thisnewday | Entries tagged with wesleyville pa

Across the intersection from me stood the house at Fremont Street and Station Road, looking much as it had when I'd lived there with my mother, great grandmother, and grandparents some seventy years ago. The only thing that looked out of place was some new curbing in front of it and a scattering of gravel across Station Road, as if its intersection with Fremont had been recently altered to ease the flow of traffic out of the town of Wesleyville.

There was that and the absence of the tall, densely-foliated trees that used to line the street past the bend in the road and whose roots had heaved the sidewalk upward in several places. I remembered that because my father and uncle had discussed jacking up the heaved sections, cutting the roots from underneath, and setting the sections back in place.

That was sometime after my grandparents had passed away, I think within a year of each other, and our families had to decide what to do with the property. I think both couples had considered buying out the other's interest in the house and moving there with their growing families. But, in the end, neither did and the house was put on the market and eventually sold.

At this moment, though, I was looking at it from an angle that seemed oddly skewed from what I remembered. Only once did I recall my father parking next to the orange brick apartments that sat diagonally across the intersection from the house. It had seemed novel then, to walk across Station Road from that direction, but it felt vaguely disconcerting now. (Later, I thought about asking my father if we'd ever come that way on one of the nightly walks we'd taken with my grandfather after the war.)

Anyway, as I crossed Station Road and approached the house, I glanced down the driveway and noticed that the people who now lived there were entertaining guests in the backyard. And, as I continued on past, I saw that the front door was open and that I could look down the center hallway of the house, all the way back to where they were standing.

Even now, I'm embarrassed to say what I did next. Which was to walk up the front steps, through the house, and out the back door, where I tried to explain myself to the startled homeowners. I told them that I'd lived there, a very long time ago, and wondered if they'd allow me just a moment to stand inside of it, to get a sense, if I could, of how it had been back then.

After some skeptical looks, and a whispered word or two, they did allow me to re-enter the house and accompanied me, somewhat noisily, to the familiar front entryway and adjacent living room.

There, I briefly marvelled at the orange-toned woodwork, with its darkening patina, the ornate railings and staircase to the second floor, and the fluted columns on the knee walls between what my great grandmother, Anna Patterson, had called the "sitting room" and the adjacent dining room.

But within seconds the rush of feelings, induced by this encounter with a surprisingly vivid and familiar past, was interrupted as someone else walked up to me, from the back of the house, and angrily accused me of thinking to wander where I didn't belong.

I told them that although I'd really wanted to see the rest of it, I'd not actually gone anyplace except where my own memories might have taken me. That, in fact, I'd be leaving as quickly as I could find the front door.

But, as I was about to step outside, the dream, the house, the street in front of it abruptly faded, leaving me to wonder, once again, why I'd been brought there in the first place...

LPK

LiveJournal

9.8.2014 (b)

The most profound and precious legacy that my grandmother left me, aside from my earliest memory of unconditional love, was that she provided the foundation for my own love of language, of reading and of writing. On any occasion when I would be spending time at my grandparents' house, I remember being read to, a practice which my mother continued after she and my father had established their own household.

Of course there were others who also encouraged and supported this during my early childhood and later life. My great grandmother, Anna Patterson, who also lived with my maternal grandparents during most of my childhood and young adulthood, was always a willing reader of favorite stories when asked.

Also my paternal grandmother, Ruth Compton Knickerbocker, who had been a four-year college graduate and country school teacher before marrying and raising her own large family during the Great Depression, always gave books to her many grandchildren for birthdays and Christmas. And, in later years, she promptly dispersed a sizeable inheritance, from the estate of an uncle who had made his fortune as a supplier to Roosevelt's TVA, in the form of educational endowments to those same grandchildren.

(As an aside, I'm obviously afflicted with that wordsmith's tendancy to notice patterns, derivations, and usages of words which other people would either dismiss as trivial or simply find annoying. Not surprisingly, the most interesting of all words are those by which we identify ourselves to others, a use through which they become both label and definition.

And what I've recently discovered is that the names by which I knew both my maternal and paternal grandmothers were not their given first names. In both cases, I made this discovery while mining the various obituary and genealogy sites for information that I might not have learned through casual conversations with other family members.

Also, in both cases, a disfavored first name had been discarded for a better-liked middle name by which they were exclusively known over the course of their lifetimes. What I haven't learned, in either case, is why the given name was so disfavored as to have been virtually unknown to family members of succeeding generations.)

There have been times, over the course of my own seven decades, when I've stopped to marvel at what a privileged life I've had. And much of that has been due to the efforts of a generation for which there were few social safety nets, aside from family, and few prospects beyond a lifetime of hard work and the ever-present threats to individual and family survival.

Sadly, even as I write this, I realize that few besides those raised by the offspring of the Great Depression (later called "The Greatest Generation") will truly appreciate that expressions like "hard work" and "family survival" are anything more than literary hyperbole. Which, in fact, points to another aspect of my own privilege: that of being raised by those whose experience of that life was real and personal and whose recounting of it was vivid, heartfelt, and direct.

Which is not to say that they didn't experience the same human failings that we see and experience today. The difference seems to be that, given the circumstances under which they lived, the consequences to individuals and families were often immediate and substantial whereas today individuals and families suffer less but the consequences of living irresponsible lives are driving an alarming deterioration of the schools and other institutions which have assumed responsibility for them.

Still, I'm not about to close with yet another old timer's lament about the "good old days," because, in fact, those days were sometimes not so good. The 1950s and '60s, the era in which I grew up, were marked by racial violence, gender discrimination, and political assassinations. Not to mention a brutal war waged on foreign soil, for debatable ends, at the cost of 60,000 American lives. At the same time, this country was experiencing its own version of China's "cultural revolution," years when some of us were so alienated from familial roots that, to paraphrase that rebel of another generation, Thomas Wolfe, we really couldn't go home again.

Today, I consider myself most fortunate to have experienced all of that and lived to write about it, to have come full circle with a perspective and appreciation I might not have had were it not for the risks taken and the dangers survived. If I have a single regret, it's that I haven't the means to tell my grandmother, and those of her generation, of my respect and admiration for what they accomplished and endured for all of us who have come after.

And so, for what it's worth, I offer this modest return on the legacy of love and literacy which my grandparents made mine, those many years ago, in the white-shingled house at Fremont Street and Station Road...

LPK
LiveJournal
11.18.2013 (a)

A few nights ago, I walked through the attic of my grandparents' white, asbestos-shingled house at Fremont Street and Station Road. In the many years since they last lived there, in the many years since I'd last seen it, it had been cleared of all the familiar things that once resided there.

Inside the house I felt oddly disoriented, unsure of how to get, from where I'd entered, up to the attic which I remembered from my childhood. Afterwards, I recalled that there'd been two sets of stairs, one from the front of the house and one from the hallway off the kitchen, which met at a landing, and then a second shorter flight which led to the floor above.

In the second floor hallway there was a door and, behind it, a few more steps up into the attic. Once there, I knew I should have found, hanging on a makeshift rod below the rafters, my uncle's Army Air Forces jacket, brought home from his wartime tour as a B-29 propeller mechanic in the Philippines.

Maybe it wasn't that I'd forgotten how to get there. Maybe it was simply that, in the inexplicable manner of dreams, I'd actually gotten there without traversing the vaguely-remembered hallways and stairs. Even more perplexing, once there, was the absence of the dark and rough-sawn rafters overhead, the soaring ridge boards and plunging valleys, the dormer rafters angling into them, that I remembered.

Instead, it was a sterile and empty place with straight, gray hallways lined with rows of closed and locked doors, much like those storage spaces that people rent when what they've come to, in their present lives, is somehow out of sync with where they've been.

And I wondered afterward if all of this was shown to me as a way of saying that, because of how I'd lived my own life, what I'd hoped to find was now irrevocably gone, the space it once occupied now empty and gray, like a life long lost and a soul left to wander among the sterile tombs...

LPK
LiveJournal
11.15.2013 (c)

More than fifty years afterward, I still feel that I've never properly grieved the loss of my grandmother. She was the one that my mother and I had lived with, in the town of Wesleyville, Pennsylvania, while my father was away during the war.

I'd held a special place in her heart, according to my father who spoke with me about it on the afternoon she died. And I remember how, in the days that followed, as relatives gathered and plans were made and services held, I sat in silence, away from the others, on the front porch of the house at Fremont Street and Station Road.

I remember also that my great aunt, my grandmother's sister, came out on the porch and said to me, with worry on her face and in her voice, "Do you know what the shortest verse in the Bible is?"

I didn't, and so she said, "Jesus wept."

I'm pretty sure that, in the days before her funeral, I cried. And know that in my dreams I've sometimes grieved. Even so, it's never seemed enough. Maybe it simply never is, in the face of incomprehensible loss...

LPK

LiveJournal
11.15.2013 (b)

Hanging in the rafters of the small, white, detached garage was a soapbox racer from when my uncle Dayne was a kid. The racer was wood-framed, black fabric covered, and had no wheels. But it looked fast, just the same, as if it were flying up there in the rafters.

Inside the open cockpit was an official Soapbox Derby tag which gave the name, age, and height of the driver. My uncle, it said, was 6'2" at the age of twelve. And there was other information as well, but the only other part of it that I can remember was the name of the sponsor, Dailey's Chevrolet, in nearby Erie.

I'm not sure how old I was, myself, when I saw this or how I got up close enough to read the tag, which was probably not much larger than the registration stickers found on cars today. I remember that I'd seen the racer once or twice before, when I'd walked down the hedgerow along Fremont Street with my grandfather who kept his old Chevy in the same garage.

What I do know is that I was younger than twelve, the age I was the summer when my grandmother died, and that this was also the last time that I saw the soapbox racer.

After that, I remember watching the smoke curl upward from the bonfire in the driveway, where my mother and father and uncle burned miscellaneous papers and other expendables while clearing out the house for its impending sale.

I remember watching the smoke and I remember the bus rides I took from the city, to be there after school, while the house was gradually emptied of my grandparents' lives.

I watched this from the window of the second floor apartment, where my mother and I had lived while my father was in Europe during the war, watched the smoke curl upward, into the still air, while the soapbox racer flew like a time machine, in the rafters of the small white garage, at the end of the driveway, far below...

LPK
LiveJournal
11.15.2013 (a)