to have become a leasing office. Those who work there have no idea that every day, they are sitting atop many complex elements of my childhood.
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