birdwood days

.

We all have three types of vision--historical, present, and future. Where you are in life and where you will go from here has a lot to do with what type of vision you allow to dominate your thoughts, decisions, and actions.

A person whose actions are dominated by historical vision believes that just about everything that's important, enjoyable, or significant in his or her life has already happened.

so says a guy in a book (a physical-fitness book, for chrissakes) from which i wasn't expecting such a frontal assault on my psyche--but, boy, did he nail my ass to the wall anyway.

as i process his little insight, allow me to offer up yet another historical vision from my apparently endless supply.

inspired by an idle google-earth search i conducted one night awhile back, i intended to post this thread in regular installments once it was completed. since i now realize that may or may not ever happen--and since i have fuck-all otherwise--i'm gonna go with what i have for now.

* * * * *

consider for a moment the following aerial photo:

it could be anywhere, USA, but this anonymous agglomeration of urban sprawl is in actuality a recent snapshot of a portion of suburban houston.

here's the specific area of that portion that holds my interest (and if you're gonna actually read what follows, then yours as well)


because there was a time when this insignificant little triangle of nowhere was my whole fucking world.

* * * * *

to this day i have no idea how we ended up in braeburn glen--maybe my dad threw a dart at a map, who knows.

all i know for sure is that in august 1960, my mother, baby brother and i were told we had been "transferred," and were suddenly uprooted from our bleak little 2/1 rent-house in deep-cajun louisiana and plopped down in the middle of a flat, treeless, mosquito-ridden, brand-spanking-new subdivision in southwest houston its developer had, no doubt--and without apparent irony--named for its unmistakable resemblance to fuckin' scotland (glengarry/glen ross, anyone?).


but fuck the how or why--this was america in 1960, and all around us were young families just like ours who, almost from the moment we drove up in front of our new house on birdwood road and got outta the car, drew us immediately into the fold and made us feel at home.

this was our street (minus most of the trees back then, of course)

remarkable, huh? and this was our house

and these were our neighbors of consequence, both good and bad--the ones i'll be talking about in this and succeeding posts

more than a few of which--half a century later, and regardless of where we've all ended up--are still our friends to this day.

* * * * *

1. the joneses

"dear god, what's the little bastard up to now?"

this from laverne ash, ex-army broad, two houses down to the left, my mother's best friend.

the women are gathered in our front yard, lawn chairs circled, coffee cups and cigarettes in hand, passing a companionable afternoon while dinner cooks and their husbands work their way home--and, as usual, i'm stealthily underfoot, soaking up every word.

even as she speaks, all heads swivel as one to the house across the street, because we all know immediately who she's gotta be talking about.

steve jones--eight years old, dennis the menace, terror of the neighborhood.

and sure enough, there he is, dragging his mother's precious pram outta the garage.

"uh oh, he's got the pram--where the hell is mary ann?"

pram, you ask? allow me to explain: when dan and mary ann jones spawned their third kid, matthew, a simple stroller wasn't enough--no, they dropped untold buckets of dough on this big, elaborate english baby carriage to trundle him around in. it was called a perambulator, or "pram," they explained to us, the unwashed. picture acres of navy-blue canvas, chrome fittings and big wheels with inflatable tires (or just look at the following picture--minus the nanny--for a pretty good idea of what i'm talking about here).

needless to say, if the joneses weren't the laughingstock of birdwood road before the pram, they quickly became so afterwards.

but at the moment, none of that matters to this group of frugal, cost-conscious housewives--all they know is, the thing is big and fragile and expensive and here's little steve treating it like it's a throw-away toy.

first, he wheels it outta the garage to the top of the driveway, at which point he lets it go. it rolls down the driveway, picking up speed rapidly. at the last possible second, he dashes after it and catches it just before it hits the street. he then drags it back up to the top of the driveway, waits for a passing car to turn the corner, times the drop for just the right moment, lets it go again, races it down the driveway and averts a collision by milliseconds.

the women are incredulous--i mean, at some point, his mother's gotta look out the kitchen window, right? then they stop themselves and laugh--like mary ann's ever caught her precious angel at anything his whole goddam life.

see, steve was the original bad seed, and everybody on the block knew it but his clueless parents.

most folks up and down birdwood road got their first introduction to steve jones when they looked up and suddenly found him in their house--no knock, no doorbell; he was just there, rifling through their stuff as they were moving in.

as the women watch his antics across the street, they rehash their steve jones stories, because everybody has one.

my mother leads with her perennial favorite: how, as the movers were still lowering the ramp on the truck, she walked into the guest bathroom of her first-ever brand-new house just in time to catch the little boy from across the street with his pecker out, reared back and spraying huge arcs of piss all over the mirror.

the women all laugh as mrs. harberger (next door to our right)--good catholic, paragon of virtue, never said anything bad about anybody--tells how she looked out her sliding-glass door one day to find little steve, hardly more than a toddler at the time, dangling from high atop a ladder at the house under construction behind hers.

"sometimes," she says, "i wonder if god made a mistake putting me there to catch him."
 

because he really was that bad--but back to the story at hand.

when little steve gets tired of playing chicken with passing traffic, he begins a new game, madly dashing down the sidewalk with the pram, then screeching to a halt, spinning the thing on a dime, running full-blast in the other direction, then suddenly changing course, skidding it sideways, turning on two wheels as he reverses field--all the while shrieking at the top of his lungs as he flings the carriage hither and yon.

one of the women: "he's gonna tear that thing to shreds; another five minutes and there'll be nothing left of that pram."

another: "pram, hell--what about the baby?"
 

they all laugh but it trickles to an uneasy stop as they all sit up and look at each other as mary ann's nasal minnesota whine comes wafting from her kitchen window.

"steeeeeeeven, bring matthew in for his nap now!"