Here’s one of the happiest pieces of the past for me. When we lived in Lexington, we were nestled in a quiet, very peaceful post-war suburban neighborhood called Garden Springs, just a few blocks from the church. That proximity was a convenience for Dad, I have no doubt, but the two worlds were utterly distinct: church life, uncomfortable as it was, called for me to be someone very specific, playing a very distinct part; in the neighborhood, I was someone else altogether.
It’s hard to express to my own kids just how different the world was back then. They grew up in neighborhoods that were largely anonymous, having the barest handful of friends; but back in the Sixties, neighborhood life was something else altogether – animated, congenial, well-integrated. We knew many if not most of our neighbors; all of our parents were on a first-name basis and frequently dropped in on one another; all of us kids were automatically part of a club that required no dues but our presence.
Garden Springs was a magical kingdom, as far as I was concerned. The streets were quiet and lazy, so it was safe to ride my bike as far as I pleased;3 [I once explained to my kids that in those days we would clip baseball cards onto the wheels of our bikes with clothespins, so that the cards would flap in the spokes and make an “engine” sound. They looked at me like I’d lost my mind.] the park adjoining our elementary school had a baseball field, and pickup games were common; summer days, we drank from garden hoses; summer nights were filled with streetlight Kick-the-Can.
Our backyard was surrounded with a chain-link fence that bordered the Gibsons, and a gate connected our families. Mike, the oldest boy, was a year younger than me and a pal of mine. He had an older sister, Jodie, and a kid brother Patrick, analogous to my baby brother Danny. Mike and I were GI Joe kids; we loved staging battles in our sandboxes.
Their mom was good friends with my mom, and I would frequently run into the house through the backyard to find her sitting in our kitchen. Their dad was a blue-collar worker of some kind, and all I remember of him was that he’d arrive home at the end of the day, pull a beer from the fridge and settling into a living room chair to rest. The beer, to me, represented scandal.
Up the street from our house lived Barry. Barry had no father than I ever met, and I seldom saw his teenage brother. Barry had cognitive difficulties and could not speak normally, and thus did not go to our school. He could not pronounce the hard c in my name, so I was always “Sott”. All of this aside, he was friendly and fun and we were the best of pals. He loved water sports; a visit to his house usually included getting sprayed with a hose.
And two doors down on the other side of our house was the Stice family, and my friend Neal.
Neal was two years older than me, and back then, that was all the difference in the world. I always felt cooler because Neal and I were friends, just because of that.
Neal was the oldest of a large and growing batch of kids. He had a sister Joanie, analogous to my own sister Amy, and another sister Janice and a baby brother Larry. They were all crammed into a house no larger than ours, with three bedrooms, and thus we seldom played in his actual house. When we hung out, it was in his backyard.
I may seem to be romanticizing Garden Springs as a refuge from church life, but alas, the latter did intrude. So omnipresent were our Evangelical bona fides that not even my baseball buddies could escape the scrutiny.
The Gibsons, you see, were Catholic; they had been sprinkled, not really baptized. Ditto the Stices, who were Methodists. Of the two, the Stices were the closest to acceptable by our standards, as they did not bow to a Papist monarch, as the Gibsons did. I found all of this utterly baffling – what could it possibly matter? - and devoted more pondering to it than it was probably worth. But ponder it I did. My dad patiently explained it all to me more than once, and the end conclusion was that no, my improperly-baptized friends would not go to Heaven when they died, and I should not fret about it but should pray for them.
Though I would have some connections with kids at our Lexington church that would last beyond our leaving, it was the neighborhood kids who had the greatest impact on me (I don’t even remember anyone I went to school with). Neal, in particular, remained a friend into adulthood.
On rare occasion, we would find ourselves in Lexington, and my parents would arrange for me to hang out with Neal, if only for an hour or two. When we returned to Kentucky in 1976, after six years in other states, Neal was just starting college and was only 30 minutes away from our new home in Frankfort. We renewed our friendship.
At some point in adolescence, Neal stopped growing. Where he’d been the big kid before, the socially dominant one in our friendship, I grew tall and better connected; as a teenager, Neal seemed isolated and lonely. He couldn’t make college work, and dropped out after two years – by which time I, too, was at the University of Kentucky. I invited him to live in the attic apartment occupied by me and some of my friends.
When I went ROTC, Neal joined the Air Force; when I got married, Neal promptly did the same (though his marriage collapsed almost immediately when his new bride was sent to prison). Throughout the Eighties, our contact was intermittent, but there always remained some connection.
He was killed on assignment in Germany in 1988, when his car collided with another on the Autobahn at 100 mph.
Whenever I’m in Lexington and have the time, I drive through Garden Springs. The trees my dad planted in the front yard of our old house are huge now; all but two of the Stice family are, like Neal, deceased; Barry and the Gibsons are long gone, their fates unknown to me.
But the park is still there, and the baseball field, and Garden Springs Elementary School. Countless are the times I’ve taken a few moments to walk them again, talking to the ghosts.
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