Looking back, it seems incredible: our whole family, house and car and all, supported just on my father’s paycheck. But that was the case for every family on our street. All one-paycheck households.
It wasn’t poverty. It was middle-class. I wouldn’t trade it for all the tea in China.
Ah, those summer nights! Packed off to bed but not yet sleeping, listening to the grownups’ conversation, and soft laughter, wafting up from the screened-in porch.
Not for all the money in the world…
Our back porch wasn’t quite as fancy as the one in this picture, but it did have a glider, a grass rug in the summer (rolled up for the winter), and was completely screened in; and we loved it.
One of the things I’ve been remembering lately is those summer nights when I was in bed and my mother and father relaxed with friends or family on the back porch. All the windows were open; hardly anyone had home air conditioning back then. So I would lie there in bed and listen: the peaceful rumble of conversation, punctuated occasionally by a laugh, and the soft clink of glass on glass–it was the grownups on the porch, doing what grownups do. I never could quite make out what they were saying: grownup stuff, probably, of no interest to a five-year-old.
But the thing I remember most about it now was that it made me feel safe. And secure. It was the sound of things being as they should be. The adults were as they ought to be. It kept the monsters at bay. The boogie-man wouldn’t come out of the woods as long as grownups were out there on their porches, or in their backyards, upholding peace and sanity.
I kind of miss that feeling.
But there is a higher and even more reliable guardian: Behold, He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep (Psalm 121:4).
This was in old song, from 1876, but it was popular when I was a little boy, and I remember it. It used to move me close to tears, and still does: I guess because I loved my Grandpa.
Some of us have things that are always associated with us, and the sight of one of those things–a cane, a hat, or a grandfather’s clock–always, and vividly, brings to mind the person to whom it belongs.
There were songs like this, back then. I don’t think there are songs like this now.
I’m glad I wasn’t born much later than I was.
It’s cold today, and it’s been cold for a week. If I were ten years old, I know where I’d be headed, right about now.
With my ice skates in my hand–yes, come on, grab your skates and come with me–I would go to the little swamp behind Mrs. S’s back yard. An enormous weeping willow tree hung over it, and beyond it was a palatial estate like a movie star’s. They had an in-ground swimming pool: in those days, a sign of fabulous wealth.
The swamp is frozen over. We walk out onto the ice and follow a stream leading deeper into the woods. It opens into a little round pond, and some of the other kids in the neighborhood are already ice-skating there. Off with the shoes, lace up our skates, and join in the fun: it’s just big enough for half a dozen kids to play crack-the-whip.
You could, if you liked, follow the stream all the way into the middle of the woods, until it grew too narrow for any proper skating. But the pond is more fun. It’s only a stone’s throw into the woods, but it seems much farther because it’s so quiet–except, of course, for the noises made by all of us playing and whooping it up because it snowed last night, heavily, and there is no school today.
We are unsupervised. We are free. We are having a blast! And if the need arises, we’re only three minutes’ walk from the nearest house with adults in it. We’ll skate until we’re too cold to skate anymore, and then it’s back indoors to warm up and maybe play a little Monopoly. It’s about a hundred times better than the best day you would ever have in school.
And the day, at least for now, is ours.
I wouldn’t trade that little frozen pond for all the fancy indoor skating rinks on the planet.