For nearly 20 years I hadn’t visited my old neighborhood, the one I grew up in and loved so much in south St. Cloud just west of the college.
For years I avoided going near that area because on previous visits, I’d feel so sad due to its slow-but-sure vanishing act.
But the other day, what the heck, I decided to re-visit it to see what if anything is left of it. Sad to say, I saw that most of it now resides only in my Memory Storehouse – precious memories brimming in my mind, circulating through my heart. Still, with all of time’s erasures, it was good to visit once again, to stand on that ground where so many happy (and some sad) things used to happen.
I drove first to the lot of the long-gone house I lived in once upon a time. It’s on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Ninth Street S. My parents, five siblings and I lived in that old rough-and-tumble but cozy house from birth through high school. The house was torn down about 50 years ago.
I was astonished the lot is still undeveloped, vacant except for the two twisty, gnarled oak trees that still remain. I smiled because that lot seemed to be a lone defiant defender, surrounded by encroaching enemies like the big apartment building across the street on the place that used to be the Kampas’ home.
My old lot seemed to be shouting to would-be developers, “I dare you to set foot on this place!” I chuckled because that stubborn, defiant attitude was very much one aspect of Dad’s mercurial temperament.
As I stood by that lot, a parade of memories marched across my mind:
The wafting soap-clean smell of Mom’s laundry drying on the clothes lines.
Our sweet, loving, frisky dog Tippy scampering across the yard.
The two seedlings brother Jimmy and I planted 65 years ago, now pine trees touching the sky.
Fragrance of the lilac bushes by the alley.
Playing Starlight-Moonlight, Pom-Pom Pullaway and other outside games.
The big front-yard oak (still standing!) that we brats used to climb like monkeys, despite parents’ commands not to.
The thrills and laughs I got while reading “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” in my upstairs bedroom.
Playing board games indoors on rainy or snowbound days.
I recalled some hooligan antics too, like brother Johnny and I filching cigarettes, puffing on them in our garage clubhouse.
Suddenly, I could “hear” Mom yelling out the back door “Denny, Michael, Mary! Get in here right now! Time to get washed and go to bed! School tomorrow!”
Then I “heard” one of the knock-knock jokes so popular in the 1950s:
“Knock knock.
Who’s there?
It’s me, Al.
Al who?
Al let you know when you open the door.”
Then I drove to nearby Barden Park where more fun memories filled my head, my heart:
Band concerts in the bandshell there when Dad often played clarinet with the St. Cloud Municipal Band.
Egerman’s circus-red Popcorn Wagon parked on Fifth Avenue selling goodies to rambunctious kids.
Crafts Day when we had fun painting those white plaster-of-Paris plaques and figurines to take home.
Back in my car, I drove up and down those neighborhood streets, seeing in memory the long-gone houses where childhood friends, many of them long-gone too: Fahnhorsts, Kampas, Townsends, Fredricksons, Stotkos, Hirts. What fun friends they were – and still are – in my heart, my mind.
Then I decided to walk a bit along Fifth Avenue. With my walking companion (cane), I headed north. A flood of memories of those long-gone neighbors filled my mind, briefly bringing a dark cloud of mortality. As I ambled forth slowly with my cane, I felt a wee bit (yikes!) like a wobbly expiration date.
They say you can’t go home again. Yes, you can. I did just the other day. And what a trip it was!
