“Mommy, guess what happened near the fence today.”

“What fence?”

“The white fence .... at Lorna Rd.” I answered catching my breath. 

The rush home had taken my breath away, let alone the event that in my 5 year old mind was the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

“What happened?”

I took a deep breath and I told her; the proudest, bravest 5 year old in the world.

"While I'm gone", she growled. “you will sit down at the kitchen table and write 250 times: ‘I will never use bad words again.’

The only noise louder than my stomach rumbling was the clock on the wall over the blackboard of Miss McGuire’s' 1st Grade classroom as it finally ticked a mighty 12 PM.  Filing so neatly in front of the doors only heightened the excitement of 400 children ready to pour out onto the open fields and the sidewalk surrounding the school building at 10 Dolphin Rd. 

Lunch break. 

This mid-day release into the wilds of Newton was part of a curriculum that sent boys and girls home to be met by mothers in aprons or live-in maids; and for the time it took to eat a tuna fish sandwich and drink a bowl of canned tomato soup with potato chips - it was lunch time.  The short walk home was also a time for high adventure.  Thursdays were garbage days and all sorts of bric-a-brac might be found protruding from the dented corrugated metal cans that lined the leafy streets of the Boston suburb.  In the fall months walking meant wading through knee high piles of raked leaves; their colored edges sounding a musical rustling monotone.

 

While different seasons were marked by different rituals one thing was constant; anything could happen between the John Ward (Elementary) School, a formidable red brick building opened in 1928 and the house I grew up in on 139 Brackett Rd. at the corner of Park Ave.  Anything could and often did.

SLXLM​​

 

 

Walking up the hill towards Lorna Rd. a small crowd had gathered on the other side of the short length of white fence that stood there timelessly recording the passages to and fro of countless young lives forgotten and remembered alike.  An after school meeting spot where boys on hand me down bicycles and cut off jeans planned their mischief in the after school hours in the warm afternoons of spring; where in the winter months the snow was piled up to the sky blocking access except through a narrow walkway worn randomly into the impacted snow.

 

Today, two boys were fighting.  Both were so much bigger and older than me they were practically grownups.  An overgrown pimply 6th grader was apparently beating up a scrawny 5th grader I knew as Lee-Lee.  Dressed today in a button down oxford tucked into beige chinos and penny loafers; being beat up by a bad boy right out of central casting – Lee-Lee didn't stand a chance.  Lee-Lee was a nice boy which meant he was either Jewish or that he lived on our street.  Belonging to the congregation of Temple Emanuel where my mother taught might further enhance his resume, however being in one of her classes did not necessarily; she was reputed to have a Wagnerian temper, and behind their backs referred to her pupils as either morons, or fresh morons. 

 

Lee-Lee's house was a small castle-like Tudor on the bottom of the street near the dead-end side of Jameson Rd.  One of the neighbors on the Jameson side of the fence had hedged his property with a row of grapevine and on days I was exempt from Hebrew School, on a red scooter I would lead any number of friends to the unsuspecting neighbor’s house, then sneaking up on it like a flock of locust we would ravage the vineyard.  A few years later and by that time a thick wall of grapevine acting as a privacy barrier, the bottom of Brackett at Jameson became a favorite place to experiment with cigars, cigarettes and marijuana - eventually.  It was a no man's land just a stone's throw from my house - also a Tudor (but not quite a castle like Lee-Lee’s).  The only people to use this passage were the nuns of Mt. Alvernia, who for us didn’t really qualify as human; we were Jewish so we assumed they saw us with similar wonderment.

As the youngest of 3 with an older sister who used me as a pincushion for her barbed fingernails - I had been trained - correction - conditioned for physical abuse, and as a self-taught student of mixed martial arts I wasn’t easily intimidated.  Fear of physical harm came only later in life; I was mostly afraid of showing fear, so in my eyes, because the boys and girls gathered around Lee-Lee White seemed indifferent to the plight of poor Lee-Lee, I stepped in. 

 

"Pick on someone your own size ", I began yelling at the bully; firing bad words like arrows.  Every size and configuration, every bad word I knew to pronounce, in every possibly conjugation, none which I understood. The fight finally lost its steam (I suppose), as most fights do, and with Lee-Lee’s face possibly cut, his shirt tails now yanked loose from his belted chinos, the two boys stood exhausted, tucking themselves back into one piece, looking at each other like alley cats.  They separated even as the bigger boy continued in his taunts.  It was over and I continued home in a swagger – a Max Fleischer cartoon character - chest swelling… I had saved the day.

 

I began recounting this incident once I left home.  Over the years it has been funny and sad alternately.  Funny, because I chose to laugh; and sad, because I had to laugh in order not to cry.  In committing it to words I’m attempting to illustrate some of the absurdity of my childhood.  Trauma is like pregnancy; it doesn’t take much to create but it takes a lifetime to reconcile.

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