Looking Back With New Eyes

I just realized what’s been missing for a long time. Not only the corner drugstore and movie houses with their triangular protruding marquee but what has disappeared is the nothingness, the vacancy, the empty lot.

I miss what wasn’t there. The house, gone. All that remained was a chunk of fireplace. Maybe the rest burned down. But wait, it’s not really the house I miss, it’s the lot never built upon or long lost to dust. The shortcut. The place where I once found a quarter. A few patches of grass. A dandelion. It’s the space. Real estate unwanted.

But we wanted it to put to our use. We had pocket knives possibly with a bottle opener and screwdriver as attachments. We played a game called Territory carving out our pieces of earth, the object of which escapes me. It was the last weapon I ever carried unless you count my water pistol.

It’s where kids played, there and the sidewalk. We were a tribe whose rules came down by oral tradition, possibly variations on games played between Goths and Visigoths. We watched the big kids until we were big and little kids picked it up from us. Chalk and marbles. Jump rope and tennis balls with skate key around the neck, a football needle in one pocket and a stack of baseball cards under crossed rubber bands in the back pocket. The essentials of life.

One potato, two potato. Eeeny-meenie-miny-moe, Ringalevio. Potsie. Sliding bottle caps. Manhole covers. Pitching pennies. A, my name is … We were a canvas in a Brueghel painting.

The artifacts of another age. Stoopball needs stoops. Bubblegum cards now sell at auctions. Has this tribe called children silently moved on?  Was all that a mid- 20^th century urban phenomenon, a moment in time? If so, I’d say we were the lucky ones having been suckled by street games in those good-old Depression years and wartime when our collected tinfoil defeated the enemy.

What did all this prepare me for? Such questions are never asked. We played as if it mattered, outside of time. Only looking back can I see how this period equipped me for a sort of communal life with competition that was fun in of itself. However, when I was about ten, plus or minus, I was ready to move on and ready myself for a career as a major league first baseman. If that failed I could always be half of Superman, the half that was Clark Kent, mild-mannered reporter for the Daily Planet but with my cape underneath to rescue Lois Lane and a phone booth never far away.

There is actually a street in the Bronx called Stickball Blvd. Otherwise all those essentials of life are extinct. But what about that barren land with the good earth? Paved over no doubt. It was the chalked pavement that was our playing field and the adjacent street, now an unmarked thoroughfare. Traffic was cursed for interrupting the flow. Perhaps this was the last stand against the internal combustion engine. Unknowingly we were at the barricades, way ahead of our time. And were we not also the last generation fluent in the unwritten language of the sidewalk and the empty lot?