A Rough Draft of Something New

Branching off a bit from writing detective fiction, I have dabbled with the idea of writing our immediate family history as a memoir for my daughter. Here is the unedited (except for spelling mistakes) draft of the introduction/beginning of the story.

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“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.“
— Genesis 2:7, KJV.

Growing up on Antilla Court I realized early on that I had two things in abundance: time and dirt. Time, because two hours to a child feels like two days to an adult; and dirt, because ours was a dead-end dirt road that was surrounded by trees.

The dust of the street was ever-present. A strong autumnal breeze would blow both leaves and dust into lawns and eyes. Rain would tame the dust for a while and the road, being uneven in many places, would hold the rain in spots, creating puddles to be stomped in (or avoided), and slicks of ice to slide down while waiting for the school bus on a winter morning.

There were rocks in the dirt, which were there to build the strength of the soles of your bare feet and to remind you of your frailty if you fell off a speeding bike or stumbled while dodging a ball. The rocks could be thrown, and that happened a few times in fights between boys who were friends then enemies, and then friends again. Sometimes an errant rock would find its way into a snowball, but no one ever purposely put one there. We had rules that we all agreed to live by, and rock-throwing was considered dirty pool. There were rules to our warfare, after all.

We walked on the dirt, ran on it, and we rode upon it, too. If you had any skill, you learned to brake your bike into a power slide, sending a shower of dust and rocks into the air, leaving a skid mark in the road, a physical declaration that you had been there, on that spot. Cars, wind, or rain would remove the mark, but we knew we had been there and so it didn’t matter.

Our yards were green and full. A few of them had space enough for any other childhood game that we could dream up. My yard had the biggest open space, and Mom liked to feed the neighborhood kids on cookies and juice, so we often gathered here. For any game that required them, first base was the willow bush, second base a bare spot in the grass, and third base was the cement stairs that led to the back door. The clothes line that hung from the back door to the lone post from an old fence (long gone) was our badminton and volleyball net. The whole of our yard was used for games of tag, hide & seek, and ball tag. Back then we stole second, dodged a ball, and swung a racket with abandon because we all knew that the grass would cushion our fall, and our moms could remove any dirt stains from our clothes. Skinned knees and elbows were tended to with a damp cloth and possibly a bandaid. In a pinch, a mother’s kiss would heal a boo-boo nicely.

The woods around our house expanded our playground. A little imagination turned them into the woods just outside a German artillery position, the landscape of an alien planet that our spaceship had just crash landed on, or the woods of Sherwood, where we dutifully robbed from the rich to give to the poor, which wasn’t us, exactly, but close enough sometimes. If my friends were not around then my brother Mark – four years my junior – joined my flights of fancy. We would climb trees, crawl under bushes, jump the small runoff stream in the very back of our yard, and climb through the muck when we fell short of the other side.

We were expected to wipe our feet, brush off our pants, and, on particularly active days, remove our sneakers and shake the dirt out of them before coming into the house. Dirt was for outside, and my Mom had enough to do without having to sweep or vacuum more times in a week than she already did. “What have you boys been up to?” Mom would ask, like she didn’t already know.

“Just playin’”, I’d say, as if that explained everything. Mom never questioned me further so I guess it did.

My mother was a Catholic; my father a Protestant. Their marriage was scandalous in 1958 and it took some decades before my maternal grandmother – who resisted their union – felt any differently. Nana did finally acquiesce on this point but it was only after my Mom was long gone and her grandchildren had shattered more inviolable norms than my parents had done. Part of my parent’s vows before Catholics and God was that any children raised in the household would also be raised Catholic. My Dad didn’t care, and Mom followed through on their commitment for both of them. So we attended church (sometimes) and on the high holy days (absolutely). That was when God was paying the closest attention.

As dutiful children, we were baptized in the church, celebrated our First Communion, and were confirmed as laid out in the Good Book. I attended CCD classes, which I loathed, and daydreamed my way through them. This caused some consternation with my parents because I wasn’t learning how to be a good Catholic. I wondered if God was paying more attention to me when I was at CCD like he did at Easter and Christmas but I never asked. Every once in a while some words in CCD or during Mass crept through my indifference. I liked the story of the flood and was glad that God promised not to destroy the world again. Talking, tempting snakes intrigued me, and so did my creation. Being a Man meant that I was born of clay. Women were formed from Adam’s Rib and that didn’t seem as precious to me somehow. I was the dirt writ large and with purpose. This made sense to me somehow, as much as an ark that carried all the animals, and talking snakes made sense. I never saw an ark and the garden snakes in my yard never spoke to me, but I knew what dirt was and so it made sense.

Looking at it now, I don’t believe that my creation was anything divine, but I was formed in the dust of that small street and given features and details by those who walked on it with me. Many of them are gone now, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, but their lives have shaped my own, and I still carry the dust of Antilla Court in my shoes.

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There will certainly be more of this to come in 2021.

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