Like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand…” Jeremiah 18:6
I have never had much musical talent. I never learned to play an instrument but still love listening to all types of music. When I was in high school, I was in the music appreciation club which involved bringing a favorite album to club meetings. We sure listened to a lot of Rock & Roll those days, and I still do. I have decided that if I had the talent to write songs and play them, one of my first songs would be The Elm Street Blues, Oh, I’ve got those Elm Street Blues again.
The Cape Cod on Elm Street was the first house I lived in. Just across the street lived Miss Hull, a retired school teacher. I would traipse over to her house quite frequently to have her read storybooks to me. Just next door lived the high school basketball player who stood better than six feet and would lift me up to the sky. Sure seemed like a long way down back then.
Across the alley were our next door neighbors who had a Boston terrier named Speckles. The dog would grab hold of a tennis ball inside a sock and then they would twirl the dog around in circles. It would not let go until it was safely back on the ground.
Our neighbor just to the north raced stock cars at the 25th Street Fairgrounds. He named his racecar the “Purple Bomb”. I would lie awake on a summer evening and listen to the sound of those races and imagine I was in the Purple Bomb.
My brother had been seriously doubting the existence of Santa Claus, until that Christmas Eve on Elm Street in 1964, when things changed a bit. He heard on his radio that NORAD was tracking a UFO entering U.S. airspace from Canada that they believed to be Santa Claus. He ran downstairs into the front yard with his binoculars and gazed intently into the cold night sky to see Santa and his sleigh. Mom and Dad said they got one more year of belief in Old St. Nick out of him, thanks to the NORAD Santa tracker. Not sure if he saw anything but stars, but the mind can play wonderful tricks on the soul. I have always felt that the feeling that emanates from the soul should trump the brain.
It was a short walk down the alley from Gramp’s house to our neighbor’s just across Elm Street, where I had a lawn mowing job. With the alley now paved, the lawn mower was an easy push. The few dollars I earned sure bought a lot of baseball cards at Northside Drugs. Three dollars a job as I recall. Two dollars if I cleaned the gutters. I always admired the geodes in Mrs. Garlock’s backyard but resisted the temptation to break them open to see what treasure lay inside. That would have resulted in the loss of my first job. But, I needed to keep mowing to keep the baseball cards coming and I still have all those cards.
We moved away from Elm Street in 1965 and I still miss it for what it was and for its bricks and mortar. I often drive by my Gramp’s bungalow on Cherry Street and the old Cape Cod on Elm Street. They still look the same to me, the memories are still fresh through all the intervening years. For me, Elm Street will always be a symbol of those wonderful days of youth when the world was an oyster to a boy full of mischief and hungry for adventure. Elm Street was the jumping off spot on the highway to my future.
We are all sculptors and painters and our material is our own flesh and bones.” – Henry David Thoreau
Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.” -Buddha
