In the early sixties, getting off the bus every day, the neighborhood kids changed out of school clothes to head up to the park where we worked on our water project. We propped open the bubbler water fountain with a forked stick. The water flowed down into lakes and canals behind dams of bricks, stones, and clay. We built, dug, rebuilt, and re-dug to expand the project down into the gulley. We got muddy and happy every day after school. One late spring day, two men drove up in a red panel truck with Municipal Utilities printed on the door. The driver, in khaki pants and gray jacket, put the propping stick in his pocket. The younger guy, in blue jeans and plaid shirt, pulled out a wrench and removed the fountain bubbler, then screwed a silver cap onto the pipe. They drove off without a word to us silently watching and some were crying. In those days, children didn’t challenge adults; the adults didn’t think they needed to explain themselves to kids.
Most families in the neighborhood lived paycheck to paycheck and some feared eviction. A mother left one night for her shift at the Rawlings plant and never returned; her daughter designed the layout of the water project and each expansion. A father laid off from the iron mines got drunk every night and would beat his wife; his son dug the canals deeper than anybody. One boy lost family members in a collision with a delivery truck on the highway; he figured out how to make a lock and dam work for toy boats. The kid next door could not play sports because he had heart problems from rheumatic fever; he monitored water flow and pulled leaves from the canals.
With all that going on in the neighborhood and more, the water project in the park had been our refuge, the one thing we constantly talked about and looked forward to doing every day, more so than anything else like riding bikes or playing football.
I drove by the old neighborhood after my mom’s funeral 60 years later. That water pipe is standing there at the top of the park and silver-capped just as it was that late spring day. Of course, all the kids are gone from that time, grown and moved away. Some did become civil engineers and construction managers; I became a psychologist.
Michael C. Roberts is a mostly retired pediatric psychologist. He now hikes in the Sonoran Desert with his dog, cleverly named “Buddy.” He tried painting inspirational rocks during the pandemic, but he cannot paint with any artistry, so maybe they were not very inspirational. He returned to photography. Several of his photographs have been published in literary magazines and on journal covers. A book is available on Amazon: “Imaging the World with Plastic Cameras: Diana and Holga.”
Someone called me a whiz kid because I knew how to record a voice memo on an iPhone. He’s a few years older than me, but it got me thinking that if I qualify as a kid, maybe it was time to start to giving the “Kid” moniker to anyone younger than me.
Fat cars, skinny cars, cars are up on blocks, tough cars, sissy cars, even cars with rusty pox. We have a gathering of Oldsmobiles from all over the country at our convention center.
A Facebook friend recently suffered an unspeakable family tragedy. Just as today’s news travels, news of that event was posted instantly, then rehashed and commented upon for days. Although I didn’t post any comments myself, I was drawn like a moth to flame to the online comments. Each poster professed “insight.” It became insidious, this “insight” offered. Then there was the one-upmanship played as commenters tried to establish themselves as owning superior knowledge regarding this tragic event.
When we were really desperate to drive somewhere, anywhere, we would pry out the back seat of the Mercury to look for loose change. In the bowels of the strange brown matting beneath the seat we would find nickels, dimes, pennies, and every now and then, a precious quarter. It may not sound like much now, but gas was 32 cents a gallon in those days, so 50 cents bought us some quality time on the back roads of New England.
Sitting in the ER waiting room, entry form on my knee, I started down the hypochondriac wish-list. Took me a while to decide—I got this, and this, but not that. It was a catalog of ailments, actually, but with many afflictions strangely missing. For example, a very personal, early one…circumcision…first loss of body part without my consent. Ha! And from there, more predictable losses like teeth and additions like eyeglasses and immunizations for measles and mumps. Not to mention the occasional ankle sprain and odd fracture.
