The Magical Land Of Suburbia
Joe Cocker begins to sing and the 8mm film is rolling. On the screen is a family and two brothers with bikes are mugging for the camera. It’s “The Wonder Years” TV show.
I grew up within a couple years of that time in history. That could have been my neighborhood at one point in my life. I spent my third through sixth grade years in a suburb of a large city. The houses in my immediate neighborhood all resembled each other with the same color bricks and maybe three or four different styles. Ok, now I remember there were exceptions.
I think I will write occasionally about this neighborhood and its inhabitants because I plan to eventually get up the nerve to write down the story I made up about all the kids I knew in this magical place at such a magical time in my life. I call the story “The Magic Song.” This is only the ground work here.
We moved into a corner house with a detached double garage that was big enough to hold the car and eventually all our bikes and “big wheels”, and other treasures of kids in Suburbia.
I remember my black and yellow bike with the black banana seat with a sickly yellow stripe running down it. If I sat back far enough on the seat, I could easily “pop a wheelie” and then try to ride as long as I could just on the back tire. All you kids reading this may have to go to a museum to see this bike.
Since we had a corner house, we had lots of yard. We had a nice fenced in back yard with a cement slab six inches thick that was our patio or deck as you might say now. The side yard was between the fence and the sidewalk. We used this for football. The fenced in back yard had the swing set, but we still used it for baseball. The front yard had a plum tree or something like one in it and so us kids generally just lounged around out there. All this yard made it easier for the kids to want to come to our house to play.
The first day, across the street from the side door, I met my first girlfriend. She and her friend became regular visitors to the yard. Shortly, after that, I met the boy my age across the street from the front door that also came over quite a bit and educated me about the city’s professional baseball players and demonstrated their particular styles in our own games in the back yard.
Now I am the oldest of four siblings. There are three boys and a baby girl. I will refer to them this way: The brother younger than me but older than the youngest boy, I will usually call my brother. I’ll the youngest boy, baby brother, and baby sister is baby sister. Ok, you get the picture.
My brother, (boy #2), met his first friend two doors over from my baseball loving friend. I’ll call him Tattletale, and you can guess how I came up with that name. He was so anxious to tell on someone that even if he were involved in a particular incident himself, he would tell on himself as well as the others in the party. He’d be in just as much trouble, but it never stopped him from being Tattletale.
Tattletale was one of the kids that helped us out at Christmas time. We didn’t need to look at the Sears catalog so much as to look at the toys and vehicles in the driveway of his garage. They were the first ones to have cable TV. High tech toy of the rich in our minds back then.
These kids were our core group. Others came and went as time went on, but this was the first year.
My brother was four years younger than me. Baby brother was not quite two when we first moved to Suburbia, and Baby Sister wasn’t born until late that summer before I started school in that neighborhood.
They called my brother “the bold one”. He wasn’t afraid to ask for money from any of our adult relatives, which embarrassed me a bit. He was also to become some of the source of my frustration, but at the same time, we shared a room and a double bed. It could be either love or hate at any given moment.
One of his bold moments was the next year. My girlfriend moved away and some people moved in that looked of the Asian persuasion. In their house were two cute little Asian looking kids, and their first glimpse of us brought them running outside and pointing their fingers and shouting, “Bang bang!”
We played along and dropped like we were dead, and then got up and shot back. We were having such a wonderful time, that the little boy was walked across the street to play with us, but the little girl was taken into the house. That’s when my brother asked the little boy, “Are you Chinese?”
A frown appeared on the little boy’s face and he said, “I’m Pilipeeno and you die! Bang, bang!”
Our first cultural exchange.
I grew up within a couple years of that time in history. That could have been my neighborhood at one point in my life. I spent my third through sixth grade years in a suburb of a large city. The houses in my immediate neighborhood all resembled each other with the same color bricks and maybe three or four different styles. Ok, now I remember there were exceptions.
I think I will write occasionally about this neighborhood and its inhabitants because I plan to eventually get up the nerve to write down the story I made up about all the kids I knew in this magical place at such a magical time in my life. I call the story “The Magic Song.” This is only the ground work here.
We moved into a corner house with a detached double garage that was big enough to hold the car and eventually all our bikes and “big wheels”, and other treasures of kids in Suburbia.
I remember my black and yellow bike with the black banana seat with a sickly yellow stripe running down it. If I sat back far enough on the seat, I could easily “pop a wheelie” and then try to ride as long as I could just on the back tire. All you kids reading this may have to go to a museum to see this bike.
Since we had a corner house, we had lots of yard. We had a nice fenced in back yard with a cement slab six inches thick that was our patio or deck as you might say now. The side yard was between the fence and the sidewalk. We used this for football. The fenced in back yard had the swing set, but we still used it for baseball. The front yard had a plum tree or something like one in it and so us kids generally just lounged around out there. All this yard made it easier for the kids to want to come to our house to play.
The first day, across the street from the side door, I met my first girlfriend. She and her friend became regular visitors to the yard. Shortly, after that, I met the boy my age across the street from the front door that also came over quite a bit and educated me about the city’s professional baseball players and demonstrated their particular styles in our own games in the back yard.
Now I am the oldest of four siblings. There are three boys and a baby girl. I will refer to them this way: The brother younger than me but older than the youngest boy, I will usually call my brother. I’ll the youngest boy, baby brother, and baby sister is baby sister. Ok, you get the picture.
My brother, (boy #2), met his first friend two doors over from my baseball loving friend. I’ll call him Tattletale, and you can guess how I came up with that name. He was so anxious to tell on someone that even if he were involved in a particular incident himself, he would tell on himself as well as the others in the party. He’d be in just as much trouble, but it never stopped him from being Tattletale.
Tattletale was one of the kids that helped us out at Christmas time. We didn’t need to look at the Sears catalog so much as to look at the toys and vehicles in the driveway of his garage. They were the first ones to have cable TV. High tech toy of the rich in our minds back then.
These kids were our core group. Others came and went as time went on, but this was the first year.
My brother was four years younger than me. Baby brother was not quite two when we first moved to Suburbia, and Baby Sister wasn’t born until late that summer before I started school in that neighborhood.
They called my brother “the bold one”. He wasn’t afraid to ask for money from any of our adult relatives, which embarrassed me a bit. He was also to become some of the source of my frustration, but at the same time, we shared a room and a double bed. It could be either love or hate at any given moment.
One of his bold moments was the next year. My girlfriend moved away and some people moved in that looked of the Asian persuasion. In their house were two cute little Asian looking kids, and their first glimpse of us brought them running outside and pointing their fingers and shouting, “Bang bang!”
We played along and dropped like we were dead, and then got up and shot back. We were having such a wonderful time, that the little boy was walked across the street to play with us, but the little girl was taken into the house. That’s when my brother asked the little boy, “Are you Chinese?”
A frown appeared on the little boy’s face and he said, “I’m Pilipeeno and you die! Bang, bang!”
Our first cultural exchange.
posted by praiseage at 6:22 AM
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