Our Stand

I heard the dripping of the water somewhere behind me in the darkness, as the gutters begain to run. The wrought iron man had added Spanish influenced scroll bars just yesterday. Too many homes , in our formerly "nice" neighborhood had been invaded by kids seeking quick money or drugs.

Mrs Canty , who has lived in this neighborhood since my mother was a child, was punched in the face by an intruder not more than 96 hours ago. When she fell , her head had hit the white oak apothecary coffee table . I know her house as well as my own. I used to go play Green Ghost with her daughter Carol and son Bobby in their basement. Teenagers have tormented her since Robert Sr died a few years ago . They run through our yards like a pack of wild dogs, stopping to beat on her windows and ring her bell at all hours of the night. Rather than risk the stairs in the dark , she had taken to sleeping on her couch. That was how she came face to face with the intruder.Helen was frightened but not frightened away. She wanted to stay in her own house. I understand that. The young girl, not more than fourteen had fled as she had come, out of the dining room window, her flight to leave was what pushed Helen into the table.

I had inherited my grandparents' home, a tidy two and a half bedroom white and green Cape Cod on two floors. Some of the neighbors had finished their basements. We never have - flooding is a problem in the Spring- even with the sump pump running. We did , however , put padded rugs on the cement floor. We took those up in the winter ,in anticipation of early flooding by thaw. New England winters are funny- sometimes they are not over when they appear to be. The basement had its own bathroom, laundry facilities by the stairs and some furniture a little worn for the living room but good enough for a den.A slightly soiled slipcovered that my grandmother had called a divan had weathered all three of the Super Bowls that had happened since we had moved in. Grandpa's leather recliner sat in the corner near the fireplace - it had not been used in years, probably decades we had promised ourselves that " when our finances straightened out, we would have both this one as well as the one in the main living room checked out and repaired if necessary.

The wooden stairs to the cellar were steep with a pole bannister on one side.. It was the reason that my grandmother had moved out after having lived there for over forty years. She could not do either set of the stairs anymore. If she could not do the stairs- she could not check the furnace which was also down in the basement. She could not get to the bathroom on her own during the day for there was one in the basement and one at the top of the stairs near the bedrooms. None on the main floor.So , she had moved to assisted living and my SO and I had taken over the house. I loved my grandmother's kitchen -it had a breakfast nook as well as a formal dining room . It had a sun porch where my grandfather, a short man of five feet four inches, used to sit in his leather recliner listening to Curt Goutie call the games for the Sox. He was a manufacturer's rep- what Arthur Miller would have called a salesman. But he was no Willie Loman . I hated Miller's play because it made salesmen look like losers. Many of them were not. My grandfather had the gift of the gab - with taunting Scot eyes.Sometimes it was hard to tell when he was kidding. He had lost much of his family's money through no fault of his own during the Depression. He accepted it with the best of sportsman like behavior - ate peanut butter sandwiches while on the road- and bought my grandmother her house- cash in the middle of it . There was a porch divan with poplin green slip covers which rocked slightly. Bored with the baseball , I had been known to fall asleep on that divan. He had quit school and supported a widowed mother and his two sibling, a girl, Olive and a boy, Jack. All three were dead by the time that I came along . He had sent himself to both a Catholic and a Baptist seminary and did not attend church. He read everything and accepted little on face value.

In the Spring white and pink lilac trees bloomed next to their two car garage.. You can see it from the breakfast nook which was wall papered in red roosters on a yellow background. When they were in full bloom, my grandmother, a large woman of six feet in height would cut me armsful of those sweet flowers. In front of that , my parents had a small vegetable garden . I was not allowed near the gardens -for my grandparents lived close enough to the Blue Hills that rattlesnakes and cottonmouth were known to frequent their land.
In the Spring of my eighth year , my eighty year old great grandmother, moved down from her farm in Chester , NH . She was a firey Irish woman who had grown up Catholic- she could quote and believed in her bible. Born in County Cork, she moved to Nova Scotia with her family, met my great grandfather, Martin , bought a farm in NH and converted to Protestantism because it was the closest church. When she moved to the United States, she never spoke Gaelic again because she was now an American. Americans spoke English.

So this house was our history and I loved it. Julius, who had come from a family of apartment dwellers was thrilled to have a permanent home. I loved the white built in china cabinets in the corners which housed my great grandmothers tea pots and cups from Ireland but alson my grandmother's mismatched best Limoge china from sets gone by. Her red mahogany table filled most of the room except for a red mahogany buffet along the left wall. Above that was a gold framed mirror. When my grandmother transferred title to me, I kept her furniture. When I sat at that table , on the crimson, olive and gold striped seats- I heard my grandmother's voice ,even years, after her death asking me to remove my feet from the wrungs of the chair, just like when I was 5. Sometimes I would put my feet there just to hear her voice. That grand table was always covered by a linen table cloth that her mother had embroidered. The braids in the rug under that roan tinted table had been done by hand by her mother, in deep jewel tones of garnet, emerald, sapphire, charcoal, as well. We used to take her to the woolen mills to buy remnants which would be braided or hooked into rugs for the house. I used to walk the rounds of the braided rug in the front entryway.

In the upstairs bedroom to the right of the stairs , there were dormer windows. You only see them now in the really old movies. Something where Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney would want to convert the two car garage into a theater to save the neighborhood library or other worthwhile project. I changed the wall paper because the pattern of diagonal roses in that bedroom with the mahogany rice carved bed and bookcases - tended to shift whenever I was ill , making me more nauseous than I might have been, still I loved the room though the closet space was small. Between the two bedrooms was the bathroon with its 1950's white and black tiled floor. The guest bedroom sported twin beds. a maple dresser and dressing table with cherbic crystal lamps. The half bedroom through that, had been converted to my office from where I corrected English papers in the evenings after dinner, far away from the noise of the television on the first floor.

My grandparents had had a good life, though not always an easy one in this house. It was in the days when there were families of responsibility living there. When ownership meant commitment- and pride, something that I found lacking in the recent changes. At the end of our street, Wentworth's drug store had been sold to CVS. I had known Sam, the father and Bob , his son,the owners, all of my life. They made me my first cherry coke using soda water, syrup ,and real cherries. Sam, a chipper man built rather like Monty Wooley, had wasted away of cancer, working until he could not any more and dying a year later in a nursing home. Bob, who looked like Robert Cummings, had told me how to make tomatoes so that they would taste good- he had sold my grandfather and I copies of the Boston Globe and The New York Times, as well as magazines about the Monkees and the Beatles. I bought a hamburger plate lunch at their counter the day that I went to see Thunderball. He told me about Robert Matheson's writing and helped me tie square knots for Girl Scouts. Bob died about four years after taking over the business from his father. Two men not from the neighborhood had come in demanding drugs and money- they shot him ANYWAY, after he filled their wishes. Tribally the neighborhood grieved. One of their own was dead.

It used to be quiet on my grandparents's street. Children used to ride their bikes and be safe.
a wakeup call was sounded when the little girl two streets over , a teen really for it was the day after she turned fifteen , when she disappeared. My grandparents , too old to join the search , helped man the phones and passed out cookies, sandwiches and water to the searchers. Metro police rang doorbells and called friends . Maryanne was no where to be found. Her mother wept on tv and her family's priest asked us all to pray. She was found in the spring in a state forest one hundred and fifty miles away. Some Boy Scouts braving an early spring on an over night camping trip, found her rotten body tied to a turpentine pine. Her head fell off when they touched her. It was then that the realization that no one really knew anyone shot through us like a bullet. A few months later , the manager of a nearby shoe store was arrested- at the time that Maryanne disappeared, he lived in the apartment building behind the swamp that abutted my grandparent's property below the lilac trees. She had been raped and abused. It could have been me. It could have been any child from the neighborhood.

As termites eat wood, so does change consume what is known . Change is destruction and destruction sometimes engenders growth. Plants become mulch and old habits die. With what they are replaced is our choice. If it beneficial or deadly. One must be cultivated , the other culled.

By keeping my grandmother's house- Julius and I took our stand. If it makes us snobby so be it. All are welcome to seek the dream but only if they exhibit the respect engendered by tradition. A tradition where children play safely and people donot jump at shadows. Where maple fronds are raked away not broken Budwiser and Jack Daniels bottles. We are the decendents of the Old Guard. We are the children of the Mayflower and those ships that followed, of the Puritans and those who braved the Salem trials,the Revolution, the Lowell girls,the McCarthy Hearings and Civil Rights initiatives. So donot tell us that we are not up to the challenge- we just refuse to surrender.