. . . is an incident involving a couple of boys and the garden next door to my house. It must have been around 1960. These days, the neighborhood at the corner of Cliffview Road and Weston in South Euclid is dotted with a few empty houses, and the house next to the one I grew up in is one of them. At the time I am remembering, however, it was occupied by a pair of old ladies, sisters, probably, who had aged along with the house. My brother and I even used to call it “the old ladies’ house.”

On this particular day I had been playing in the neighborhood with a couple of other boys. I say “playing,” but I didn’t like those boys. Joey, I’ll call the larger one, was a bully, the sort who preyed on pasty boys like me. On this day, however, he may have been lonely or otherwise distracted, for we ended up playing together with a third, smaller boy, who is now no more than a shadow in my memory. Maybe he was a shadow even then, a timid boy who hung with Joey to avoid being kicked so often.

What were the three of us up to? I don’t know. Snapping twigs? I have an oddly powerful memory of this fairly mindless activity that boys seem to have done a lot when I was that age. Running in the woods? In those days, simply running around seemed like something with character to it. Certainly, there were far more woody areas then than survive in the neighborhood today. Where then an oak forest grew across the street from my house now stands a condominium development wholly at odds with the derelict feel of some of the houses. We used to — my older brother and I — play in those woods for hours, doing I haven’t the slightest idea what, playing Civil War, perhaps, or Korea. To this day when the words oak or acorn are spoken or when I read them on a page, my mind’s eye flies inevitably to an acorn littered patch of ground at the base of one particular giant, and now-felled, oak tree.

Joey and his forever nameless companion were poor, waif-like wanderers in the neighborhood; I’m not sure I know where they lived, though perhaps my mother did, warning us never to go “there.” But that day, we had been doing something together and gradually made our way back to my house. My brother was not at home. My father was away at Georgetown. My mother was napping inside.

“I need to go to the bathroom,” Joey said.
“Me, too,” said the other boy.
“No,” I said. “My mother is inside.”
“So?”
“She’s sleeping.”
“So?”
“You’ll wake her up.”

Besides waking my mother up prematurely from her nap, I couldn’t allow Joey and his friend in the house because we were not the sort of family that had people inside. In my nine years there, I can’t remember a single person coming inside who was not family. There must have been exceptions, and I do recall when the FBI came one morning. Plumbers, electricians must also have muscled their way into the sanctum. But there was another reason.

On waking, in the morning or after a nap, my mother could sometimes be seen without her glasses. It wasn’t often, but without the glare of her glasses hiding them, the deep brown circles under her eyes were plainly visible. I think now she must have developed them during childbirth, my birth, the fact of which I was somehow dimly aware even then. My mother’s young face was normally lovely when she smiled, and was so until her death last year. The circles, or half-circles, however, marred her beauty like smudges of mortality, badges of pain, and to me she was simply someone else without her glasses. I didn’t want Joey or anyone else to see her that way.

“Let us in,” he said, walking through our carport to the side door.
“I can’t,” I said, standing in his way.
“I have to poop.”
“Me, too,” said his friend.
“No,” I said. “Poop at your own house.”
“I can’t wait!”
I tried to keep my voice down. “No,” I said firmly.

Either seeing that it was fruitless or impelled by the pressure of their intestines, Joey and his friend strode across the side yard to the old ladies’s house, squatted among the flowers under the windows, lowered their pants, and did their business.

I was stunned by the primitive nature of their action, but the insult took its course. They were soon finished and, ignoring me, laughingly pulled up their pants without any intervening act of hygiene, and left.

We are talking now about the early 1960s, after my family had moved from Ohio to Connecticut, and I was hanging around with my brother, who was a year older, and a boy named Tommy, an orphan who was adopted by a family two and half streets away from where I lived. Tommy had a beautiful sister, fine boned, quiet, striking in an aboriginal kind of way, if one can say that, a primal beauty, the fact of which I noticed even when she was a child of eight or nine, two or three years younger than Tommy, and when I was between them in age, barely out of childhood myself. On multiple occasions, Tommy insisted that she, whose name I forget unless it was Anne, was his biological sister, though it’s likely no one used terms like biological back then — though he might have; he was quite probably a genius. I suppose he just said she was “my real sister.”

Tommy was unusual, a high-strung, olive colored boy of jerky movements. His arms and legs were jointed like a marionette’s, and my persistent memory of him is walking quickly, tilted forward, in the middle of gesticulating some argument to a conclusion only he could see. What we could see was that he always wore shined leather shoes, dress socks, trousers, a belt, and often a cardigan or V-neck sweater. No doubt he was picked on in school for his formality, but I imagine he knew he was a genius among cretins, so it hardly bothered him. He was, besides, a risk-taker; an early smoker and drinker (this was later on), all of which commanded Tom, as he had by then become, a bit of awe, too. Coupled with all of that, his father was a noted doctor, his mother quite cultured (it was she who presided over my and my brother’s visits to his house, when we used to see his sister shimmer silently, sullenly through the rooms as we played on the rug and later with his recording equipment); my point being that he was also rich.

But I’m getting off track; I really wanted to mention that on many occasions, after playing inside or out, Tommy, my brother, and I would walk two streets over to Valley Road and visit Mrs. Barsky’s.

Mrs. Barsky’s was the neighborhood name we gave to a candy shop run by an old woman and her husband in a little one-story room attached to the side of their house. It was set back from the road, as I remember it, and a step or two up from ground level. The screen door to this room was always closed, but when the inside door was not, it was the signal to neighborhood children that Barsky’s was open for business.

You would follow a path up the yard from the street, though it might have been a sidewalk or a slate walk. The room inside was quite small, hardly large enough for three boys, but well-stocked. There was a freezer case under a window to the immediate right of the door; here were Popsicles, Fudgsicles, ice cream bars, ice cream sandwiches, Orange Cream bars, and those paper-wrapped cones now called Big Dippers. There must have been a refrigerator somewhere, because we would often get bottled Cokes, and there was a large red Coca-Cola sign somewhere high on the wall and visible from the street. If memory serves, it was of the large drinking Santa Claus. You could also buy plenty of what is now called penny candy — little wax bottles filled with colored sugar-syrup, fire balls, the orange and blue boxes of rock candy (these were more expensive), striped paper straws filled with tart sugar, bubble gum, Bit-O-Honey bars, barrel-shaped wax containers of something supposed to be root beer, wax lips, Necco wafers, and the rest.

When anyone entered the shop from the yard, if Mrs. Barsky was not already in it, she would soon appear, entering through a door to the left of the main counter. You had the sense that the rest of the house was as dingy as the shop, a museum of doilies and sad chairs. She was at least seventy and bent forward, as if she had spent far too much time over a counter in a previous life. Her hair, white and still thick, was pulled away from her face and tied in a bun. She never smiled, but I remember her quick eyes washing over us as we entered, and you knew nothing escaped her watch. She was always in attendance, knew what we were about, and seldom said anything besides a number, the total of each purchase. She was sometimes accompanied by her sinister husband, a bald man as short as she, often in shirtsleeves, who said nothing ever, but who hovered around anyone in his wife’s little shop, looking for signs of trouble. Of course, we made fun of this odd couple as stupid children will do. We imagined poisonings, kidnappings, and all manner of weird behaviors behind locked doors. After all, who would run a candy shop from her house but a witch and her warlock husband?

It never occurred to my brother and I, and possibly not to Tommy, though he was by far the smartest of us, that running a shop was a way to fend off the poverty of being old in Fairfield County. It’s likely that Mrs. Barsky — or Barski — and her husband were refugees from Europe or the Soviet Union, victims of some pogrom or other, unhappily scraping together their final days on pocket change and whispers from snotty kids who didn’t know the meaning of a dollar or anything else.

When I was younger, though not so very much younger that I shouldn’t have known better, I found myself puzzling over the question: when are you exactly half your father’s age? Working it out longhand, through some trial and error, I discovered of course that it’s when you are the same age he was when you were born. It’s a fact of mathematical beauty that had escaped me until then, but here I rely on the Great Detective’s ignorance of our planetary system; or as my daughter once said in a skit: “My mind is very much taken over.”

This fact was brought back to me the other day when I was digging in my mother’s house and found a packet of letters, postcards, school drawings, mass cards, and assorted paper items on the floor in the back of a closet stuffed with clothes.

“What do you see?” Lord Carnarvon asks.
“Wonderful things!” Howard Carter responds.

Or something like that. In addition to a couple of dozen postcards and letters to my mother (and her children) from my grandmother at various stops on her many-visaed 1960 trip to Vienna and the Eastern Bloc to visit her family in Budapest, there were two letters from my father to my mother while he was at Georgetown and she was in Ohio with her sons trying to support all four of us. I was six at the time of the letters, my father thirty-six, or over twenty years younger than I am now.

I won’t divulge the contents of the letters, though they are commonplace. That (right, that) seems an invasion of some kind. But the tone of them was absolutely familiar from a far earlier part of my own life, and a bit sad. It’s a wonder anyone ever took me seriously when I was that way. Apparently more is granted to a father. They included a kind of apologetic yearning, both self-defacing and pleading, and a petulance that I suppose is entirely genetic. It will take some re-readings to absorb the letters, or, rather for them to slot themselves into the spectrum of emotions one carries away from childhood. I suppose the menacing edifice of Father does not expect bundles of letters from his youth to be ferreted out of dead peoples’ closets.

I was speaking to a friend the other day about this very thing. He told me he had dicovered a raft of letters from his father to his mother before they were married and agreed with his siblings to leave them unread. I can completely see that. These seemed more in the nature of reports from a distant city which, in small ways, they were. In the meantime, the ferreting and slotting goes on.

The time I ran away from home involved neither running nor actually being away from home. It wasn’t for very long, either.

I was mad at something big. Most likely a perceived slight or a less than perfect manifestation of motherly love. Whatever it was, I ran into the room I shared with my older brother, packed my suitcase, and stormed through the kitchen, past her bewilderment and my brother’s smirking, and right out of the house.

The door I chose to leave by was a heavy one made of metal. Slamming it made a final sound. With a perfect sense of that finality, I swung the iron door hard and left my old life forever.

Now, this door led from the back hallway off the kitchen and outside. You went down two cement steps to the level of the driveway, under the open sort of carport common in those days. Listening, I may or may not have heard words between my mother and brother inside the kitchen. I hardly cared. I was out and free of that place. Now what to do? It was a cloudy day, cold, I think. We lived then on a wide main uncrossable street near an intersection at the top of the hill. Walking — or fleeing — down the hill meant eventually having to hike back up. The other way would take me in front of our closest neighbors and what friends I had, so this was not the way. At the moment, my escape route seemed unclear. I decided to find a spot in the carport itself and wait for a plan to come to me.

There was on the wall against the house, a wide shelf of corregated green plastic mounted over a couple of sawhorses. Below this shelf was a mess of rakes, brooms, shovels, cartons, mountains of rags, and the old push lawn mower. With a little remodeling it would make a splendid shelter and cubby for a weary fugitive. I slipped behind the handle of the mower and folded myself into a small space between some cartons and waited. From my vantage I could see into the old ladies’ garden next door and to the place where in days to come Joey and his friend would do a fairly disgusting thing. But never mind that now.

I waited. No one came. Nothing happened. Time passed. Hmm. Should I have packed more deliberately, huffed loudly as I dragged my little red suitcase from under the bed, heaved clothes over my head, slammed dresser drawers? Should I go back in now, and announce more emphatically that, yes, in fact, I was leaving home, never to return?

As I rolled these thoughts over in my mind, the iron door opened, and my mother appeared. So. Finally. She had taken notice. I was silent, didn’t move. The way she leaned out, turning her head from side to side, reminded me of Auntie Em’s panicked search for Dorothy in the witch’s glass ball: her face wrinkled with concern and fear.

But apparently there was not enough concern and fear, for the door closed again, and there followed another few minutes of nothing.

My hideout was cramped and smelly. Wedged among the cartons — and being quiet about it — strained my back. Whatever I had packed in my suitcase, it wasn’t food, but that was all right. A life on the open road was tough. I’d steeled myself to the hardship of it. If I went hungry, if I slept in makeshift shelters, so be it.

But wait, my brother was out on the step now. He looked down the street. Not for himself, I knew. He didn’t care if I’d gone off somewhere. He was likely part of the reason I had stormed out in the first place. Besides, he’d have our room all to himself. He was merely acting as my mother’s emissary. He too was baffled by the cleverness of my hiding place and retreated back inside after a few minutes. Would they call the police now?

A third time the door opened, and both of them stood on the top step now, she behind him, leaning over his head. I don’t remember any words between then, but all at once, he slipped past her into the house, as if, little detective, a thought had occurred to him, and he needed to check something in our room. Drat! What clue had I left behind?

My mother said nothing during all of this. In fact, what was there to say? In collusion with my brother, she had done a terrible thing to me, and now I had vanished. This incident, this escape from home was more than just another of the simple unloved movements I made around the house. It was at once a triumph of revolt and an indictment of family. For me, it was new and dangerous. It was something that, if handled correctly, might get us all in a newspaper, with me as its undisputed hero.

Finally, it was something more immediate and less philosophical that brought me home again. I won’t say I waltzed back in the door, but with an aura of victory, full of the knowledge that my time on the road had brought them both weeping to their knees, though they neither wept nor knelt in my presence, I passed silently through the kitchen, suitcase in hand, and went straight to the bathroom.

. . . didn’t want to be buried all the way down in Virginia with his father. A wounded and decorated veteran of the Normandy campaign, he was seventy-eight when a stroke sent him tumbling down the stairs toward the front door. His son later wiped blood from the carpet where his old white head had struck the floor, but he apparently kept this fact from his mother.

According to the brochure literature, burial at Arlington for a veteran includes a place for the spouse, but their visit there did not at all make obvious where one might be put. The stones were awfully close.

After his elder brother died, and sometime after the shock of all of that lessened, his mother decided that he was dearer to her in some ways than her husband (though this may be an oversimplification, entered into the record to quicken the telling), that Virginia was so far, and that her life was here, so she’d rather lie beside him; him, who also happened to drop dead, although the distance was not so great, perhaps as short as from the bed to the floor. There was also some carpet work to be done there but not by him: between the removal of the body and the brother’s coming two days before Christmas, the landlord snipped away a square yard’s worth of rug.

In September when she was found, her now-only son, the one we’re talking about, called the same fine and happy fellow who had carved the first monument and asked him to make a second in the same style. Notwithstanding the three years that had passed, the carver remembered, and a price and schedule was fixed. So that much was set. Later, he (the living brother) learned that the monument maker would match the stones (side by side plots had been arranged courtesy of the cemetery manager) by rubbing the existing one and carving the new one in a like manner.

“Rubbing?” the son asked the cemetery manager. “Isn’t there a ‘style’ for markers? Like, the first was a Number 3 stone; I’ll have another of those . . . ?”

The manager laughed and laughed, a sound that had the oddest effect in the quiet graveyard where they waited for the priest, and something was said about the carver being “old school.” It may have been the brother who came up with this phrase. More laughter. It was September, a pleasant morning, and a Friday.

There was much more to tell, more details to report and notes to be made, but he couldn’t do it just then, so the fabric of the tale remains a bit thin. A bit. His last name.

. . . is all about the devil you know. In thinking about the Christmas season, I’m reminded of the Cleveland years. The eastern side of Cliffview Road near the corner of Weston was a sequence of nearly identical tract houses built in the late forties for homecoming veterans and their new families. Our neighbors to the left were the Downings, a couple with two daughters: Holly, the oldest, who often babysat for my brother and I, and Regan, my age. While Regan sometimes joined the boys in neighborhood play, the Abbotts and Downings never consorted as families. There was, however, an identity among the four of them, a gravitational pull toward center that I envied. It was so unlike the vague desperation at home.

I suspect one of the reasons we didn’t mix socially was that Mr. Downing was the complete opposite of my father who, as unsocial as he was, ruled our event calendar. Or, rather, Mr. D was the opposite of my father in every way but one: they were both loners who had nothing in common with the rest of the world. Now that I think of it, they both also generated fear in their children. Then there was the veneer of superiority they both carried around with them. Okay, maybe they were two hateful peas in a pod. Like Mr. Downing, my father was quiet and sinister, a red-faced ball of anger and resentment with a violent streak. There were rages from room to room. Silences. Biting language. Not to mention the time he . . . but I see I’m going off track here and should go more deeply into this some other time.

What I wanted to tell you was that on Saturdays after mowing the lawn, Mr. Downing relaxed by putting jazz records on the hi-fi. Then he would turn the speakers out to the patio and play an assortment of pot- and pan lids with a set of wire drum brushes. Drum brushes. As if he was in a smoky downtown club and everyone was hep. Only he was playing his wife’s kitchenware, it was a patio on Cliffview Road, and it was only us kids. For such a cool cat, he was darkly fierce about this activity; it was not only his damn right, but something he was compelled to do. We were under strict instructions not to disturb him while he was playing. I know, right? Ruin his solo or something.

We were under strict instructions not to disturb his lawn, either. If anyone started across it after a winter snowfall, he’d tear open the front door like a mad little demon and shriek, “Get off my snow!”

Snow. That’s why I’ve remembered all of this. We’ve just had a pretty good snowfall here in Connecticut. My family and I invite you to walk all over it. Merry Christmas!