I could write for hours, or days about this one name place image (photo '72). I spent at least fifteen years of my known childhood in this one setting as earth revolved around the sun creating four distinct seasons. In deep winter snows in this very spot, in winter flooding the driveway to create a skating rink on the very surface we shoveled for the family car to drive over. Every household hung their laundry in the fresh air, east of the belching Bethlehem Steel monster, now defunct, along with our English (British) neighbors who had beautiful names as Paloma, Fiona, Paul, James, Carol, who ruled the neighborhood as summer "street kids", playing safely under the street lights (3 of them) which gave just enough illumination to play various versions of hide-and-seek. We older teens played a rougher version (created by Patty) which involved a leather belt for the "it person" to whip the person FOUND until you ran to 'base' for safety. She was a rebel like the British invader John Lennon whom we all worshipped since Jesus was not in vogue at the time. That was then and Jesus tried to take over America years later as we all know during the post-Carter years. Fear to us came in little doses of daily living. Like getting beat up on a school bus. Getting stalked by the parochial school mafia in the school yard. Or staring at a cold plate of peas for what seemed like hours until finishing a Sunday dinner, not to mention math homework. Halloween was magical; and terrorizing. One Halloween parents of a friend dressed so mysteriously in what I can only compare to something out of 'Gone With The Wind' with opaque face masks making them appear REAL yet unidentifiable. Thirty minutes later we almost called the police from the wall phone in the kitchen where most of us hid, most absolutely unaware of my own anxiety, from the "invaders" sitting in the living room...closest to the front sunporch entrance. Mix the Twilight Zone with the X-Files and you have the moment. It was only Jack and Irma, who had a son I went to school with, and rarely did anything in public on the street. Their son died early in his adult life, my friend James was my radical alter-ego "James Dean-like hero" who lived in this house with the back porch and laundry hanging. The first James Taylor, as I called him when the singer came along later, died in Germany after joining the U.S. military riding his Harley off a slick turn while being stationed in the Fatherland, just after high school. Across the street an American golden boy, as they say in the sports world, who excelled in baseball was killed the summer I graduated from college digging a trench for a sports field that should be named for him, you would think. Talk about pressure... in the house I would hear the famous line from my own movie, "What do you think is going to happen? The phone is going to ring and suddenly you have a job?"...what's a parent to do? And that is exactly what happened. I spoke to the person from Kentucky on the phone and followed the information. I was off to the time-warp called public education in my America; where little changes and now WE TEACH THE TEST so no child is left....behind in the employment line. But I digress. This neighborhood is now transformed into the new transplanted culture of the post-VietNam immigrants who fled the big cities twenty years before they would flee New York again for another reason. Change comes at a steady stream of energy in the USA. I have learned not to call my country America because America is bigger than US. America starts at the tip of Argentina and waves through Los Andes through our unique cultures, like a Navajo rug being cleaned in the wind, up the spine of its volcanic nerve through Mexico toward the Canadian Rockies past Alaska to the Aurora Borealis above us. That is America, always bigger than our teeny weenie minds where clusters of Rush Limbaugh fed bigots can say "free speech" is a right. WE are bigger than "hate-speak radio" and yearn to use our government FOR THE PEOPLE, not for the OWNERS OF THE glass bead game. I think Marie Osmond and Rush should market a health product together. I love public radio and God Bless Garrison Keillor. Somebody say, AMEN.
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