Cul de Sac, Roland Avenue 1957

When I awakened this morning, this post was writing itself in my mind. This often happens. It seems that perhaps my early years as a book worm have trained my mind into a prose narrative habit. Also, my brother is up here in New Jersey visiting from W.Va. for his 77th birthday and that was on my mind.

We spent our teen years on Roland Avenue in Maple Shade in a brand new hosuing development, so new that several of the two dozen or so houses were still unfinished. Our street was a cul de sac, shaped like a tear drop, one road in. On the South we were bordered by the Pennsauken Creek, and on the North we were bordered by what was left of the orginal farm. Our house was on the outer rim of the wheel and behind us was a tall berm, like a hillside and atop it was a corn field. Our brand new house was two stories with two bedrooms upstairs and two bedrooms downstairs, a bathroom upstairs and one downstairs, a living room, dining room and kitchen with a washer and dryer in one corner. It was a comfortable house. My parents were enthralled with the fertility of the grounds after living in a brick row home in the brick row canyons of South Philadelphia and they immediately began to garden. My mother had a Rock garden, and then my father had a vast truck garden.

Dad built a large pantry under the staircase to the second floor. Every harvest season, my father and mother stood sweating in the steaming kitchen boiling the jars and lids for the canning process. They made stewed tomatoes, pickles from cucumbers, preserved corn and peas, and even root beer! Dad stored the rootbeer in the small side attic upstairs and one summer the heat caused it to all explode!

We had no basement in this house on Roland Avenue. But my father was a master craftsman and built a substantial garage with a woodworking area.

I remember some of our early furniture, a redwood picnic table in the kitchen before my parents could afford a dining room set. We had an orange vinyl sofa that eventually went into the tv room which was the 2nd bedroom on the ground floor.

It was in this house that my parents began the second round of offspring. When we first moved to Roland Avenue, there was just me (in the big upstairs bedroom) and Joe (in the little downstairs bedroom,) and my parents bedroom beside his. Then, after a miscarriage, my mother successfuly brought into the world my brother Neal, my sister MaryAnn, and finally my little sister Susan. By the time Susan was born in 1965, I was gone.

I had been about 12 when we moved to New Jersey, and I was a book and reading obsessed introvert. My early childhood had left a lot of emotional damage and books were my escape in an infinite variety of ways.

At the graduation from my unsuccessful high school experience, but successful in that I did graduate and got a business education and a job from it, I went to work at W. B. Saunders Publishing Company in Philadelphia, at age 17.

But that veers off from what my mind was writing this morning. I was back in the kitchen on Roland Avenue, age 12, hovering as my mother's neighbors and lady friends drank coffee and talked about their pregnancies, their husbands, their homes, their shopping, their ailments and all sorts of topics. They ate donuts from Steve the Bond Breadman and drank coffee from my mother's party sized percolator. They wore housecoats (kind of bathrobes) and slippers and their hair was in curlers, and they smoked - all of them! There were ashtrays alongside the luncheon plates for the donuts, and the coffee cups and saucers. The women had modern problems for istance, our neighbor across the street, Mary, her husband left her for another man. He drove up in a white sports ar with his boyfriend who looked like Johnny Mathis. There she was with her two children and her house in the development and no career and no husband. She did eventually marry again and had a happy life.

All the women in the "Circle" as Roland Avenue called itself, were housewives. At that time, most women we knew didn't work. It was only ten years post World War II and the men had come home and got their jobs back and the women happily retreated to the domestic sphere and got busy repopulating the country. Most of the women in the Circle had at least three children. All the husbands were invisible figures to me. The only time I saw the fathers was on weekends when they coud be seen mowing the lawns. Fathers then loved the role of lawn mowing on Saturday, or leaf raking.

In the early years of our move to New Jersey, which was "the country" to us city folks, our old neighbors came from Philadelphia on weekends in the summer to enjoy the Jersey tomatoes, burgers and hot dogs on the eaborate brick grill my father built in the back yard and cases of beer. They all got hiariously drunk and threw one another into our three foot kiddy pool.

I don't remember what we children got up to. We are invisible to my memory but I do remember the grown ups in large vivid color, Pat and Tommy Taggart, Ella Reily and her husband whose name I have lost, and a couple of other World War II era friends. Later, my father's brothers Bill and Clyde, their wives Marge and Edna, the grandmothers on lawn chairs on the front lawn and sometimes my mother's family from 10th Street in Philadelphia would come for the picnic in the backyard.

Another thing I remember vividly from those times is the relentless domestic labor of my mother. In summer she hung the clothes to dry on the cothes lines in the backyard. She ironed everything! She ironed the sheets, the pillowcases. Things that were hung on the line to dry were very stiff and wringled. After the babies began to arrive there were endless cauldrons of boiling baby bottles being steriized and filled, endless reeking diaper pails of dirty diapers to be washed and bleached, hung out to dry and folded and put away. The youngest three came so close together, two years apart 1960, 1963, 1965, and by then I was in my teens and a sulky malcontent unwilling to lend a hand in the household or help with the childcare. It was then that I decided I did NOT want to become a mother and a housewife.

It must be said however, that my mother loved her sphere and was happy. She loved being a mother, cooking, decorating, and developing her home making skills such as upholstery, curtains and drapery. Every day just about the time I came home from school, mom began to prepare the evening meal. In those days, it meant cooking some large piece of meat, a ham or a big piece of beef, a turkey or chicken, paring and dicing carrots, potatoes, celery, and using some of those preserves. Every meal from breakfast to dinner was a real meal. Breakfast meant hot cereal such as oatmeal, or creamed rice, eggs, bacon, sausages, or Taylor's pork roll. Dinner was always some kind of meat or fish such as turkey, baked and sliced down, two vegetables and a starch. If not potatoes, baked, boiled, scalloped or mashed, then macaroni and cheese baked in the oven. Pot pie was real, made with real pastry dough, fresh carrots, peas, celery, onions, potatoes and diced chicken. We actually shelled peas! Mom had boxes of salted cod which she would soak and then make cod cakes. She had a hand cranked meat grinder that screwed onto the side of the sink drainboard, and into it went all the left over bits of turkey or chicken or ham to make croquets which we all loved with gravy. There were some terrible quarrels around that table however, battles of will between my brother Joe and I and our parents when we were served something we didn't want to eat. In my case it was salmon. I hated it, the hidden bones, the uncooked nature of it. For my brother it was scrambled eggs. He hated the texture. Parents who had grown up in the Depression and survived the World War had no patience for ungrateful children turning their noses up at valuable food! Once my brother kept scrambled eggs in his mouth all the way to Ocean City. He only disgorged them when He got out of the car to pee alongside the roadway. Mainly the tactic was that we would be forced to sit at the table until our plates were empty. We sat there all evening. It was a stand-0ff. My parents were united on this issue of food being wasted and chidren not eating what they were given

It is true and an item of regret to me now that I was indeed an ungrateful child in so many ways. I have to stop now to go to my brother's birthday lunch! I will come back and conclude this evening.

I think my dream and awakening mind narrative was inspired by my brother's visit from West Virginia for his 77th birthday this weekend. Today was his birthday. He, however, wasn't interested very much in talking about Roland Avenue and our childhood, he wanted to watch an action movie on my sister's large tv.

Everything changes and everything ends. First I moved out of Roland Avenue when I was 18 and got my first apartment, then my family bought a beautiful and historic house that had been burned out inside by a fire and my father began the devoted restoration of 19 East inwood Avenue in Maple Shade which took several years. I never lived in that house but all my brothers, Neal and Joe, and my sisters, Susan and Maryann did. My Grandmother Mabel lived with them for a time as well, but when my father retired at age 62, sometime in 1983, he moved to West Virginia and built the retirement home where my brother lives now. The family split up. Mom and Dad and MaryAnn to West Virginia, Neal and Joe to Philadelphia, me to Europe and then to Philadelphia, and then back to New Jersey. My sister Sue lives in Clarksboro, NJ.

People who lived on "the Circle" Roland Avenue still meet and have reuions on facebook and in person. All the young people I grew up with on Roland AVenue have died: Joe McGuigan, Butch Grimes, Diane Judge, Chris Gilbreath, the kids I played basketball with, and board games, and even some of the kids who found us and hung around with us like Art Borget, who was my boyfriend first and later married my best friend Chris. They are all gone.

I used to drive down to Roland Avenue and look at our old house every time I met my friends for lunch at Maritsa's on Main Street, but I don't do that anymore. I would look at our house and the garage my father built and the Pennsauken Creek where we swam, and the houses of those kids I knew who are all dead. After all, I decided not to do that anymore because it makes me sad and I don't want to be sad in these my last years. It is hard enough to stay buoyant under the weight of the degradations of age as I approach my own 80th birthday in a couple months I don't need to invite the ghosts of the past to haunt me. So I say goodbye to Roland Avenue, the "Circle" and turn my mind to the present and to my efforts at strengthening myself for the struggle - tomorrow the GYM and our walk around Martin's Lake!

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com