The Hood

 When I dream at night, I still find myself returning to my old neighborhood. That cul de sac where I grew up is the geography that is most readily fixed in my mind. I have a pretty solid memory for all the families who lived on our street. At one time or another, I was in most every one of those homes. Sometimes it was just a brief stay, just long enough to have our picture taken in our Halloween costumes. Mostly it was because I had been invited inside for some sort of play. One of the unique features of Garland Lane was not just the fact that most all the homes had basements, but that all but a few of them had a passel of kids looking for the next game. 

Inside, outside, it didn't really matter. We were going to play, and generally speaking, the more the merrier. Nobody came to our neighborhood just passing through. It was a dead end. If you were there, it was because you had business there. Street football games that lasted until you could no longer make out the ball in the protective glow of the streetlight. Capture the Flag contests that went on long past dark. And the ever-popular riding in packs on our bikes up and down the street until it was time to come inside. 

Inside was where the play became more refined. Some houses were board game destinations. Some, like my own, had the earliest video games. Hours could be spent playing Combat! or Breakout on our Atari 2600. Tournaments were set up. Brackets and consolation rounds. But there were never enough controllers for everyone who wanted to play. Some houses didn't have Hungry Hungry Hippos. Some of them had Easy Bake Ovens. Some of them didn't have GI Joes. They had Barbies. And this is how I learned that playing with dolls was very different from playing with action figures. A guy could take a lot of abuse for spending an afternoon mixing the life-like hair and kung fu grips of their toys with the dream house of Barbie and her pals. 

When the snows came, it would have been easy enough to surrender to the elements and stay indoors. Not our crew. We built forts. We threw endless salvos of snowballs at one another. And when we asked just right, my father would hitch half a dozen sleds to the back of our station wagon and drag us all up and down the street until we had worn a path down and the runners were scraping asphalt. Our house had the best candy. My mom raised three boys, so she knew how to shop. She also made enough cookies and cakes to keep all the kids coming back for more. 

In the decades since I left that street behind, all the families I knew back then have moved on. New kids have taken our place, though they don't seem to have the same clannish nature that we all shared way back when. I wonder if they will still dream about their neighborhood when they are all grown up and gone away.