Outside was the place to be. Outside in the unfailingly pleasant southern California climate, there were friends and dogs running in the street. There were vegetable trucks and Helms Bakery trucks rolling down California avenue selling their wares. And there was a small diner across the street that once gave me a whole pie for Halloween and a small neighborhood store with penny candy next to what our mother referred to as our “tiny stucco crackerbox” of a house. And down Century Blvd the Italian grocery store baked fresh bread at 4 PM each day that you could smell from our own backyard. My mother would give me a quarter to go and buy a still-hot loaf in the white and red paper bag.
There were vacant lots that would soon be filled with new families, with soldiers and sailors returning from the Korean War. Back then you could still see tumbleweeds rolling down the centers of Boulevards and Avenues in the mildest of winds. Outside, the vacant lots waited for us to gather. They were our fields of imagination that could become baseball games or science experiments or battlefields with the hurled dirt clods of opposing forces. And on some days, the dirt clods were thinly disguised rocks that moved at twice the speed of sight.
Outside, new life was coming into existence. Outside, up the utility poles, stringing the infrastructure of the future, the lineman came down to pay secret visits to the tiny stucco cracker box that would result in the birth of the bastard boys, my brother, and myself. Soon they too would tumble down the boulevards and avenues of the working-class Los Angeles suburb. There they would live outside the boundaries deep into the world of possibilities.
Outside would always be the place to be. You only came inside to duck and to cover, to eat, hide, or recover from the occasional thinly disguised dirt-encrusted rocks. Or, you came inside when you could hold it no longer and had to pee. Or you came inside at the end of the day when it got dark, to sleep and to dream, and to wake again and go back outside, where you could feel at home.
— DanielSouthGate
There were vacant lots that would soon be filled with new families, with soldiers and sailors returning from the Korean War. Back then you could still see tumbleweeds rolling down the centers of Boulevards and Avenues in the mildest of winds. Outside, the vacant lots waited for us to gather. They were our fields of imagination that could become baseball games or science experiments or battlefields with the hurled dirt clods of opposing forces. And on some days, the dirt clods were thinly disguised rocks that moved at twice the speed of sight.
Outside, new life was coming into existence. Outside, up the utility poles, stringing the infrastructure of the future, the lineman came down to pay secret visits to the tiny stucco cracker box that would result in the birth of the bastard boys, my brother, and myself. Soon they too would tumble down the boulevards and avenues of the working-class Los Angeles suburb. There they would live outside the boundaries deep into the world of possibilities.
Outside would always be the place to be. You only came inside to duck and to cover, to eat, hide, or recover from the occasional thinly disguised dirt-encrusted rocks. Or, you came inside when you could hold it no longer and had to pee. Or you came inside at the end of the day when it got dark, to sleep and to dream, and to wake again and go back outside, where you could feel at home.
— DanielSouthGate
That captures perfectly the outside I remember growing up. In the spring and summer and early fall. Beautifully done (lkai)
ReplyDeleteOh, I love how you snuck the lineman in there. This is so very YOU, Mr. Southgate. Well, of course it is. I relate to much of it. Not being a boy, I did not hurl dirt clods, but I rode my bicycle furiously. We had the stores and the bread and produce trucks. Idyllic it seems now. You are a master of meaningful repetition and the inclusion of glimpses of a larger world. A fabulous write! (Macoff)
ReplyDeleteWow, thank you so much. That is the nicest thing anyone has ever said about something I've written. Means a lot coming from you.
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