The razed lot
I went back to my home town after a long absence – more years lived away now than lived here – and had a nice Sunday supper of meatloaf and mashed potatoes and canned corn with my mother and father. Five-thirty and the dishes are already put away, the old man fast asleep on the couch with the TV tuned to the football game that just a few hours earlier he said was “must see.” Feeling drowsy myself, I decide that a walk through the old neighborhood would be nice, so I put on a light jacket and stroll down the sidewalks of my youth, under the dim street lights anchored on splintered wooden poles, kicking the same stones that I kicked when I was six years old, dragging a stick from the same tree across the same chain link fences, agitating if not the same dogs, then the great, great grandchildren of those curs. I turn right into the narrow walkway between the two apartment buildings with the clapboard siding that still chalks my clothing when I brush up against it. The crude, discordant sounds of apartment living are focused down here – rattling dishes, blaring television sets, people yelling at each other (new languages, of course), babies crying. I used to run through this bleak alley as fast as I could, out to the grassy embankment behind the tenements that opened up onto a vacant lot: our stickball field. Back then, still running, I would announce my arrival with a Tarzan war cry and hop the crumbling cinderblock wall to the cheers of my friends and take my position wherever I was needed on the field. We never knew what building stood there before the lot was our ball field and we didn't much care; but idly scratching at the dusty gray soil with our shoes we would often unearth the remains of ancient (to us) pipes, rusty nails, bits of wallboard. Now the old razed lot has a brake and muffler shop jutting out of it with black pavement all around, patched and re-patched, just like everything and everybody in this eroded Appalachian town. A big neon sign sits squat to one side of the lot, near what was second base. It is quiet this Sunday evening. The rickety cinderblock wall has been shored up too high for me to jump over, so I just stand and look around and back through time until an old woman, a fable book harridan, opens her window from one of the apartments and admonishes me. “Didn’t I tell you to stop cutting through here?” she says. “Didn’t I?” As if thirty years had not passed since the last time I stood on this spot.
9:13:09 PM  Stories
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