Surroundings

26

After my entire life at one family home, how did I settle into my new surroundings?

To properly set the next four years, I should probably explain the townhouse and the surrounding area. The bottom floor was a concrete pad that had golden shag carpet over it, the stairs and upper floor were smooth hard wood floors. My mother was so fearful of slipping down those steps that she took the two foot wide strips of orange shag from the temporary living room at the house and sliced it up and glued it to each stair step using a vast quantity of white, all-purpose glue. While this insured no one would ever slip off a step, I doubt she got her security deposit back. The remaining strips of orange shag were used to carpet the attached storage shed where the clothes drier was located along with any yard items.

The upstairs was divided into two halves, the front half was the master bedroom which my mother let me have as I ''would have more room to play in,'' but with the bunk beds stacked in one corner with the chest of drawers directly next to it, it left the room very empty. The remaining half of the upstairs floor was cut in half again for the second bedroom which my mother took with the remaining portion sliced up for the bathroom, towel closet and hallway between it all. My mother bought a large round throw rug to put in the master bedroom to take up some of the vast floor space, but it looked rather lonely in the center of the floor, making the room seem that much larger.

Once I had finished the penicillin and regained my strength, I moved from the lower bunk to the excitement of the upper bunk. Before the age of safety rails, one night I rolled in bed only to fall off the edge. My head collided with the chest of drawers while the rest of my body hit the floor. I soon moved the chest of drawers against the wall at the foot of the bed and pulled up the throw rug to the base of the bed to cushion any future falls. By August, the thrill of sleeping on a high bunk had passed and I remembered the bunk bed came as two halves. I took them apart and I put the top half in the corner where the bunk bed had been and the lower half parallel to it halfway down the remaining wall. I slid the throw rug to the center of the smaller open floor space and this made the room look more naturally filled. I had chosen the top bunk half for the corner to use as my bed because its half had shorter legs and sleeping on such a low bed reminded me of the time my eldest brother slept on the mattress in my old childhood bedroom.

The townhouse complex was three buildings of four apartments each, set-up in an 'L' shape, with our apartment in the lower half of the long line. Inside the 'L' was a solid flat parking area with each apartment having enough room to park two cars in front. There were no lines. Between the buildings were large patches of lawn and behind them a smaller ribbon of lawn after which there was a forest. As I had enjoyed the tree houses my brothers had built at the house, my mother had Joe provide some assorted scrap wood so I could build my own tree house in the woods behind the apartments; she had gotten the permission of the landlord she told me. I then spent the next few days scouting the woods for an ideal spot.

The scraps of wood weren't much, so I talked my mother into going to a nearby town's hardware store so I could get a couple two by fours to support the base of the tree house, we also got some nails and a saw. My mother had kept my maternal grandfather's turn of the century hammer after clearing out his house, so she got herself a small toolbox to put it in and a set of screw drivers for use in the apartment. The tree house started out as a small platform between two tress with strips of the scrap wood nailed across to create the floor. With the remaining two by four wood, I created a ladder to get up to the platform, but found it was too short to reach from the ground to the platform. To accommodate this, I nailed one side to one of the trees about halfway between the ground and the tree house floor, the other side of the ladder hung in the open air. While not structurally sound, with my childhood weight it actually held up pretty good. From the platform I surveyed the woods and looked across a large rock touching the two trees I was at and it stretched to a third tree about six feet away. I fantasized about one day having the floor of the tree house reach that third tree, but I didn't have anywhere near enough scrap wood.

Then soon after, the remaining unused scrap wood I had in the backyard disappeared. My mother panicked as she saw the project of the tree house critical to keeping my interest in living at the apartment rather than deciding to move back with dad at the house. In reality I didn't realize I had a choice so she was safe. But still, she called around and found that the landlord's guy who came to mow the lawn assumed it was trash and took it and threw it out. As the landlord had given permission for the tree house to be built, he felt guilty about this and, as he was a house developer, had two four foot by eight foot sheets of half inch thick plywood brought over to replace the scrap wood. I was vastly better off with the deal and we ran to the hardware store to pick up five dollars more of two by fours and I was quickly across that rock and had a solid floor to the third tree and a roof to boot!

For birthdays, while my friends would have parties with lots of other friends, I pretty much just had one friend over, if that. But for my first birthday at the new apartment, my mother wanted to make it big and memorable and insisted that both my brothers attend and even had Uncle Ronny and Aunt Harriet come out. So everyone could come, we celebrated my birthday the Sunday before and we had lunch and cake, and I got to show-off my tree house and my mother took lots of pictures... In fact, that was one of my very few birthdays that pictures had been taken of and had ended-up in the photo album. For that birthday my father had one of my brothers bring a ten speed bicycle as my present. It was in a box and needed some assembly, which my brothers helped with, and it was child sized. While my mother had at first fumed that the bicycle was father's way of upstaging any present she had gotten me, those feelings were soon replaced with shy laughter. As I was just turning eleven, I was already no longer child sized, at least the size the bicycle had been intended for, thus my riding it was a little like the way clowns would ride tiny bicycles at the circus. By the next week I had found a longer handle bar brace pole and bicycle seat and installed them so I could ride with my legs fully extended. The side effect of this, though, was there was the bicycle down by my knees and feet, then about a foot of the extended poles to where my arms and seat were. Still, I was thrilled with it and the first time my father picked me up at the apartment the following month, my mother insisted I ride around the parking lot for him to see. I was more than happy to but, while I did, I noticed my mother smirking as my father frowned.

Once September came and I was going to go back to school, my mother returned to working the day shift at the local branch store and thus we discovered that the apartment complex had a block party every Friday night. The lights and loud music horrified my mother, but by the second Friday they drew me out of the apartment building to see what was going on and I got to meet my neighbors and one of them had a boy, 'Andrew', a few years younger than me whom I would later impress with the tree house and he would become my tag-along buddy whenever I was up to something on the nearby grounds as he wasn't allowed to leave the property without his parents. His parents didn't like the diminutive 'Andy,' but when we were out of their ear shot, I would call him Andy as he got a tickle out of being called by the forbidden name. With him in mind, I added middle height safety rails to the tree house and eventually filled the space between the safety rails and the floor base with slats of wood to make walls on either side. I eventually replaced the ladder that hung out into space with a structurally sound one at the back of the tree house.

Wandering the woods as Fall came, I found a girl, 'Beth', sitting on another large rock in the woods meditating. I introduced myself and while she was initially hesitant, we soon became good friends. She also lived at the apartment complex so it made it easy to visit. She was a year younger than me and had an even younger brother and a single mother about my sister's age. Having a mother so much younger than my own meant there was a whole different generations' worth of interests. Where my mother was into Herb Alpert and Dean Martin records, her mother was into rock and even Cheech & Chong albums. They had a bean bag chair which was all the modern rage at the time and her mother made Jello with a third of the water in a cookie sheet, then once solid, sliced it into squares which could be eaten as rubbery finger food.

With Fall came a shock. Once the ski area was closed for the Summer season this year, my father took Sundays off. It was the first, and I think the only time, he had either day of the weekends off on a regular basis. And he was taking them off just for me! Each Sunday he would pick me up early in the morning and take me places, typically touristy places but sometimes nature places. There was the Boston Museum of Science one time. Another Sunday he took me to visit an old timey railroad station and take a scenic steam train ride and he showed me how to squish a penny by placing it on the track for the train to run over. A trip to the capital city to bum around and see a re-release of Vincent Price's 3-D movie ''The House Of Wax'', this was one of the very first polarized light 3-D movies and I kept the special glasses in my keepsake drawer for the next few years. Once we visited the ski area where, at the base of one ski lift, there was a stream that a beaver had damned up making a pond; we got to watch with binoculars as the beaver worked, then later walked up to the damn and took a closer look. There was the time to visit the Boston Aquarium and the Bunker Hill multimedia experience nearby. There were a couple more of these and then they abruptly stopped and my father would just take me to the house and read the Sunday newspaper inside while I raked up the fallen leaves and pine needles for him. We never did anything like this again.

After another boring Sunday of just raking leaves or bumming around the house, as having friends over was not allowed, I asked my mother what I must have done wrong for him to have stopped taking me places? She laughed and told me they had finished the separation agreement two weeks earlier and ''He didn't have to put on a show anymore.''

Once the ski season started, my father was back to midweek days off and I would visit him and stay at the house on those days after school, and at the apartment the rest of the week. And so things remained for the next four years...

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