Going home again

Built in 1940, this is the first house I remember living in. It looked far different when I lived there. (Don Dale photo, 2011)

Last week, I drove by the first house I remember living in. It looks somewhat shabby now.

I've spent the past few days trying to decide what that ought to mean to me.

We moved there in 1946, when I was 4. My father had just gotten out of the Navy after service as a Seabee in the South Pacific during World War II. Ten years later, our family, like so many others, moved to the suburbs as part of the "white flight" that followed the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

When I was a kid, there were red azaleas along the front of the house, a boxwood hedge surrounded the front yard (how I hated having to help trim that hedge), a huge maple tree with a swing dominated the back yard, and deep purple hydrangeas flanked the house.

My mother loved gardening (something I never appreciated until I had a house of my own). Her brick-edged flower borders stretched the length of both sides of the back yard, with tulips, daffodils, irises and lilies in the spring, followed by sweet williams, petunias, hollyhocks and verbena in the summer.

Our next-door neighbors, the Adamses, had a damson plum tree that overhung the fence, and we kids would enjoy those plums right from the tree until we got thoroughly sick of them. My mother would make damson preserves every year.

The Schwartzes, who lived on the other side, kept bantam chickens in a coop on the fenceline -- one rooster and one hen. Mr. Schwartz would sometimes let them out to peck in his yard and let me come over and play with them. They were quite tame, and neither Mr. Schwartz nor the bantam chickens seemed to mind my chasing them. As I recall it, I was not yet quite old enough to catch them.

Across the alley behind us, a neighbor had a grape arbor that we were allowed to ravage when the fruit was ripe. The dark purple grapes were a treat on a hot summer day. Running barefoot across the alley one afternoon, I stepped on a nail that went right through my foot. It hurt like hell, but the rest of the neighborhood kids kept asking me to take off the bandage so they could see the hole. It was my morsel of glory that summer.

Essie Taylor and her husband lived two doors down from us, on the corner. Essie -- she encouraged us to call her by her first name -- was my favorite neighbor. Childless herself, she seemed to me like a doting, loving aunt. I adored her dog, a liver-spotted pointer named Pierre, whose tail would begin a frenzied wagging each time he saw me. I spent many a splendid summer afternoon playing with Pierre in Essie's back yard.

Later, when I was about 8, we got a black cocker spaniel of our own, and he was my boon companion. My father named him Mr. Boh, after the character in the TV commercials for National Bohemian beer. My mother used to clip his long ears up with a clothespin when he ate to keep them out of his food dish.

(Mr. Boh, an enthusiastic if indiscriminate epicure, once ate an entire box of Crayolas that my sister had left on the back porch -- 48 crayons, including aquamarine and cotton-candy pink. To the extreme delight of me and my friends, Mr. Boh left a rainbow of colorful deposits in the yard for several days.)

I had an abundance of playmates my age. Buddy lived across the street. When we were old enough to ride bicycles, he and I would roam far and wide through Fairmount, from the Luck's Field playground to the edge of Woodville. In the winter, we'd make snowmen in my front yard and throw snowballs -- and stay outside until our fingers grew numb and our lips turned blue.

Just down the block was my friend Jerry. His father had died in Normandy during the war. His mother had remarried, and Jerry had a younger brother who was about my sister's age. Jerry and I would ride our bikes over to Oakwood Cemetery, about a mile away, and catch tadpoles in the creek under the old stone bridge and explore the markers on the graves of Confederate soldiers. The dates on their gravestones seemed to us to belong to a faraway time when the world was much younger.

In the hot summers, after dark, we'd all gather under the weak glow of the streetlight at the end of our block and catch fireflies in mayonnaise jars or play ring-a-levio, a highly stylized and complex game of tag that involved competing teams. The game would end with cries of "olly olly oxen free" as our parents began to call out into the night for us to come home.

Remembering those days brings to mind a time when the world was simultaneously finite and limitless. The future was as far away as the stars, and the adults all seemed to be wise and loving guardians.

As I look at our old house now, with its front windows boarded up and the yard unkempt, I know once more the truth of what Thomas Wolfe wrote: You can't go home again.

The physical space might remain. The time, however, no longer exists. Except in memories.

But the passage of more than half a century and a picture of a boarded-up house cannot dim my recollections of that childhood full of golden light and freedom from all responsibility.