The Adventures of a Latchkey Kid Read online

  The Adventures Of A Latchkey Kid

  Tales of Growing Up On Long Island

  ©2020 Robert Hodum

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  print ISBN: 978-1-09833-080-4

  ebook ISBN: 978-1-09833-081-1

  For you

  A Word or Two

  What will it be like

  To realize that the last time that I’ll say your name

  Has arrived.

  Will I be able to force my voice to be strong,

  Summon words that you can hold in your memory’s hand,

  Look into your eyes with a smile as I leave,

  Be firm in my need to give you strength as I lose mine.

  And remember not to say goodbye

  Nor hint at your mortality by saying that we’d see one another again some day.

  Of any words to be shared

  In my heart I know I’d want to say Thank you

  For your love, your presence, for allowing our lives and those of yours to

  rub together in the myriad of ways that they have,

  For your patience with my fumbling through this life,

  If I could, I’d ask you to remember to remember ... me.

  To share recollections

  And to laugh at, with, and because of me,

  And keep close a word or two of mine.

  And remember to say my name

  From time to time.

  Sound Beach

  August, 2019

  Contents

  Just like water

  Summertime Waifs

  Striking Matches

  Roaming the Fields

  The Hill

  The Widow of the Woods

  Rough Knocks

  Sledding on the Hill

  A Snow Walk’s Lessons

  A Different Kind of Christmas

  Watching Wrestling with Grandma

  Learning to Fight

  Saturdays at the Movies

  Hanging Out with Cousin Dennis

  Grandpa John’s Best Tall Tale

  Happy Hooligan

  Shooting Rats

  Hammers, Nails and the Dumps

  Sock Fights

  Cigar Smoke Around the Table

  This Too Will Pass

  Just like water

  Today, I gave time a chance to be itself. Fluid, unhinged, without sequence, like the blue fall skies over this farmer’s field.

  It appeared on the other side of my lunch break at a job I had taken at a Halloween attraction on Long Island’s East End. The owner needed help with the preseason renovation of his haunted house, an old potato barn surrounded by farmland. I signed on until the end of September.

  After eating, I stretched out in the shade along the tree line that bordered the farm. I ran my hands over the blades of grass on the rise that overlooked this expanse of sod and clouds.

  Sensing that I wasn’t alone, I looked up.

  The field wavered in the heat of the noon sun. A shadow pushed forward, through memory echoes, imagination and a sense of time that flowed just like water.

  And there he was ... I was.

  My childhood self waved at me from the middle of an East Northport potato farm. In my mind’s eye, I sauntered along, stick in hand, my feet caked in mud, under cloud-flushed summer skies. As a kid, I had stood in fields like this one, rubbing my feet into its soil, and facing the shadows of the surrounding woods. I relied on those skies to steward my daily adventures. They drew us latchkey kids far up past the circling seagulls. We drifted on those clouds, looking down on the universe where we ran wild.

  In the early sixties, suburbia hummed with novelty. The sounds at worksites in the nearby developments spoke of new families that would be coming to our little town of East Northport. Neighborhoods smelled of recently laid asphalt, and the roads shone with freshly painted, broken white lines. So many newly poured foundations to climb down, framed-out homes left unattended to investigate, and recently dug sumps whose easily-scaled chain link fences led to ominous drainage tunnels. A well-set table of escapades and antics awaited us daredevils. We learned to extricate ourselves from most of the trouble we provoked, and anticipate adventure as our daily course of events.

  Those fields and wooded tracts bordered the outer limits of our known domain. Little did we care to know the other world beyond those treetops. Though it filled our socks, and caked under our fingernails, we had no idea that the ground under those fields was timeless, and our memories, unlike the dirt on our jeans, not easily washed away.

  That world, turned under by decades of tractor wheels, and largely covered by two-story colonials, still seeps up from this farmer’s field. The darkness of the surrounding woods whispers adventure, but also caution. Recollections of the conflict, isolation, anger, and fear that colored our childhood palettes lurk in the shadows of those trees like rusted, sharp cornered tractors.

  We latchkey kids were alone, marooned on islands of our own creation where exhilaration frequently ended in laughter, or fisticuffs. But for certain, those days concluded with an inevitable return to dark and empty homes. Sometimes we endured the loneliness and sense of gentle abandonment that we came to consider normal. Other times, we did not.

  We went to school with keys, dangling around our necks or tied to our belts, tucked away in change purses or stuck deep in pants pockets. Having lost mine twice in the first grade, my family hid my key under the milk box on our stoop. Responsible for locking up in the morning and letting ourselves in after school, turning lights out and radios off, we kids did our best to convince ourselves that we were stalwart keepers of the family’s realm.

  Locking up and leaving the house was easy for me. Anticipating the shenanigans of lunch and recess with buddies and the smiles of a few good teachers, I’d happily step away from my house. Often scolded for being a dedicated clock-watcher, I’d crash out of school and start my return home. As I’d get closer, I’d slow my steps. My walk home always ended the same, at a locked door. I dreaded opening that door to a dark and empty house. Most of us latchkey kids shared that apprehension, rarely voiced to our parents, who expected us to maneuver deftly through that discomforting solitude. Instead, we conspired and hatched adventures together, raised a lot of noisy and unrepentant hell, and ran wild under limitless suburban skies. Whether I was solo or running with the gang, regardless of the weather or season, our antics played out in surrounding fields and woods, our childhood’s stage.

  I am in time’s debt for returning me to when my greatest concerns in life were dodging phone calls from my teachers, surviving roughhousing with my buddies, and getting home before my parents did. Always plotting new capers, skirting trouble, playing on the local hill, and digging tunnels deep into its soil, time seemed mutable, an eternal rollercoaster run through seasons, adventures, and farm fields like this one.

  So, thank you, time, for allowing me to see once again through a child’s eyes, and find a return home.

  Summertime Waifs

  Absent parents and teachers, we were unshackled during the summers. Older siblings worked summer jobs. Our parents left home early in the morning. The fathers of our neighborhood left by six thirty to catch the morning train to Manhattan. They’d return after seven in the evening. Many of the moms were out the door by seven thirty, some after dropping their husbands off at the Northport station. That’s what Mom and Dad did.

  Dad started with Sunoco Mobil Oil Compan
y as a runner when he was eighteen. A track star at Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn, he easily qualified for this job which required him to run documents between the company’s main office and numerous depots and satellite offices throughout Midtown Manhattan. Sunday nights I’d see him seated at his desk, flipping through pages of hand-written columns of numbers. Dad did all his calculations in his head and his work in pencil.

  Mom met Dad in the building where they worked. She was a divorced telephone operator with a young daughter, Frances Jane. Dad was a widower with an eight year-old son, Harry Charles. When I was born, Mom stayed home in our Glen Cove home until we moved out to East Northport. When I was seven, she went back to work as a telephone operator for different businesses in Western Suffolk County.

  During summer vacation, we kids, waifs from the early morning until dusk, were left to our own devices, entertainments, and deliciously nasty pursuits. We followed our rules of conduct, forgetting Saturday catechism lessons and parents’ advisements at least until the adults returned home. We gathered at eight in the morning under the branches of a weeping willow, where we felt protected from unwelcome eyes. The day’s plans would be made, decisions reached, friends called on, and off we’d go. We wildings relished our summer days, playing outside even in inclement weather.

  Fields smelled of wild wheat stalks that swayed in the wind. Glistening boa constrictor-vines of crimson poison ivy slithered up the corners of farmers’ sheds, and wrapped around corroding farm equipment. Blue skies, sweat stained T-shirts, and the odor of earthworms after an early morning rain were the colors and scents of our summers.

  Our hideout, an abandoned trailer behind the local farm, was our final destination at days end. Its darkened interior spoke to us of ghostly October shadows, winter igloos of the far-off Arctic tundra, and pillboxes on some Japanese-occupied Pacific island. Its walls sucked in our stories of our sandlot baseball games, our Mars Attacks card collections, and who had the fastest bike in the neighborhood. An accounting of our most recent illicit activities usually figured at the end of these discussions; errant stones that broke neighbors’ windows, recent playground fights, and who had gotten caught playing with fire.

  And yes, we played with fire a lot.

  Striking Matches

  We kids mastered the art of playing with fire early on. Our parents considered striking a match a valuable life skill, given that their childhood chores included lighting the gas sconces and wood stoves in their kitchens or parlors. As kids they dried their hair over metal heating grates in the floor and didn’t’t have indoor plumbing. We children of privilege had to manage stirring soup on electric ranges, closing the doors of refrigerators, and remembering to turn off light switches. Unfortunately the good and useful skill of striking a match led parents and children astray. They in their young adult lives, started smoking, and we, played with fire.

  Many of our parents were smokers. Dad lit up his first cigar at age twelve in the family’s outhouse in Brooklyn. During his adulthood, Dad’s birthdays or Christmases included a fine crafted wooden box of artistically banded cigars. He’d end the day in his recliner with a cigar in his mouth and his grandfather’s smoking stand close at hand. Mom and my sister always had some kind of menthol cigarette, and my brother rolled his pack of cigs in the sleeve of his white T-shirt when he went out with his friends.

  I never liked their smoking habit. My clothes stank of cigar smoke so much that my dentist once suspiciously inquired about my personal smoking habits. After being admonished by my sister never to smoke, I pinpricked a pack of her cigarettes. Her first drag on one of those decommissioned cigarettes was worth the scolding.

  My family’s Sunday dinner conversations, ashtrays on the dinner table, sometimes strayed into muffled talk of Russian nuclear attacks and how we might have to buy guns and stockpile food, water, and, of course, matches. It sounded like we kids might have to pull ourselves out of some crazy war-imposed stone age, and being able to make fire would be integral to our survival. Though admonished never to take that skill lightly, matches opened new avenues of entertainment for me and my friends.

  I acquired the match-striking skill quickly and soon became know as the “fireman”, the go-to kid for little twig fires, igniting balsa wood planes before takeoff, and a general singeing of plastic model toys and army men when buddies needed things to look “authentic” for their set-ups. We recreated flaming dogfights with rubber band-powered balsa wood planes. Pouring a rivulet of gasoline on the tips of the wings, lighting it up and hand launching the plane, created a most impressive scene in our imaginary air battles. Planes with their tail fins soaked in gasoline left fabulous smoke trails. One of us would strike the match and another would release with a quick throw. We’d rate the burns and the crashes of these expendables, never realizing the horror that this must have meant in real life.

  Whatever we saw on Vic Morrow’s TV show, “Combat” or in any war movie, we did our best to recreate. It either involved firecrackers, hard to come by except in July, or gasoline, easily found next to the lawnmower in every kid’s garage. Reality was we just liked burning stuff.

  One day, I changed it up and decided to use tar roof shingles that Dad had lying around and build a miniature house that gave refuge to a squad of plastic soldiers. Simple enough, but I decided to do this in the garage. Of course, I left the garage door open for ventilation.

  I wasn’t sure whether tar would burn, so I poured some gasoline on for a dramatic flare. I struck a match and BOOM! The flames of a short-lived mushroom cloud reached taller than I stood. Once the fire died down to less than a foot high, I grabbed my dad’s coal shovel and swatted the flames, which set the metal shovel head on fire. So, I extinguished the fire by pouring the remnants of an open bag of cement on the flames. Midday during the summer, most parents worked, so the smoke that billowed out of the garage door never triggered a call to the fire department. The kids knew that I was just messing around.

  I shoveled through the melted tar that had turned to a pottage of black glue on the garage floor. The edge of the face of the shovel curled back and melted away as I scraped up the molten tar. I dug a hole in Mom’s garden and buried the hardening tar sludge behind the last row of roses.

  By five in the afternoon a dark smudge remained on the floor near our car’s oil stain. A faint smell of smoke and tar lingered as I wiped the shovel off and stuck it behind the other tools. Remarkably, my folks never realized the pyrotechnics that had taken place that day in the family garage.

  Ben, an older kid who lived across the street, hosted the greatest pyrotechnic event ever held on our block. A week before, we had all gone to the movies to see Barabbas, a film about a criminal who was pardoned by Pontius Pilate and later became a famous gladiator. We reenacted its battle scenes with swords crafted from the struts of winter fences that rotted along the perimeter of the farmer’s field. One of the film’s Colosseum fight scenes featured a river of fire that the gladiators jumped over to reach their opponents. The weekend after the movie, Ben’s father had trenched around their patio and had run metal conduit for electric lines for lamp posts to illuminate the area. Ben, ever the showman, called us over for a daredevil show when our parents were at work.

  When we got there, he poured gasoline in the trench from end to end, told us to step back, and threw a match into the pit. A wall of flames took seconds to ignite and was just high enough for him to jump back and forth, just like those gladiators. Ben invited us to try. With swords in hand, we spent the next couple of minutes jumping over the flames. With each leap, the fire got lower and lower, so he just kept adding gasoline, and we continued jumping.

  Since Ben had gone through puberty before us, he could boast of having singed his leg hair. We just seared our already beaten up sneakers. None of us noticed that the fire had charred the conduit and melted the exposed electric cable. He got some serious whacking when his father connected the damaged
conduit and cable with the empty gas can.

  Ben didn’t play with us for quite a while after that day.

  Roaming the Fields

  I grew up playing on potato fields. Sloshing in the mud, sometimes way over the tops of my sneakers, I chased butterflies, threw stones and sticks at anything that moved, and jousted with seagulls that dared to land in the large day-puddles that formed after a good rain. Happily encased in that summer snow-globe world, of piercingly clear, blue skies, I’d float above those fields.

  Morning showers would leave pools of slowly ebbing water in furrows that reflected a muddied kaleidoscope of sky. Eyes fixed on the clouds, and never pulling back my steps, I’d march over the furrows, waiting for the vertigo, and the inevitable stumble to my knees and outstretched hands that usually kept my face out of the muck.

  Broad-stepping the mud, I’d look for anything to throw up at the crows and seagulls that dipped down to the puddles that collected in the low points of the field. From my backyard, I heard the boys clubbing muddy splashes out of the light brown stagnant pools. I’d join them, pointy stick in hand, and harpoon the opaque water for whatever creature might be at the bottom of that miry sea.

  Never dissuaded by the firm slaps on my butt or thighs that likely awaited me at home, I’d do my best to splatter others, and embrace the mud and muck that came my way. Mom would order me to strip at the backdoor, clap the mud off my sneakers, and mound the clothes off to the side. I enjoyed being bare-assed, reveling being in this sanctioned public nudity. Spanks or not, mucky puddles never lost their appeal.

  On sunny days, we’d hunt the much prized and ever dangerous bumblebee. Hunting bees became my specialty. We filled jars with the engorged, black and white ones that foolishly lingered over the swatches of clover that covered the field’s borders. Scooping them up with those glass spaghetti sauce jars that we carried with us, we’d feed them tuffs of clover or grass clippings. Some would even make it home alive. After their day’s captivity, I’d dump mine out on the lawn before dinner.