Euclid Avenue, Part I

When I was five years old (several decades ago) our family of six moved into a brand new, fully-furnished model home at the end of a dead-end street, a block away from Stonewall Jackson Elementary School in Bristol, Virgina. It might have been an idyllic setting, except for a few key issues, number one being that it was actually too small for us. It was supposed to be a two bedroom house with a "walk-through". If you're familiar with those houses from the 1950's, a "walk-through" was a room (usually by the kitchen) that could be used as a den, a dining room, or in our case, a bedroom. There were doorways (two), but no doors. Thus, the name. My sister (she was six) and I shared a twin-sized bed in one corner of that room, but for the life of me, I can't remember what else was in there. All I know is that when I was lying in bed at night, I could see straight into the kitchen, which allowed me to keep tabs on everyone, and I loved that.

The furniture that came with the house was all very typical 1950's-style: blond wood, sectional sofa, Formica kitchen table. Of course, the house also had the nondescript basement with the concrete floor, (later on they would refer to those as "unfinished") which was the perfect spot to house our old furniture, as well as provide space for my teen-age sister's "loud" parties. That brings us to a second issue, which was the close proximity to our next-door neighbors, the GodAwful's, who apparently had the police department on speed-dial (rotary-wise) for any time teeny-boppers started showing up en masse. Granted, the powerful sound coming from the 45's playing on my sister's little record player in the basement could very well have violated the city's noise ordinance, but I think the GodAwful's were just looking for an excuse to ruffle our feathers. It was always right about the time the party would get going good that Bristol's finest would show up to shut it down. In which case, the GodAwful's hadn't just ruined it for the teenagers, they had ruined it for the rest of us, too. The ones who were perched on the top steps to watch and learn, were shooed off to bed when the party broke up. I'm still pissed.

Across the street from our house, there was a vast expanse of red clay dirt. I have to think that the builder's initial plan was to build another row of houses along that side of the street like the ones he built on our side, but they never materialized. So the empty lots with  their giant (I was five) mounds of dirt became the neighborhood playground. It was on that hallowed ground that I learned to shoot marbles and that I first contemplated jumping off of something high enough to get hurt just to see if Jesus really would save me, like they said he would in church. Actually, Jesus may have stepped in to save somebody there one day, but it wasn't me. It was a nine year old boy who was ordered by his friend, the older GodAwful boy, to hold one end of an electrical wire while he (the god-awful idiot) did something stupid and dangerous with the other end. We had just sat down to have our usual summer fare of bologna sandwiches for lunch when we heard the loudest boom I could ever imagine. To this day, I have never heard a sound quite like it. We all jumped up and ran out the screen door to the vacant lot where the GodAwful boy was still holding onto his end of the wire, and the other boy, who was lying face down in the dirt, wasn't moving. We all thought he was dead. Luckily for him, he was wearing rubber-soled shoes, which may have saved his life; that is, unless Jesus really did intervene. All I know is, the GodAwful boy arrogantly denied any wrong-doing, which gave not only my family, but the entire neighborhood (especially the injured boy's parents) a whole new reason to hate the GodAwful's. As if we needed one.