Thursday, August 28, 2003
Chestnut Street
From 13th, I turned east on Chestnut and sat in my truck with 1458 in sight through the windshield. It’s only a few blocks from the Light House Mission now and decay is evident in the neighborhood. Some beaten down people with dirty hair and teeth that need work look away even before you look at them. There are vacant lots where some of the houses were so bad that they had to be torn down. I studied the old sidewalks, curbs and the street and saw no improvements since my childhood.
It was not a swell house when I moved out of it in August 1944, but it still stands. The door that led to the upstairs apartment has been covered over with new vinyl siding and the house is now a single family dwelling.
Jo, the waitress at a downtown tavern called the Racetrack, lived upstairs and I watched her come and go in a brightly colored uniform like jockey’s silks. I’m sure it’s because of Jo that I’m always attracted to women in uniforms.
Everyone liked her and I don’t think she came home alone many nights. The family talked about the night Jo came home with Hoagy Carmichael and they were both drunk and the composer vomited on the front porch. We joked that my father wasn’t singing or whistling “Stardust” when he saw the mess that would have to be cleaned up.
A memory that is not just a family story repeated until memorized started on Chestnut Street shortly after I broke my arm as a 4-year-old and wore a bent plaster cast from wrist to arm pit. No matter how hot the day, even if shoes weren’t, the cast was worn.
Two young teenage girls saw me in the yard, said I was adorable and offered to take me to the corner drugstore if my mom would allow it. I had not seen these girls before but they must have been known to my mother because we went down the sidewalk, barefooted me and my two new long legged girlfriends. The concrete sidewalk was hot on my feet but when it became too hot, I walked on the grass of the tree row.
My bare feet could not stand the heat of the black asphalt on the street we had to cross to get the ice cream and that stopped our outing for a moment while the girls decided what to do and then they grasped their own and each other’s elbow to form a chair and scooped me up in it and carried me to the drug store like a little prince for the sweetest ice-cream ever.
Is such simple happiness even possible today?
It was not a swell house when I moved out of it in August 1944, but it still stands. The door that led to the upstairs apartment has been covered over with new vinyl siding and the house is now a single family dwelling.
Jo, the waitress at a downtown tavern called the Racetrack, lived upstairs and I watched her come and go in a brightly colored uniform like jockey’s silks. I’m sure it’s because of Jo that I’m always attracted to women in uniforms.
Everyone liked her and I don’t think she came home alone many nights. The family talked about the night Jo came home with Hoagy Carmichael and they were both drunk and the composer vomited on the front porch. We joked that my father wasn’t singing or whistling “Stardust” when he saw the mess that would have to be cleaned up.
A memory that is not just a family story repeated until memorized started on Chestnut Street shortly after I broke my arm as a 4-year-old and wore a bent plaster cast from wrist to arm pit. No matter how hot the day, even if shoes weren’t, the cast was worn.
Two young teenage girls saw me in the yard, said I was adorable and offered to take me to the corner drugstore if my mom would allow it. I had not seen these girls before but they must have been known to my mother because we went down the sidewalk, barefooted me and my two new long legged girlfriends. The concrete sidewalk was hot on my feet but when it became too hot, I walked on the grass of the tree row.
My bare feet could not stand the heat of the black asphalt on the street we had to cross to get the ice cream and that stopped our outing for a moment while the girls decided what to do and then they grasped their own and each other’s elbow to form a chair and scooped me up in it and carried me to the drug store like a little prince for the sweetest ice-cream ever.
Is such simple happiness even possible today?
