lickhaven

For all my attention to 130 Hastings Ave., the house itself wasn’t the Place; the Place embraced the yard, the street and the creek. The three-block stretch of Hastings Ave. and the (at most) quarter-mile trail through the woods set the tone for what existence should be – because existence, then, should exclude the intrusion of people.

During the war, we had two vegetable gardens out back, and though I was as much a carnivore then as now – rhubarb is like snot but less pleasant – fresh peas and string beans were a treat, even when served up by my mother, the maternal epitome of wretched cooking. (Her Boston baked beans would have defeated the British singlehandedly, and her perloo – a Spanish-rice muck that lurked in the bottom of a simmering pot for four hours – wept at its own fate when served). 

Along with the gardens, Mom spent much time weeding the lawn and tormenting our many bushes and shrubs.

A barberry hedge ran across the entire front, which spanned two lots. Most neighbors had privet hedges, which don’t say or do much. A barberry, though, grows wicked thorns and small red berries. Mom hacked and tooled the hedge into a boxy shape but developed a wicked allergy to it. At night she kept her hands wrapped in gingham cloth mittens, soaking in bowls of liquid. Looking back, I wonder if it was an actual “condition” or a weird affectation.

After the war, she grassed over the main garden area, leaving a four-inch-deep depression in back, the width and half the depth of the house, and we switched to canned vegetables. In case you’ve heard rumors that there may exist something less palatable than 1940s canned vegetables, don’t believe it for a second.

But the fruit trees…. wonderful. 

The cherry grew on the left side of the house, and brother Vic, intrepid hero, would harvest the fruit from the porch roof outside his bedroom. (I, by contrast, had such an absurd fear of heights that I got vertigo looking down from a first-floor window.)

The apple, squat and imposing, grew at the very back of the yard and produced scrumptious fruit. Between it and a steel pole hung Rod’s rope Navy hammock, fun to lie in, though the least wiggle dumped you unceremoniously on the ground.

(Rod later told me we had a pear, tree though I can’t recall it.)

Mom, oddly, was good at desserts. She made excellent pies – cherry and apple – plus a luscious custard that I can still taste, over 70 years later. The kitchen seemed a magical place of process, with its odd assortment of small hand-machines: a simple two-inch pincer for grasping and wrenching loose the green attachment of a strawberry; a manual egg beater with a circular collar between the rotary handle and the beaters, that fit snugly onto a flat-bottomed translucent blue-glass bowl with inclined sides; and, especially, a small table-clamped metal contraption with interchangeable rollers. 

When outfitted with two rubber rollers, it grasped the stringy terminus of a pea-pod, forcing open the opposite end and shooting pea artillery into a bowl. Exchange one roller for a cylinder of parallel knife-blades and it julienned the hell out of green beans (I first heard the term “julienne” thirty years later; I still hate its French snootiness).

In the summer, I loved to mow the yard, as much as my six-year-old self could, with our clunky hand mower. I must have been a peculiar sight – short, lugubriously skinny, almost albino and wearing glasses with squared-off black tape on the lenses to channel my vision – huffing and puffing a machine twice as big and weighty as myself. 

A special note on our willow tree: There’s nothing more beautiful in all creation than a weeping willow, and I doubt I’ll see a more magnificent one than ours, dominating the expansive side yard. Today, if you look up “130 Hastings Ave. Havertown PA” on Google street view (please don’t), you will be presented with a house that replaced that willow, while my 130, in its shrunken domain, has been demoted to 128.

Willows slurp up huge quantities of water – we had the driest basement on our block – and I sincerely wish the cellar of today’s 130 awash in lethal sewage. 

But beyond anything else, growing or otherwise, rested the ineffable joy of summer – a succulent, unquestioning enfoldingness that, were the universe properly ordered, would obliterate all other seasons. The sun, the heat, the sense of endless nothing-to-do, of no-one-to-tell-you-want-is-expected: Catching lightning bugs (“fireflies”? feh!) and incarcerating them in a jar with a perforated lid, their stale, musky odor wafting from my fingers. The rash rasping shudder of a cicada – all the music the spheres could invoke. I’ve felt intensely lonely much of my life. But those summers were a time of serene, accepting aloneness.

My few acquaintances ranged from goofy-uninteresting to just-plain-mean. Charley, a year younger than me, rode his trike along the sidewalk. It was his most interesting activity. Donald, from the next block over, called shit “grunty,” which about sums him up. 

The boy I spent the most time with (name? lost) probably evolved into a small-time hood, but at least he was brighter than Charley or Donald. Our “friendship” was broken off by Mom after he accepted my dare to piss on my leg in the woods.

Previous to that, he had cut a hole in the side of a refrigerator box in his back yard to create a neat hideaway. One day, a slightly older, preternaturally nasty girl named Barbara, seconded by her bespectacled female lieutenant, held Charley and me prisoner in the box, a humiliating experience. When I broke free and ran home, my mother handed me a broom and ordered me to go back and threaten retaliation. I did, in a frightened, half-hearted way, resulting in a pointless standoff.

(I view the 1940s as a low point in American music. Even as a kid, I actively disliked big bands, with special animus directed at Tommy Dorsey. We had no phonograph in those days of 78s, but the radio pumped out insipid crooners (Vic Damone – good god!), patriotic ditties, light novelty songs and Broadway show tunes (another grey area for me). Though my passion for summer was built at Hastings Ave., not so my passion for music.)

There was nothing wrong with the Oakmont public school on Eagle Road, but it was the seat of the unholy terror of school constantly nipping at my drawers. I remember almost nothing of my classes there, but I can see the maypole we actually danced around, and I loved watching the sky-writers who enlivened almost every celebration in the days before jet contrails made them obsolete.

A teacher at Oakmont, Skipper Dawes, ran a daily dinner-time radio show, “The Magic Lady,” that featured bits of a continuing story and young singer/actors. One was Eddie Fisher, who grew up to sing “Oh Mein Papa”, marry Debbie Reynolds and Liz Taylor, and become an all-time celebrity jerk.

I enjoyed remarkably few foods as a kid. I hated all nuts, ketchup, mayonnaise and marshmallows. I hated scrapple with such passion that I would slather it with ketchup because anything was better than scrapple. I disliked onions, most fish, dry cereals except Kix and (oddly) Grape Nuts, and would have created a special circle of hell for shredded wheat. Oatmeal, as Dr. Johnson suggested in his dictionary, should be fed to horses. Wheatena was invented by the Turks in an early attempt to exterminate Armenians. 

Milk held a special horror. In those pre-homogenized days, little mucus-like blobs of cream would float around the top of the glass and slime my tongue. Left too long in in the sun, it formed a stinking funereal scum. Was I forced to drink this cow excrescence, or did I simply never complain because any complaint about food was improper in our family?

Dad, as the morning cook, firmly believed in big breakfasts. When I was spared cereal, he made wonderful soft boiled eggs, toast with butter and strawberry jam, but under the dread of  school, my stomach was in no mood to accept or even recognize morning nourishment. I often threw up in the sink before leaving for educational oblivion.

On Sundays, Dad made Bisquick waffles or corn fritters for late breakfast (“brunch” was an unknown term). He cooked the waffles in a wonderful old round waffle iron (I greeted the advent of square irons with shouts of “Heresy!”). Using the same simple ingredients, I’ve never been able to match them. The fritters were heavy pancake batter chock full of corn, fried in deep bacon fat until they fluffed and oozed. (Fuck my arteries – I wouldn’t mind lopping a few years off my life for a return of those babes.) 

A bakery somewhere along Eagle Rd. (the corridor to everywhere) made luxurious sticky buns, and a shop in Manoa (which sounds like a cow plop) produced “submarine sandwiches” that could face down most any hoagie today.

I’m  not looking for understanding with this nostalgia binge, because at some level there’s nothing to be understood. It is just a slow unfolding, an examination, the me-that-is intrigued by the me-that-was.