A Walk Down Melody Lane

It's a virtual homecoming, for crying out loud, thanks to Google Earth.

I love maps. I love staring at maps and tracing my finger along roads and highways I both have and never will travel. It's a sickness, I think, this willingness to look at one-dimensional depictions of the world.

Now, though, I can move to virtual 3 dimensions, as though I can shrink myself, step into the map, and see things. Sicker still, I always start or end up at the same place: Woodstock, Illinois, where all things must have started for me, and where I'd probably be happy when things end. With Google Earth, I have found this--my boyhood home (at least, if my boyhood is bracketed by age 5 on one end and 13 on the other).


My bedroom was on the second floor, the second window from the right. Kinda spooky, looking at it now I hope whatever who kids spent time in that room have enjoyed it as much as I did.

What I remember...

• The garage being added.
  
• Before the garage was added, happening upon my mother and a neighbor kid's mom sitting on the side of the house. My mom smoked a cigarette as the other woman cried and I quickly changed direction.
  
• Shoveling snow off the sidewalk and driveway.
  
• The metal milk-box on the porch, and how in winter sometimes the milk would freeze in the glass one-gallon bottles. (I fell down the steps leading to the basement once while carrying one of those bottles, and the broken glass sliced my elbow and left a scar I still carry.)
  
• Watching a barn along the highway burn, and watching a house north on the highway burn.
  
• Dashing through the front door when I came home from school with my new trumpet, and being chastised for not using the back door. Having the trumpet saved me.
  
• Getting the crap beat out of me in the back yard by a couple of neighborhood bullies (probably deserved it).
• Watching through the bedroom window at the storms rolling in.
• Opening the window at night so our dog and I could fill our respective noses with cool air. This was probably when insomnia started.
  
• Looking out that bedroom window on a winter morning and finding that a foot of snow had fallen announced.
• Helping my father take down/put up storm windows.
• Sharing a room with my youngest sister when she was first born. She turned out to be a wonderful human being and sister, probably because my parents got her out of there as soon as they could.
• The last morning I lived there--a cold, overcast January day.
• Summer nights running barefoot around the neighborhood, and fireflies.
• Sleeping in a canvas tent in the backyard.