#4 SUMMER IN THE CITY We made it as far as Columbus-----Columbus, Ohio. Except for the two nights my grandmother and I stayed in the bus in the hospital parking lot, it would forever be my last nights and days on the road with them. The morning of the third day my Uncles, Joe and George arrived from Akron ----my mother too. I was glad to see her again and I rested my head on her lap as we drove to Akron in Uncle Joe s sedan. My Uncle George had stayed behind to drive the bus when the time was right and on that day with my grandfather tucked neatly in my bunk in the rear of the bus and my grandmother by his side in the big wicker chair, they made their way without incident to Akron and joined us on the peaceful hillside of West Akron ( Mayview Drive where the foundation can still be seen). Sy had recovered just long enough to see the little house in Copley nearly completed and it would have been only days before the four of us: my mother, my grandparents and me would have moved and lived our lives out, just across the dirt road from my Uncle Joe and Aunt Doris and my best friend for life, my cousin Robert Haag. And then one afternoon, just weeks from moving to the little house and Sys health appearing to improve, my grandmother found him, flat on his back on the stone walkway. She was bent on both knees beside him as I rounded the corner and I knelt down beside her, stunned; brokenhearted, as she removed two pennies from her apron pocket and placed one on each eye; a gesture I understood as payment into heaven. After the funeral, and lots of kind words about a better place and of course, meeting his maker, he was gone. For some reason that I was never aware of it became imperative that we leave the barnhouse while the little house on the back road was being finished by family members. And so, my mother and I took up residence in a small sleeping room in the rear of my Aunt Gladys shoe-box -shaped apartment in a two story building on Emerling Ave in South Akron, where from the front porch we could see the sprawling brick metropolis of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. My cousin Ben, nicknamed Butch, who was four years my senior lived in the front and became my hero as we ran wild with his group of friends in the cinder lots of transient hotels and beer joints along Main Street from the Firestone Stadium to the Miller Ave bridge. Many nights he and I would discreetly perch ourselves in the dark corners of the front porch listening to my Uncle and his buddies tell war stories about gliders and paratroopers and flame throwers, imagining the day when we might be endowed with those very same things. One night they talked about a close family friend named John who was at Saipan with the 6th Marines and how when he came home he disappeared for two years. About 1947, the year I was born he returned, and being penniless he came to live with us for awhile at the barn. My mother told me when I was very young how John would quietly patrol the barn at night with a large knife. He told my grandfather he was making sure no Japs were hiding in the rafters upstairs, waiting to strike. As the story goes, one afternoon my grandfather and John walked to a hillside overlooking the valley and were there for a long time. Thats true, my Uncle Joe said between sips. And Sy told me, that later that day, John seemed different----better. Then my uncles and their friends would all grow quiet; staring off in their own ways toward the shadows and headlights of the city; their bottles of beer dangling motionless between their knees by just a few fingers. And then one of them would say in a soft voice: Yep, it sure was somethin alright. And hed take a swig of beer and maybe say a dirty word or two, followed by chuckles and a harsh reminder once noticed for us two pissantsto get to bed. In the darkness of the small room I stretched head first toward the end of the bed and with my arms as a pillow on the open window I watched life parodied on the tiered walkways of the ramshackle Empress Hotel, where residents tipped ancient kitchen chairs against the clapboard siding. And balancing themselves in their stocking feet against the railings, they sipped beer from tall brown bottles as others pressed women friends tightly and passionately against door frames, kissing and slowly gliding their hands up and down each others silhouettes. Across the street in the dim light of other porches, fathers preparing for the third shift to start, slurped coffee and sucked long drags from Lucky Strike cigarettes that illuminated their faces like a red firefly had perched on their noses. At midnight the whistle would blow at Plant One and the sidewalks would become empty once more as a few hours of sleep fell over the neighborhood, coaxing those of us still awake to drift away on the lullabies of hillbilly music from the open door of the nearby bar and the mechanical echoes of a thousand machines humming in the distance. It was a great summer in the city. But it was coming to an end. School was about to start. And the little house in the country was waiting.
Posted on: Wed, 04 Dec 2013 00:06:04 +0000
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