Dead End

It says a lot about me that the local cemeteries are my favorite place in Batavia. As a kid I spent many summer days, alone, riding my bike over to the cemeteries, and the industrial ruins that sit like a wedge dividing our town into a North & South side. I don’t know why, but it has always drawn me to it. I’d walk the rows of headstones, and read the names and dates, and wonder about the history and the lives that went before. The three cemeteries on Harvester Avenue, are among the most sylvan, and shady spots in town, and I have always felt at peace there. Maudlin children, and Gothic kids everywhere can sympathize, but sometimes life was easier among the dead, than it was among the living.

This past Sunday, I drove over to the cemetery to pay a visit to Dad’s grave, and ended up wandering those shady lanes for an hour, alone, looking for something that I felt like I lost once. It was still there. The emptiness, the peace, the silence.

When I started this blog in 2009, I felt like I had so much to say, and so many stories to share. Now, in the summer of my 44th year, I find myself returning again, and again, to the same places, only to find that the words I have already written about them, sum them up so well I have little left to say.

So I’m saying goodbye. Again.

I’ll still be working to publish the book of historical fiction based upon the E.N. Rowell murder from 1883, and once that is complete, I will most likely move onto compiling the stories, fragments, and memories that I have written here, into some sort of cohesive whole that I also hope to publish. Thank you for all the time you’ve spent reading 20 Prospect, and stopping by the front porch to chat. I’ve enjoyed every minute of it.

So I leave these words like footprints, pressed into cement, and recorded for posterity. May they someday inspire another introverted child to pick up a pen, and go exploring.

Go Dogs Go!

I’m back in Minnesota again, after a wodnerful whirlwind of a trip to Western New York. There is no better time of year to visit than early June. The weather was perfect, and the lushness of WNY never fails to surprise me. Who knew there were so many shades fo green? Minnesota is far from being a desert, but there is just no comparison to the verdant shades of green that you see in Upstate New York in early summer.

Last Friday night the 20 Prospect clan descended upon Dwyer Stadium, home of the beloved Muckdogs, to watch them play the Jamestown Jammers. If there is a better way to spend a small town Friday night than watching baseball with 1,000 of your closest friends, then I have no idea what it might be. It doesn’t get anymore Norman Rockwell-esque than this…

alas, they lost. But they always lose when I see them play. It never seems to spoil the experience though.

20 Prospect Jr. nabbed a foul ball while we were going to the concession stand for some Stewart’s Rootbeer. I gotta say, the Rochester Red Wings, who are currently operating the club, are doing a great job with the place. RC Cola, ON TAP!!!!! Not a Coke or Pepsi in sight! It’s like they knew I was coming.

There were fireworks after the game, which were only enhanced by the sound of my niece’s 3 year old squaeling with delight at each explosion. It was so great to share the memories with another generation of the family, and to see that it is still just as wonderful as I remembered it being. May there always be baseball in the summertime on the corner of Denio and Bank Street. And may there always be a 20 Prospecter there to enjoy it.

Turns out, you can go home again, as long as you promise not to touch anything.

On the Maid of the Mist

There is no better way to experience Niagara Falls than from the deck of the Maid of the Mist.

Well, maybe a barrel, but your chances are better on the boat.

It was 90 degrees in the shade, and getting pummeled with the effluent of Lake Erie felt wonderful. Finished the afternoon with footlong charbroiled hot dogs and curly fries at Louies in Tonawanda, then spent the evening on Big Bruddah’s back porch sipping a beer as the streetlights came on.

 

Louie’s!

On the brink

If I ever own a creepy haunted mansion…

This portrait is hanging above the fireplace.

I hope our plane comes with goggles and a scarf.

Whenever I fly in one of these, I feel like Gregory Peck in 12 O’Clock High.

Good fences make good neighbors.

My impending trip back to the Elysian fields of my idyllic childhood has made me nostalgic again. Not that it takes much to make me nostalgic. The mere sight of a pack of Juicy Fruit in the checkout line will usually suffice for a 15 minute reverie. As I alluded to in yesterday’s post, the neighbors could fill a few chapters in a book. (Hmm… there’s an idea…) Growing up on Prospect, my folks were always cordial with our neighbors. Something that is necessary when the homes are built 20 feet apart. Yet despite the occasional nod, and smile, they never socialized with them. Of course, the kids in the neighborhood all ran together in packs like feral dogs, as kids are wont to do, but the Mom’s and Dad’s and Little Old Ladies stayed up on their own porches and pretended not to notice each other as best they could.

So it struck me as strange when I met Mrs. 20 Prospect, and learned that her family actually invited their neighbors over to their house from time to time. Seriously. Of course, I was always a shy child, so it never really occurred to me that social interaction was something to be sought out. Particularly with your neighbors. That’s like holding hands during the Our Father at Mass. Something that surely would look good on the resume when you’re interviewed by St. Peter, but nothing you’d actually want to practice.

Perhaps part of our problem with befriending the neighbors had something to do with the transient nature of residents that lived in the house next door. When we first moved to Prospect Avenue, the houses on both sides were owned by little old ladies. They were relics from an earlier generation, a time of doilies and fringed lamp shade, and both of them had long since buried their husbands. Hopefully not in their basements, at least as far as we knew. The houses were tidy, and well kept, and both of these sweet old ladies must have cringed at the thought of a family full of white trash moving in next door. Still, if they did feel that way, they always managed to hide it which is what we in Minnesota call “being nice”.

However, by the time I was old enough to go to school, the little old lady to our left had sold her home and moved into the senior apartment high rise that had just opened on East Main. (I believe it has 8 stories, which qualifies as a “high rise” in Batavia). Like most single family homes that sold in the during the rust belt great depression of the 70’s and 80’s, the buyer was not a new family, but a local slumlord.

The first family to rent the place was a large family of slightly delinquent children. I don’t remember much about them, except that my Dad was convinced they were trying to burn down our barn. There was an old chicken coop in their back yard, which served as a great little clubhouse, but within a few months it mysteriously burned to the ground. They left shortly thereafter, leaving behind a significant amount of garbage in their wake.

The next family of renters was a professor from the local community college, and his 2nd wife, who moved in along with his 3 kids. The kids were right about my age, so I was thrilled at the possibility of having more kids to fill out the endless baseball and football games. However, like all new kids on the block, they were subjected to a hazing process by the ringleaders of the neighborhood gang. It did not help their cause that their folks were younger “hippie” types, and that the kids had long hair, and strange taste in clothes. Let’s just say that they never did assimilate into the clique. However, being a lonely little mop haired freak myself, I still befriended them. What they may have lacked in athletic ability, they made up for in weirdness. Even at that tender young age, I was drawn to the freaks and misfits.

We played many games of hide and seek, and kick the can, and other neighborhood classics; Spud, Red Rover, Freeze Tag, etc. in our yards. Their backyard had the unfortunate happenstance of being the lowest point on the street, so it was prone to turning into a pond during heavy rains. That is until the landlord stopped by a construction site up the street, where a crew was digging the foundation for the last house to ever be built on Prospect Avenue. He cut a deal with the crew, and they backed their dump truck into the yard, and filled it with dirt and rocks. We assumed at the time that he would pay someone to bring in some topsoil, and grade it out, but he never did get around to it. So the backyard of the house began to resemble the surface of the moon. It did fix the flooding problem though.

As I began to get closer to the hippie kids next door, and played games of Astronaut in their moonscape yard, I came to understand that their parents were a little… off. Their dad and step mom used to argue, and fight quite a bit, which usually ended with their dad taking off in the car, and a strange thumping sound coming from inside of the house. When I finally asked what the pounding noise was, they informed me it was their step mom pounding her head against the wall. I considered this for a few moments, and decided that while it wasn’t exactly normal behavior, it was still better than the Mom on the other side of 20 Prospect, who pounded her son’s head against the wall when she was upset. But that’s a story for another time…

Eventually, their step mom moved out, and not too long afterward, they did as well. The house sat empty for a few months as we watched the weeds in the backyard grow, and flower. Finally one day we saw a moving van pull up, and begin unloading. Multiculturalism had come to Prospect Avenue! I was never sure exactly how many kids lived in the house, but they ranged in age from the late 20’s, down to the boy my age. I got to know him, and he explained the reason his parents had accents was that they were from Puerto Rico. I had just assumed they were Sicilians. So I consulted my puzzle map of the United States to figure out where exactly Puerto Rico was located. Come to find out, it was not on the South Side of Batavia.

For the most part, this family kept to themselves. As I said, there were so many people coming and going from the place that I couldn’t keep track of who was who. They planted a garden out back, and began to mow the moonscape, so from Dad’s perspective, things were looking up. At least until the morning when we were awoken at 5 am by a rooster crowing. At first I thought I had dreamed it, but when it happened again the next day, Dad mentioned it at the dinner table. The chicken coop had been long gone by now, just its stone foundation was left out back, so we speculated about where exactly the crowing was coming from. Finally, I asked the boy next door, and he explained that his Dad was keeping them in the attic. Apparently, they were in training for the welterweight cockfighting championships of Genesee County. The aviary only lasted a few days before someone turned them in. Not too long after the roosters disappeared, the neighbors did too, leaving behind an impressive collection of cast off furniture in the garage, which by now had become home to a family of squirrels.

After that, the landlord decided to double his income earning potential by dividing the house into 2 apartments. So commenced a winter of banging noises from next door, this time presumably coming from a hammer, and not someone’s head. By Spring we had 2 new sets of neighbors. The couple downstairs was married, and in their 30’s. They didn’t have any kids, but they seemed like decent folks. They eventually became the closest things my parents had to friends on the street before they moved out. However, the upstairs apartment became a revolving door of renters. Mostly single men, or women. Finally, a girl rented the place, and seemed as if she was going to stick around. Months passed. Eventually, her boyfriend and his German Sheppard moved in with her. More months passed, and we only saw the dog leave the house once or twice. Eventually the downstairs neighbors began to complain of the smell. When the dog had a litter puppies, it stopped coming outside all together. Finally the landlord let himself into the place and discovered the entire upstairs covered with a layer of dog excrement. He offered the downstairs renters a few months free rent if they cleaned the place, and they surprisingly took him up on the offer. Perhaps they had seen his efforts at landscaping in the backyard, and figured it was better to do it themselves than wake up to a dump truck filling in the upstairs of the house.

More renters followed, and eventually the house went on the market. By that time cable TV had come to Prospect Avenue, and we were no longer reliant on the neighbors for nightly entertainment. A few years later I was moving out to go to college, and see the world. Mom and Dad stayed behind for another ten years before we ourselves became another of the long list of former residents of Prospect Avenue. As for the house next door, the people that bought the place in the 80’s, still own it today, and so I will politely refrain from telling their story. At least until they move.

You can’t go home again. No really, there’s a restraining order.

Another long day at 20 Prospect is coming to an end. All up and down the street people are sitting out on their porches, talking in subdued voices amidst the flicker of the citronella candles. The light from the streetlight is shining through the awning casting zebra stripes across the glider. Pull up a chair, and sit for a while.

Tomorrow we’re leaving for Batavia to celebrate Mom’s 75th birthday. The entirety of the 20 Prospect clan will be gathered together in one place for the first time in… ever. Seriously, since the kids came along we have never all been in the same place at the same time, due mostly to the selling off of the 20 Prospect homestead after Dad died, and the scattering of the siblings and grand kids to the 4 winds. This will prove to be quite an experience.

In one of those strange quirks of small town fate my Big Bruddah is now renting an apartment in the house directly across the street from 20 Prospect. Like so many of the great old houses in Batavia, it had become rundown and split up rental apartments back in the 60’s. It’s been fixed up since then, but remains apartments. Since Big Bruddah is the only one in town with a yard, the birthday party will be held in a tent out back. It will be a very strange emotional experience to be back on the street I grew up on with my entire family in attendance. Dear Batavia, please let me apologize in advance for the disturbance that we are sure to create. Also you might want to pick up some Labatt’s Blue from the store before my clan gets to town and drinks it dry.

So in honor of my return to the ancestral homestead, here’s an old story from the first days of my blog. It concerns the very house we will be partying at on Saturday. But this is not the story of the 20 Prospect clan, it is the story of the motorcycle man and the summer of 1974…

The motorcycle man lived in one of the apartments in the house across the street, a rundown old white house, yellowing around the soffits from years of neglect. It was divided up into 3 apartments, and owned by one of the town judges. He didn’t spend a dime on the place, and was pretty lax about who he rented to. The place was always the site of domestic disturbances, and in the days before cable TV came to town my Dad enjoyed many entertaining nights out on the front porch watching the comings and goings of its inhabitants. The cops paid regular visits to the place, and had the landlord not been a judge, the neighbors would have probably had more luck getting the city to force him to clean up the place.

That summer of 74′ the front apartment was occupied by the motorcycle man, and his squeeze. We never knew their names. They were notable only for the screaming fights that usually ended with motorcycle man climbing on his chopper, and spraying gravel as he tore off out of the driveway. To us 6 year old’s he was the subject of fascination; a long haired bearded chopper riding easy rider straight from a Hollywood B movie. Remember, this was back in the days before Harley riders were CPA’s, so anyone riding a motorcycle was assumed to be an outlaw. We used to run to the curb when we heard him coming down the street to watch him pass, and flash him the peace sign. Whenever he flashed it back at us we felt naughty and dangerous.

At night laying in bed, you could hear him coming home from a block away as he accelerated up the street. He’d turn into the gravel drive, and ride straight back into the barn behind the house, his red tail-light disappearing into the darkness within. The roar of that bike at 2 am drove my Father crazy. Until the night he crashed.

Dad loved to tell the story for years afterward. That summer night he was laying in bed as he heard the chopper coming home from the bar well past midnight. Motorcycle man must have had a few too many long necks that night, because coming down the hill and turning into the driveway he mis-judged his speed. Dad heard the sound of the brakes locking up, and gravel spraying as he slid into the dark recesses of the barn, followed by a loud bang. The next morning Dad savored his coffee on the front porch watching motorcycle man load the remains of his chopper into the back of a friends pickup truck.

Summer ended before the chopper ever made it back. Sometime during the winter, the chopper man moved out, and his squeeze stayed behind. Things got a little quieter around the neighborhood, at least until the Puerto Rican’s moved in next door and started raising fighting cocks in the attic. But that’s a story for another night. It’s time to blow out the citronella candle and go to bed. Peace.