They're Burning Leaves

Our summer of freedom was over when school opened. It was the greatest summer of my life. I knew it, then. On reflection, I still think so.

Most of our crowd resorted to Ocean City in the summer. It was the place for families. If you wanted action you went to Wildwood, a playground by-the-sea. The rich went to Atlantic City.

My sister was now married. She and her husband went to Wildwood that year and stayed in one of those opulant Victorian houses translated to summer rentals. Their suite was the largest, the bridal suite, and itself was a marraige of porcelain and brass and wicker and lace and crystal and wood. They invited me to come for a few days (with permission granted by my parents) and they paid for my room across the hall from theirs. My quarters were spacious. Big bay windows looked out on yet uncrowded views. My bath was larger than my own room at home and the tub sat on elephant-like legs. Later in that summer I returned to the coast with my neighbors, the Piras, and had my own introduction to the Last Resort, Cape May, and after that all other places fell in my regard to lesser attraction.

I returned to Philadelphia on the eleventh of September. It was the first summer that I vacationed without my parents (who were attracted to Florida). School registration was the next day: Tuesday. Our scattered gang was reunited with the opening of school and we compared notes.

By Friday everything was in order: new clothes, class assignments, scoping and assessing new girls at school, re-assessing the ones we already knew in consideration of changes in their figures. It's remarkable what one summer did to some of them. Friday night plans, spur of the moment stuff, were sought after like items on a menu: the dance, the Phillies game, a movie, going to the school football game, corner lounging, table talk at a restaurant (usually after one of the others). Other plans would have to be considered: Saturday night, afterschool activities and part-time jobs for spending monies. All were to be rostered around homework time.

Dave Wagner and I decided on a movie. Billy Sandrow brought up the idea on Wednesday. Others prevailed on him to go to the football game. "Wanna go?"

"Nah."

In 1950 automobiles weren't riveted to people's asses. A ten or fifteen block walk to school, to a friend's house, to a movie certainly was no big effort. In later times it's become commonplace to drive two blocks for a pack of cigarettes or a stick of gum. It may be argued that we walked because we didn't have cars. But we had neat conversations that made the walks enjoyable. Put two young people in an automobile and chances are the radio displaces nice chats.

Dave and I went to the movie. The others went to the social event: school football way out in Coatesville. You couldn't walk to there. That's about thirty miles away.

We ate pizza after the movie. The Rialto was in his neighborhood. The Tomato Pie House was in mine. A pizza cost seventy-five cents. We reviewed our summer and discussed things to come.

Pat was having a birthday party for Alma.

Pep rallies would be held. We'd burn orange-crates in the school yard and have another bon-fire at Vernon Park. We'd raid Olney Highschool with paint-buckets of green and white. That, of couse, would be excessive "fun" and we would get caught, of course.

Dances looked good at Tumble Inn.

Beyond those little things of such great value the larger world had intruded. Paul Hart was recently killed in Korea and some of us were seniors looking at Paul's tragedy that could, if war continued, affect our crowd. Already Steve Mallinson and Tommy Hagan had volunteered. They were sent to Germany just that week. What's safe? Some men in their division were killed in a train-wreck.

The wars that we had played with sticks as guns in the fields near our houses were evolving into sinister realities elsewhere and we (veterans of play) might be invited to be part of it at the expense of our own priorities. Indeed, the summers of freedom were about to disappear.

The big Wurlitzer sat at the back of the pizza parlor. For a nickel it would give us a tune. It was stuff made for dancing: "Good Night, Irene" and "The Tennessee Waltz." Music was an easy background to eating and small talk.

The music box lost favor to the radio in the kitchen. The Phillies, on their way to their pennant, were laboring in extra-innings. Minutes before the curfew would have suspended the game, Del Ennis, a local boy from Olney, belted one over the wall.

"Yea!"

Baseball had a curfew (12:55 AM) but there was no such restriction for kids and now, after one AM we set out for our homes. I took the long way by walking Dave to his house and then returning to my own, a half-block from the pizza shop. We passed Mister Fleming's yard.

Fleming lived in a three story Victorian house up the street from Piras. A big lawn went out to the street and it was protected from outsiders by a wrought-iron fence with a hinged gate. The yard continued along the side of the house and out through the back of the property back to my street.

He was a housepainter and he had two grown sons who lived at home.

Some people clog their lawns with those ornaments that they might think are beautiful but are the object of mixed reviews by passersby. Statuary in plaster or concrete or plastic doesn't mean much when it comes from mass-production discount roadside Americana- schlock shops. Maybe that's unfair: beauty is what the owner likes and critics be damned.

Fleming didn't clutter his yard with stuff like flamingoes or Mexican peasants with burros or Francis of Assisi with bird or iron turtle or Immaculate Conception or Jockey with lamp or any other titled work you might see from time-to-time that the non-rich put on their property. He built a wooden wind-mill of fair size with sails that worked. It was handsome. He got a cannon, the kind that was used on old men-o-war sailing ships and laid it on a concrete cradle. Its iron muzzle pointed out at the traffic on the road.

Dave and Billy and I hadn't left the old gun un-noticed. We had gotten some firecrackers and on nights that we went to the pizza-shop we would drop by Fleming's yard to fire one off from its barrel. We took turns. One of us would crawl across the yard, place the cracker just inside the lip of the barrel and light the fuse then run to the gate as the fuse sputtered. Boom! A belch of fire, a cloud of smoke, and then Fleming's sons rushing out of the house to chase us who were a bit faster afoot.

I imagine Fleming's sons waiting behind the curtains and watching the figures outside. One of them is crawling across the lawn, one notes. He's lighting the fuse. He's running. Boom! Get <@145>em! The door flies open. We're laughing like hell and running like hell.

We didn't do that anymore. We glanced into the yard and continued on our way. The old gun now lay on its concrete cradle strapped together with baling wire: a dead relic. The last time we passed by we did damage. One kid crawled across the lawn on his belly. The others waited at the gate. The fuse was lit. Boom! A belch of flame, a cloud of smoke. The door flew open. The cannon cracked from end to end. The right side rolled off the cradle onto the grass. The left side fell into the cradle. Time stopped. Fleming's boys looked at the ruin. We were frozen in horror. They saw our faces but they didn't chase us and we melted away. It's ashame that we didn't sit down after passions had cooled — -maybe about twenty years later — and apologize and laugh the whole thing over.

Our trail of firecracker outrages was the substance from which laws were made notwithstanding injuries. We passed Steve Mallinson's house. He had gone to Germany with his army unit (instead of Korea) and our source of firecrackers had evaporated.

His neighbors were relieved. His own perverse triumph was still mentioned with disgusted regularity among adults and with glee by his friends. On a Saturday morning earlier that year we gathered on Steve's steps and watched old man Dagleish being taken for a walk by his Great Dane. The dog was in control. As they passed us directly across the street the dog squatted and dropped a huge pile at the edge of the sidewalk. That's impressive to teenagers. Today they proudly call things like that "gross."

Steve was seized with inspiration. He rushed into his house and returned with a firecracker. We went over to the offensive baking pile, put a finger up to test the wind, and looked around to be sure adults weren't watching. He planted the firecracker in the pile and lit a match to it. We ran like hell.

Bang! The shit flew everywhere, onto cars, house windows, and on us. So much for wind direction, for timing and physics, and common sense.

We passed Billy Sandrow's house. The lights were on. We thought for a moment that we should stop in and ask about the game. Never mind. Why crowd the night when we would all probably get together in the morning.

Saturday morning might mean chores. This one was free. I made breakfast. A bowl of Rice Krispies popped and crackled. It's true. I still put my ear close to the bowl to hear the real McCoy. Eggs were in the pot and the timer glass was half run down. My sister called to me. I looked up from the timer and Jimmy Evans had news. He stood in our kitchen and said "your friend, Sandrow, was killed in a car crash. It's in the paper."

Not in my paper. I scanned the news. Nothing! It's true, he insisted. The eggs were still cooking but I ran to McCall's store and looked at a later edition.

It was on page one. I read it, then again, and again and it wouldn't go away. There's an undefinable feeling of panic that demands another reading. Maybe it's a dream. Maybe I've read it wrong.

Dave and I sat on Ostrum's steps and stared away at memories. There was so little to be said and nothing could be understood. Is this a rotten dream, a hoax? We might rationalize old people dying of cancers, of heart attacks, of being old. Death is for the old. But at barely sixteen.....no.

Billy's father drove up to the house in the blue Plymouth. We watched him in helpless silence. In all our broken spirit we were so much less crushed than he....He carried a bag.

In a while he came out carrying a suit. He drove away again. We cried badly that day and nothing then nor the next day nor Monday that followed could offer any consolation or acceptance of what was happening.

Again and again we would hear (and maybe ask) "why?" and that word begs explanation. "It's God's will," and enough of that and you may not want to know God anymore. Let's face it. God can take the whole population of Peru or Mongolia and I don't think anyone here is going to get theologically unhinged over it. But....

On Sunday night I tried to polish my shoes. My co-ordinaion collapsed. My mother remarked that I was acting silly...all this weeping. I retreated to the basement and sat crying on the bottom step...and was left alone. Later I went trembling alone to the wake.

On Monday it rained. Billy's sister had told Dave and me and four other boys that we were chosen to carry the casket. Six friends found suitable reward that day, so awkward, out of step, lumbering across the muddy grass, hauling a larger burden for others who loved him so much more than we did.

We hadn't been this close ever before to the unacceptable mystery and now we felt the same as the heirs of others who had died, those who had stones lain on their hearts forevermore because they were capable of some happy vein of memories. There's the suitable reward, our memories, that prevents us from coming undone at the death of strangers. Our preferences expose acute senses.

When the leaves are gold and red,

we say

"how beautiful they are" discerned.

But...they are dead,

and they

are raked in piles along the road

and burned.

Our time of childhood was over.

(Autumn, 1950)