| August 1962 - December 1966 This was my block during most* of this time span. The landscape back then had almost no trees, and most lawns were newly sodded. The subdivision only went one more street to the north and to the east. Town was to the West, and there was more subdivision as far as one could travel, to the South. We lived at the frontier - the excursion of suburbia into rural America.
Julie, Wendy and Jon are my siblings. We lived in a four bedroom, split level, tract house. We had some friends and neighbors. Brad was a fellow dreamer, who lived next door. We played together constantly, and made many trips to 'the Swamp' which was a water bypass created to remove runoff from the subdivision we lived in, as the construction grew away from the area, it became more and more overgrown. There were many pools and rivulets. Frogs numbered in the hundreds. Small fish in the thousands, and muskrats in the one. The Muskrat. Most of our time there was consumed by the hunt for the muskrat. Claire was the girl next door. In retrospect a suburban rebel. She was about three or four years older than me and is the reason I broke from my pre-pubescent gender antagonism, and began liking girls. Specifically the way they were shaped, which Claire demonstrated admirably. She was probably 16 or maybe 17, because she could drive. Motorcycles to be exact, she usually wore a skin tight, long sleeved, leather body suit or a yellow bikini. Those are the only clothes I ever remember seeing her in. Oh, she had a sister my age with whom I was friends, but I remember nothing about her. "The John Birchers" were two families directly across and to the west, on the corner. They didn't have kids, or if they did, they didn't mingle with us. Yeah, maybe there was a kid. Vague. All I remember is that they invited my parents and the Troykey's over one evening, for dinner. When they came home, they were weird. They had attempted to indoctrinate them into a group that considered anything left of ... mussolini just about, as pinko, communism. You know, Rooskies. It all had something to do with Kennedy being killed. The Troykeys, Mary and Joe, were my parents best friends. They hung out all the time. Joe and my mother were artists - they painted and talked about Timothy Leary and stuff. Mary and my dad were more conservative, but the four of them had a reputation after the 'Birtcher Incident'. In late 1965, the Troykeys moved to Scottsdale, Arizona where Joe opened a very successful restaurant, and they lived high up on Mummy Mountain. Bart, Matt and Sarah Troykey are the people outside of my family, that I have known the longest. Drischolls are a family that lived down the street that I interacted with on occasion. We did not like the Drischolls, and they did not like us. It began with insidious play, which became open hostility. A conversation between Mrs. Drischoll and my mother: Drischoll: "Your son has been swearing at my house. What are you going to do about it?" Mom (fearing the worst): "Can you tell me what he said?" Drischoll: "He took the Lord's name in vane." Mom (incredulous): "Oh, Jesus Christ! You're kidding me." Drischoll: "I see where he gets it." Click! |
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