I'm writing this immediately after visiting the home where I grew up. After the tour of Lakewood, I've driven on out to a nearby village called Dexter, and you'll see why, later. Anyway, this is a good place to sit in a coffeeshop and have a bite to eat and to try to absorb what has just happened. (The photo on the left is the front of my old home, 236 Mason Avenue, Lakewood/Ann Arbor, Michigan)
As I drove out Jackson Avenue toward Lakewood this morning, I was struck by the fact that I came upon the old subdivision so quickly; in my youth it seemed to me that we lived "way out of town" – how can the distances have shrunk so much? Suddenly, I was driving past Bethlehem Cemetery, where I and my siblings used to sneak over the fence and play around the old tombstones. And right beyond that hallowed ground, I came upon the turning into Lakewood, where an old gas station and general store always marked the entrance. Lo: the entrance was now marked by a very spiffy "Great Lakes Chocolate and Coffee Shop" – right where the old station once stood. Of course I had to stop in: it was 10 AM, aka "Cappuccino Time." As the co-ed mixed my capp, I said in my corniest old-folks voice: "I grew up in Lakewood 50 years ago, and used to come to a convenience store right here all the time." She told me that this was the actual building that had housed the station and the store, but (indeed) it had been vastly remodelled. "Do you still have an ice chest in the corner with Nesbitt's Orange Pop in it?" I queried archly. She looked a me with a "Who is this nutty old party, I wonder?" gaze and said, "We do carry orange soda, if you would like it." .... I accepted the cappuccino instead, and bought an "Ann Arbor News.Com" local paper (now published on Thursday and Sunday only, and believe me, not worth the newsprint it's printed on .... but then, maybe it never was). It was rather nostalgic to sit in there and glance through the poor remnant of my first example of journalism in childhood, idly wondering if they'd "hazmatted" all the dangerous pollution before establishing a coffee emporium herein.
After coffee, I drove into Lakewood, down the streets I used to ride my bike on, the streets where I learned to drive the Studebaker 4-on-the-floor when I was 15 ..... and I came to the old swamp. Hah: old swamp is now "Dolph Lake Park" and has a little dock there at the end of Lakeview Avenue (I hope not for swimming: eww, swamp creatures!) That dock is just where we used to launch out on our ice skates when the swamp waters were frozen hard; it was pretty bumpy ice, due to the reeds and roots poking up from the depths, but we were tough in those days. Just a bit further on, the old forest begins, as it did in my youth; and I saw paths like the one we would follow uphill to where gnarled old vines hung from mossy trees: we'd dare each other to swing out on those "ropes" like Tarzan. (Did I ever do it? Memory says, sure you did; but now, I'm not so sure. Imagine if the vines had not held: I'd be swimming with those Swamp Things now.)
Here is one of the paths through the woods; perhaps it's the one we would take to walk back in to where the blackcap raspberry thickets yielded those great breakfasts .... my brother and I would walk over there very early on a summer morning, before it got unbearably hot and humid, to gather the berries, haul them home, and eat them in big bowls with top-milk out of the glass milk bottles, and lots of extra sugar....
Wandering around back roads in my car, roads that were not extant when I was a child, I found my way back onto Lakeview Avenue. I drove up and around the corner where my girlfriend Alice Coleman's house still stands (the very corner where her evil boxer dog took a chunk out of my brother's leg as he biked past, one day); and there I was in front of my old home.
I parked the car, grabbed my camera and the photocopies I'd brought of old black and white pictures of the exterior of the house that my mother had taken with her Kodak in the early 50s, and hopped out. I was snapping away, when an old guy came around from the back of the building, where he had been power-washing the exterior. "Are you the owner of the house, sir?" I asked politely. "No, I'm just a friend, helping him get the place in order," he replied; "who are you?" I told him I'd grown up in this house, and did he think the owner might let me come inside? He assured me his friend would be happy to do so, and went to get him. A nicely dressed man came out and greeted me; I showed him the photocopies, and he was just delighted; he'd bought the house just a month earlier, and was thrilled to see what it had looked like back in the day. So he gave me a guided tour of my old home. It was a fascinating experience; you see, it was, and yet was not the place where my dreams often take me back. The rooms were in the same locations, but oh my, how much smaller they seem now! I gazed about the remodeled little kitchen, wondering how on earth my mother had fitted in a small table and chairs in the center, and had room to do her ironing on a pull-down board at one side of ths tiny (to me now) kitchen where I learned to bake and cook. Upstairs, my great bedroom with its alcove and window where I sat to read and dream, seemed no longer mine at all; the owner was using it as a home office, and he scanned my photocopies so he could keep a picture of the exterior for himself. I peeked in the room that was my parents' bedroom, and on the next floor up, looked at the loft that I'd helped my dad to renovate into a room for my brother. They were the same rooms; but yet they were not. I had thought I might cry, walking through all those memories; but all I felt was gratitude that the people who lived there after we were gone had kept the fine old place in such lovely shape after all these years..... No, it was not my childhood home any more; that place lives now only in my heart and soul.
When I left Mason Avenue, I needed a change of venue badly. I remembered that further out Jackson Avenue a road led a bit northward to the small village of Dexter; I thought it might not be as changed as Ann Arbor has become, so I decided to drive out and see if the old cider mill where we used to go on excursions in other autumns was still there. It is; and after lunch I am going out there. You can read all about it in my next blog.
