"78 Westminster Road"

"78 WESTMINSTER ROAD"

A true recollection by David Julian

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It was 1961 or thereabouts. Seventy-Eight Westminster Road.

We lived in a comfortable grey New England house in a suburb of Boston. Our street dead-ended on a hill backed by a moist tangle of old logs, skunk cabbage, brambles and a few puddles of unfamiliar dark ooze. Cars sped by on the busy road just beyond our secret suburban jungle. That tangle of discarded cuttings and drainage separated us from the real world when we played there, and it seemed altogether unbreachable. On certain days, when the breeze blew our way through the thicket, we could hear the honking horns of cars whizzing by on Langley Road. When we were exceptionally lucky, we got to hear the screeching tires of a real car accident— but that gift of audible intrigue happened only twice as I recall.

Dad had a home office in the basement where he toiled exhaustively at work that only he fully understood. I knew that his work had something to do with a self-invented system used for inventory control in clothing stores, but the details of it was beyond my young comprehension. He started his business in about 1953, and was the only dad I knew that didn't have to drive off to work each day. He had his brother involved in it too. Dad smoked a fragrant pipe as he typed, conversed with clients and toiled in his daylight basement office. His pipe was always packed with Borkum Riff, Balkan Sobranie or some special exotic blend he found at a peculiar tobacconist's store downtown. He listened to his beloved football games on a transistor radio, occasionally muttering a correction to the announcer's grammar. He had truckloads of flattened brown corrugated boxes delivered on pallettes a few times a year, and they filled our small garage on the huge plywood shelves dad had built. There was just about enough room left over for a few snow sleds, a red metal Coleman cooler and a powerful red snowblower that occasionally spit up the mis-delivered newspapers buried in the deep New England snow. Spiders that seemed the size of telephones lived in the dark recesses of that feared and musty place. To be caught in there at dusk was unthinkable, so I occasionally snuck in there on bright summer days to jar a beasty pet.

Dad's business mystified me, despite his attepts to explain it on occasion. I was only six, and the real world was as heavy and chaotic to me as a barrel of rusty screws. Sometimes, Dad's brother Uncle Everett would bring over large cartons of small clear plastic boxes. There were thousands of colored plastic chips in other cartons he brought that needed to be put into the little clear boxes in varying amounts and color combinations to fulfill customer orders. Dad had a patent on these chips! I assumed that that meant that they were valuable, like the patent leather on my sister's best Mary Janes.

There was a mindless job we kids could do to help our dads' business, and many Sundays were spent in the den with our cousins, everyone filling the clear plastic boxes to capacity with the colored flat plastic chips. Their colors were pure and rich, and I secretly collected several of every color to have my own collection to amaze my schoolmates with. I figured that a set of ten colored plastic chips was worth at least a CrackerJack prize. I don't recall anyone being amazed, nor ever willing to trade even a new penny for them. Proud with my special boxed collection of color chips, I even displayed them for "show and tell" at school. My kindergarden teacher was unimpressed but somewhat amused that I found the collection worthy of public display. She was probably all of 23, so what the heck did she know?

Mom was a model suburban housewife. She had three kids at that point, and feeding, clothing and shopping with us was an obviously full-time task. On cold winter Saturdays, she let me fill the waffle iron grid with batter so I could watch the excess squeeze out along the edges as it closed. Sometimes it smoldered and flamed! The burnt edges of excess batter filled the kitchen and my nostrils with a rich and pungent aroma of happiness mixed with curious danger. I was both excited and fascinated by the transition of batter to breakfast. Another breakfast favorite was the pop and smell of sizzling raisins that remained smoldering in the toaster long after the raisin bread had popped out. Mom was artistic, as I recall, but would not easily admit it. She often sang quietly to herself and danced alone in her kitchen to Brazilian Samba records, stopping only when noticed or relentlessly teased by one of us. I can still picture her dancing, and I loved her that way— lost in her private daydreams of exotic time.

My little sister Jenny was an active toddler, and from her booster seat at the table, she bounced and babbled to whatever music was on the radio or Hi-Fi. She had a thing for Dad's New Orleans clarinet Jazz records and for anything with a xylophone in it. I liked only the older 1950's Doo-Wop songs that played on a discarded radio that Dad had repaired for me with Duco Cement and clear Scotch tape. My cracked radio glowed nightly from its dusty vacuum tubes, casting an amber light and oddly-shaped shadows on the walls of my little room. I was transported into a nightly dreamworld where the voices of singers wooed their young lovers into waiting arms. I got to have my own room because I was the boy. I also had to defend myself nightly from the various demons that I was sure could creep out through the gap in my headboard and from behind the tall iron radiator where dust also grew and silently multiplied while I was at school. The cowboys and indians printed repeatedly on the wallpaper would come alive in my detailed visions, battling my secret demons while I slept. My imagination was so convincingly vivid that for the first eight years of my childhood, I used my pillow only to fill the gap in my headboard so the demons could not reach out to me. It was never used for my head to rest upon.

My older sister Nancy spent alot of time with Jenny and Mom, playing with her dolls and reading aloud. She was gentle, although prissy, but laughed easily when tickled. She also cried loud enough to summon the dead, and never lost an opportunity to tell Mom on me when I comitted acts of ordinary boyhood. I was always careful not to get into trouble with Nancy, but not always careful enough. I knew well the taste of Ivory soap from the many stern punishments I may or may not have deserved. Once each year, we would cuddle up on a favorite chair and watch The Wizard of Oz together, covering our eyes when the Wicked Witch of the West and her Flying Monkeys filled the screen with mythical horror. We also got to watch the Jackie Gleason Show if we were really good. Nancy knew all about movie stars and girlish things I could never know, like how to imitate a Swan dipping to drink water with her pale white forearms and delicate pointed hands.

I played often in the wooded lot bordering our back yard, learning what I could from turning over rocks and following animal noises into the underbrush. I'd come home filthy with grass in my hair and sap on my arms, but pleased in the knowledge that I'd made personal discoveries and had the scratched arms to prove it. My neighbor Johnny and I stole deeper into the woods where we could find old bullet casings, huge caterpillars and waxy brown horse chestnuts. We'd sometimes set these up along the cement driveway walls as if they were a Military encampment, hooting and clapping as the caterpillars clumsily knocked over the precariously stacked brass shells in their vain attempts to escape our terrifying little world. Other times we would act out Three Stooges antics to the squeals of delight from our sisters. That era ended when Johnny failed to put his hand up quickly enough to block my spread eye-poking fingers. He went home tearfully squinting and I got walloped and sent to bed without dinner. Imagine that— kids getting into trouble for acting like grownup TV stars. There was just no reasoning to it at all!

I was forbidden to watch the Three Stooges from then on, but soon discovered that my other friend Ned's parents didn't care what we watched or saw, including Ned's mom crossing nude in front of the TV towards her adjoining bedroom, after her shower. What a circus. We could slide off their roof into a seven-foot snowbank without a scolding at Ned's. In fact, we slid off his garage roof after one great snowstorm, landing directly on the convertible top of his Dad's lovingly restored 1940 Sunbeam-Talbot. Never heard even a yelling for that blunder. Had it been my family, I would have been nailed to a plank and shipped to Fairbanks in a sealed trashcan full of starving ferrets. Or forced to use my sister's cootie-filled toothbrush.

One warm summer day— I believe it was 1962— Dad was adjusting Nancy's new full-sized three-speed bicycle. My pal Johnny had gotten a fringed rawhide jacket, like the Lone Ranger's. I had an Indian outfit left over from a Cub Scout ceremony. We took off to the bramble lot at the dead end of our street to play out a cowboy and indian hunting fantasy. Soon we were deep into the underbrush tracking and stalking imaginary bad guys. Dad and Nancy were downhill a seventy yards away, attempting Nancy's maiden voyage on the bike. Johnny and I whooped and hollered as we "caught" our imaginary outlaws, and I kicked over a rotten log to punctuate our victory.

What happened then was a explosive frenzy of hellish proportions, as the log I had thoroughly disturbed disgorged an entire hive of livid hornets. Nancy and Dad regarded our yelps without due concern, as we had been loudly playing for over an hour by then. Johnny and I sprang from the thicket covered with hornets and wildly flailing to protect our eyes. We rolled on the hot pavement to crush our attackers. What must have been twenty seconds later, Dad realized our screams were too constant and wailing. He then noticed the perceptable cloud of hornets swirling cartoon-like around us, released his grip on Nancy and her bike (sending her downhill in a rather uncontrolled manner), and charged up the street towards us. With adrenaline-fueled power, he scooped us up, a 60-pound kid in each arm, and made a seventy-yard dash like a mad running back with two footballs full of fire. He was also stung horribly as he ran towards our house.

The next thing I remember was waking up in a steel tub full of frothy white water, and several people staring at me, and my mother was wet-eyed from crying. I was whimpering too, I recall, and my own voice seemed to come from somewhere else, as my ears were still swollen and burning. I could see through the red slits I had for eyes, that I was in a hospital, that I was naked in the warm water, and that my hands looked like a doll's hands made of pizza.

Johnny was also there, not as badly stung, his fringed jacket having offered more protection I suppose. Dad had several stings, but was dressed and happy to see me through his puffy red eyes. I got plenty of attention that week, and was happy to be alive. Someone told me that I had sustained 52 stings. I'll never know for sure, and no one seems to remember now.

I was a little jumpy at picnics and parties that summer, when a yellowjacket would buzz my Koolaid, or a bee would check me out. But I was told that bees and hornets were just doing their job, and that I'd accidentally caused them to attack in defense of their hive. I learned more about yellowjackets, bees and ants that year, drawing them from Golden Guide books, and from the library books I borrowed. A year later, as I was riding my own bike, a honey bee landed on my index finger and I stopped just as it gripped my flesh with its tiny-clawed legs and dug its stinger deep in to release its sting. I steeled myself as the burning began, but watched in fascination as the gland at the bee's business end pumped the poison in and the bee pulled itself off, leaving its entrails and pumping stinger in me. It didn't hurt all that much, and I was fascinated by this demonstration! I saved both the dying bee and it's stinger, and had them well into my 40's along with the fascinations begun on that suburban summer's day.