The Adventures of a Latchkey Kid Read online

  Sometimes we’d catch them in our cupped hands and quickly slap our palms on the tops of the open jars, hoping that the impact would dislodge the bee from the fleshy part of our palms. That usually worked. Having been stung several times, after the initial shock, I’d put on a brave face, say a few curses and continue hunting. Out in those fields, surrounded by our friends, we’d try to pull out the stingers, splinters, thorns with our teeth and spit them away. We acted like the he-men we pretended we were; never a tear, not a word, not a peep.

  But at home when our moms came at us with the tweezers’ cold, silver claws of death, we’d scream our lungs out. You see, we were also very accomplished actors, and could turn on the tears and sobs whenever it suited us. Sometimes we’d practice this. Who knew whether we’d tug at their heartstrings and wrangle an extra serving of ice cream or tapioca pudding out of them. This never worked with our teachers, but at home, now that was different. But one thing I learned, always choose your mom over an older sibling for the extraction.

  All of the crap, the no-way-am-I-doing-that attitude, the snippy, wise-ass remarks, pushes, pinches, and general snootiness we’d give our siblings all came home to roost when an older brother or sister had the tweezers in their hands. The promises of never doing it again flowed as quickly as our real tears. And somehow they always walked away avenged and satisfied, and we, for the moment, repentant.

  Bees weren’t for all of us. Some of us collected the monarch or swallow tailed butterflies that on good days, painted the ground in a levitating mass of color. One or two of our gang mounted those things on blocks of cardboard and had wooden cases full of these trophies. They even studied their names and points of origin. For most of us, they were just field butterflies, simple as that, and if we could pick them off with an accurately aimed stone or swat them with a tree branch, we did.

  As long as the supply lasted, potato wars were high on everyone’s list. We picked the discarded tubers out of the dried furrows. Some had already begun to rot and were perfect for chuck battles. Others were edible, I remembered my mom telling us once how her friends would make mickies, potatoes thrown into small open fires that she and her friends had made during the Depression. Mickies being too much trouble for us, we opted to throw them, the more rotted the better.

  Marksmanship was always a function of how you gripped the irregular mass of rotting potato. If the projectile was still fresh and hard, we always pulled our throws. After all, these were our friends that we pelted. But if that tater was soft and oozy, we let them fly as fast and hard as the arm could throw. Overhand was a sure hit, sidewinder not so reliable. A direct hit was marked by a clamorous response from any witnesses, and a scream and a string of curses from the victim. Retribution was almost immediate from the wounded soul or one of his closest friends. So, you really never knew what angle the potato was going to come from.

  Duck, turn, and run proved to be the best tactics during these potato wars. But never under any condition, did any of us ever aim for the face. If an errant throw happened to strike a buddy’s face, an immediate and most sincere apology was offered. Gritting your teeth and pushing down any sense of triumph or laugh, we’d pat the shoulder of the victim. In extreme cases when his tears flowed and the slighted one was inconsolable, it was potato war etiquette to hold your arms out, offering up your body for a free shot. Of course, to be thrown at a reasonable distance that was determined by the shouts of approval from the others to the one-man firing squad.

  If you offered to take one in the chest to make peace, you couldn’t move, flinch or duck. Doing so caused you to lose face, and you and your family paid for it for the rest of the day, being cursed in the most vile and inventive ways. But taking the potato blow meant that you were the unspoken king for the day. Though the title was short-lived, it earned you some deference, pats on the back, and a solid and warm adieu from the gang at the end of the day.

  Regardless, tears of the swollen faced victim dried quickly once vengeance had been exacted. The older kids insisted that handshakes seal the truce, allowing us to return the next day without grudges. Playing in those proving grounds, separated gang leaders from their followers, and reminded us that a handshake counted, at least until the next poorly aimed potato.

  The Hill

  During the construction of our new elementary school, the contractors mounded all the excavated soil in the old farmer’s field directly behind the homes with easterly facing backyards. A thicket of wild cherry trees ran the property line of my house, which I climbed to watch the trucks mound the dirt to heights that seemed to touch the clouds. They kept piling foot after foot, spreading it out to the width of the infield of a baseball diamond, until they completed the excavation for the school’s foundation. By the end of the spring, we had our own Mt. McKinley. Never mind that we would eventually have swings, jungle gyms, and basketball courts on the school grounds. It was the hill that became our source of shared adventures and personal dramas, and our much valued and defended turf.

  In the northern corner of a former potato field, now school property, and at a great distance from the recently completed 5th Avenue Elementary School, the hill promised solace and adventure, a site for rendezvous, cloud watching, sleigh riding, and unrestrained tunnel digging. This was our domain, undeniably free of adult strictures, a netherworld of mystery constantly undergoing seasonal transformation. Pockmarked by the holes and tunnels that we dug, and sled trails that cut deep into its steeper sides, it was a place of wonder and refuge.

  You’d swear that we were all sons and daughters of miners. Given our skill for tunneling into its compacted sides of topsoil, we divined its texture and pliability before shoveling out trenches and caves. We jumped, rolled, and crawled in its rich, dark soil. After a hard day’s play, we carried earth home in the cuffs of our pants’ pockets, shirtsleeves, and sneakers. We wore its smudges and grains behind our ears and under our fingernails for days.

  If we could have eaten it, we would have. Certainly most of us inadvertently swallowed several handfuls over the years of rolling down its weed-covered embankments, throwing globs of mud, and cutting deep into its sides with our fathers’ shovels. We dug trenches, caves, and tunnels as the weather became warmer and the spring rains loosened up the winter’s compacted dirt of our sleigh runs. Pockmarked like the battlefields of the Somme, the hill was our canvas, pliable to our spades and subject to our creativity.

  From its summit, we could see people in their backyards, and what friend or foe might be approaching. Its sloping sides provided a slip-slide run of cushioning weeds. We made beds from clumps of knee-high grass that rolled from the summit, overlooking the nearby farmhouse. Grasshoppers abounded, bumblebees circled the stalks of flowered weeds that surrounded us, and long-legged spiders crawled over our chests.

  We’d stretch out to watch the clouds in a summer sky. Those billowing, bedsheet clouds took shape and morphed into expendable delights, and then suddenly misted into oblivion. We painted on that canvass every imaginable shape and scene, each of us a Picasso in the making.

  We’d hear our moms call us to dinner. One or two families had supper bells that inevitably clanged around five thirty. They couldn’t see us, but instinctively knew the directions to direct their calls. Sometimes I caught glimpses of Mom stepping out onto the cement stoop directly off our home’s kitchen. Her first call to eat would be inquisitive. The second was more strident, the third signaled annoyance, and would be certainly less forgiving than the first two. I didn’t wait for the fourth.

  All of us tried to delay our returns home. Grudgingly we’d drop our rocks and sticks, and drag our shovels home in July’s heat, pull our sleds over the frozen, weedy clumps in January, and grab our plastic or home-made weapons, dropping the caked mud bombs of October. We exchanged the obligatory “See ya” and head off to home.

  When my folks consigned me to my room for some transgression or rudeness, I’d study the c
hanging contours of the hill, and relive my most outstanding adventures there. Seen from my bedroom window on rainy afternoons and during winter snowstorms, the hill morphed, almost vanishing into the fog of rain and swirling snow. But the hill was eternal, and upon the storm’s passing, seemed to wait anxiously for my next visit.

  The Widow of the Woods

  We spent most of our summer days walking farmers’ fields and the nearby woods. We’d kick fallen branches that we couldn’t snap with our feet, skip stones on the brown puddles left by morning rains, probe animal carcasses with sticks, and, of course, tell stories.

  On our hours-long walks, we debated the merits of TV shows from the evening before, the strengths and weaknesses of our favorite comic book characters, and who amongst us fell dead the best when we played war. We filled our personal airways with this chatter, knowing it to be simply a prelude to the real discussion; where we’d go exploring and what adventures we’d have that day.

  Funny that we never spoke of what went on in our homes. The problems our families faced and the issues we might have had with siblings. We rarely discussed our onerous household rules and chores, and certainly never spoke of how we were disciplined when we failed to comply. The sadness, troubles, and challenges that at times seemed to define our families were unmentioned and remained behind our doors. Those silent realities we’d shed as we ran down the furrows of potato fields and sheltered in the coolness of the the oak trees that framed the entrance into our summer world.

  Ever observant to changes in the paths and fields, the banter let up when we scanned the horizon for the farmers and “the big kids” that more than once had chased us back home. Sometimes we’d walk without saying a word. We latchkey kids knew solitude all too well. Its weight of emptiness accompanied our morning breakfasts and waited for us as we returned from school in the afternoon. It paced behind our homes’ doors, alert to the rise of a garage door or the turn of an unlocked doorknob.

  For some, panic accompanied the first steps into an empty house. For others, the embrace of familiarity faded as the sense of being alone grew. A quick change of clothes, and we’d be outdoors during temperate seasons, joined by every other kid whose parents and older siblings were not home.

  As autumn darkened into winter, most of us resolved to hunker down, backs to the wall, and wait. Disquiet teasingly emanated from the attic and dispersed itself through the top floors. Its remains nestled in the darkened basement. Only the sound of a car in our driveways or the shuffle of our parents’ footsteps behind an opening door relieved the isolation and separateness, and in some cases, the terror we felt during the winter months.

  Though here in our woods, we sometimes chose to be quiet, if just for a while. To willingly step away from words was our choice. This silence gave us a sense of fraternity and power. We controlled it as we explored these woods and footpaths that formed the nexus of our summertime world. A world where we never walked alone and quiet was not an enemy.

  Surrounded by trees, some whose twisted trunks bore the scars of lightening strikes, we’d walk under their shade, along paths rutted deep by farmers’ tractors. In daylight, their brown gnarled trunks and branches seemed to embrace us kids as we climbed up into their canopies.

  We’d occasionally discover in their crusted bark, rusted and bent nails that must have held No Trespassing signs.

  Those woods so familiar during the day turned sinister at dusk. They seemed to close ranks, forming a wall of mystery at night. Even from the safety of the backseat of Dad’s Chevy Impala as we returned Sunday evenings from my cousin’s home in Kings Park, they loomed menacingly along the roadway. Never knowing what lurked in those shadows, we kids ruled out any visits after sundown.

  A broken down house where an old lady lived stood at the entrance to the first grouping of trees across from our neighborhood. Known to us as the witchy house, an early 1920s three-story farmhouse with outbuildings that formed part of a once productive potato farm, prowled in the shadows of the oaks that overhung her property. The owner, a woman widowed by a farming accident, appeared daily on her porch, sitting in a rocking chair, dressed in black with a gray apron tied loosely around her neck and waist. She’d stare up past the trees. Sometimes she’d glare at us as we sat on our bikes on the dirt path that bordered her once cultivated fields. Other times, unexpectedly, she’d thrash her arms to shoo us away. We’d stare back in silence, nod our heads, and move on. The locals who farmed these fields knew her as the “Widow of the Woods.” For us kids, she was a dark cloud that could pull us into the shadows if we failed to keep our teasing and frequent property invasions at a safe distance.

  But sometimes we pushed it.

  In the heat of those summers, the musty coolness of her collapsing barn was a major attraction for us. Distant from her front porch, we knew that she couldn’t possibly get out here to grab us with those long, sharp nails that we imagined she must have had.

  We’d climb up the hayloft ladders to investigate the piles of rusting farm tools and stacks of old magazines and yellowing newspapers. Each of us took a turn swinging from a thick coarse-threaded rope, draped over one of the beams. Thinking that she was unaware of our shenanigans, we’d run in and out of her barn, playing tag across her wilted gardens. More than once, we’d catch her staring at us, studying our faces. One time, she rose from her rocker, leaned over the porch’s railing and pointed her finger unwaveringly … at me.

  When school started, our invasions of her property and our walks through the woods came to an end. By the middle of September Halloween was imminent. Its unvoiced presence accompanied the beginning of every school year at Fifth Avenue Elementary School. Halloween impatiently waited behind any events that the new school year might bring. Rushing through homework, memorizing lines for fall plays, fights on the playground, anticipating phone calls from teachers and picking the right moment to ask my parents to sign the first quarter’s interim report were merely ambient noise.

  Autumn was synonymous with Halloween. As pumpkins began to appear in local farmers’ fields, days grew cooler and leaves fell to the ground, a palpable sense of abandon, mystery, and the unexpected could be found in the darkness of autumn evenings. For us kids, that one night seemed to always be around us. Every unidentified creak, sinister shadow, and rustle in the leaves would magnify our already heightened sense of anticipation. All Hallows’ Eve blushed our October evenings with this wonderfully unsettling air.

  Before we were of age for flying solo on Halloween, which was widely agreed to be nine years old, a parent or an older sibling assumed the role of chaperone. I considered advocating for an early release, but my folks had made it clear that until my teacher stopped calling them about my questionable behavior, I’d be walked around the neighborhood with a very firm hand. But let’s be clear about this, no matter how much we kids might have protested having an escort, we were secretly relieved that we weren’t allowed out alone. As I discovered, these chaperones didn’t mean that hair-raising encounters wouldn’t happen.

  All seemed under control one Halloween when my sister, Fran, escorted me to the houses in our neighborhood. She held my hand as I did my rounds and coached me on how to knock firmly if there was no response to the ringing of the doorbell. She discretely waited at the curb as I marched up to the door and knocked, shouting Trick or Treat.

  At first, there were plenty of kids out that night, most accompanied just like me, but as the evening progressed the sounds of other children faded away. As we made our way up Kenilworth Drive towards Pulaski Road, the main thoroughfare that boarded the woods. Fran seemed anxious to get home.

  We were six house-lengths from the old lady’s farmhouse that stood among the trees on the opposite side of the street. It had started to drizzle and the leaves were wet, glimmering in the moonlight. Homeowners began to turn off their porch lights and close their front doors, thinking that we kids had all gone home. It would have been
pitch black if it weren’t for the light of the full moon.

  Now, all I could think of was how that old witchy lady would be waiting in her rocking chair, glaring down from her porch at me, waiting, just waiting for the right moment to strike. As we approached her home, I imagined her rising slowly from her rocker, dressed all in black. She would turn towards me, and glare unblinking as I walked past her porch. Suddenly with uncharacteristic speed, she would be standing behind a tree on my side of the street, her hands and witchy nails visible around the tree trunk closest to me, and then she would lunge!

  The quieter it got on this street, the more real this scenario seemed. As our steps sounded clearer, the more distinct became the sound of her nails scratching the tree trunk nearest us. If I had spoken to Fran about any of this, the witch would surely have heard me and acted accordingly. So I kept quiet and walked a little quicker.

  Just as we were about to turn the corner onto our street, Fran stopped and pulled me tightly to her side. I was looking across the street at the old lady’s porch and could see some kind of movement over there.

  “Did you see that?” Fran whispered, pointing up at the moon.

  I looked at the tree trunks nearest us, searching for those gnarled fingers that surely ended in those long, sharp fingernails, but I saw nothing.

  “There it is again, Bobby!”

  She was pointing up at the moon, her eyes seemed focused on the dark around the glow.

  “I saw her. I saw something fly right across the face of the moon. It was a black shape moving fast across the moonlight! Keep looking, now. You’ll see her!”

  Believe me, I didn’t want to see her, but I looked long and hard for anything that I could report to my sister. The wind had picked up and the clouds started to move in the moonlight, rustling the leaves and the trees.