Elaine Street

A time to be reapin’, a time to be sowin’
The green leaves of summer are callin’ me home
It was good to be young then in the season of plenty
When the catfish are jumpin’ as high as the sky.

A time just for plantin’, a time just for plowin’
A time to be courtin’ a girl of your own
Twas so good to be young then to be close to the earth
And to stand by your wife at the moment of birth.

(A time just for plantin’, a time just for plowin’)
(A time just for livin’, a place for to die)
Twas so good to be young then to be close to the earth
Now the green leaves of summer are callin’ me home.

I remember the summer of 1960. The movie the Alamo, starring John Wayne was playing in theatres, and the Brothers Four song “The Green Leaves of Summer” was playing on the radio, over and over again. I remember it so vividly because a friend of mine had recently moved away, and not long after, we found out that he had been killed, and the mood of the song seemed appropriate for the occasion. Several days later, his mother and father stopped at our house, and saw my brother and me, playing out in our garage with some friends, and invited us to Mark’s funeral.

I had only known Mark for a year or so. He was in my class at Ramona School, and my brother was the same age as his brother Phillip. They lived in one of the nicer homes in our neighborhood, on the corner of Mapledale and Maryton. Being on a corner, it had a nice big front yard, but we never played outside. Mrs. Lee would always greet me at the door with a smile and invite me to go into Mark’s room, where we would spend hours and hours playing games together, or swapping baseball cards.

I liked playing at Mark’s house. He wasn’t my best friend – that was Hank. Every day after school I would go over to Hank’s house, and we would play football or baseball out on his front lawn, but I began to feel unwelcome there when every day his mother would charge out and grab him by the collar like Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly, and drag him into the house. It seemed like Hank was always getting punished for one thing or another – not making his bed, or not cleaning up his room, or arguing with his sister Judy. And if Hank wasn’t getting it, then Judy was. His mother wasn’t particular. Mark’s mother wasn’t like that at all. I don’t think she ever got angry at Mark. Mrs. Lee baked cookies instead.

One day they moved across town, to Seaforth Street. If I ever visited their new home, it was only once. Though it wasn’t that far, Mark started going to another school, and not long after that came the news that he had been killed. I learned the details about his death from the obituary in the newspaper. Mark was riding his bicycle on Rosecrans, near Elaine Street, and the wheel of the bike got stuck in a groove in the gutter and he got hit by a truck that was backing up, when he couldn’t maneuver out of the way.

I didn’t attend Mark’s funeral, but I felt bad about his death, and grieved for a long time. And even many years later, whenever I would ride my bicycle on Rosecrans, I would never go near Elaine Street. If I wanted to go to Norwalk Square, the shopping center that was only one block from there, I always rode my bicycle in the back way to avoid Elaine Street. It became a symbol of death to me, and I was deathly afraid of it.

Last year they began renovating one of the little nearby strip-malls, that had a taco stand that was a popular hang-out for the local high school kids, called Taco Joe’s. The day after they closed for business, I walked over to take some photographs of the old place, which I posted on the internet for friends to view. While I was standing there, I noticed an old couple sitting in a car, and took a picture of them. As I began to walk away, they pulled up and the old woman rolled down her window, and we talked for awhile. She was very old, with silver gray hair and she shook nervously a little when she spoke, and there was something very familiar about her. Like me, she said they had come to say good-bye to the old taco place. “We live up on Seaforth now,” she said, “but we used to come here a lot.” I started to ask her if she knew the Lee family, but something held me back. There is a time for raking leaves, and a time to just let them lie.

~ by dobee on February 22, 2007.