Part IV: The Kids Are Alright

Growing up on Maplewood, kids were everywhere—33 in an eight house area. The next four houses from our corner were home to the Boesen, Keister, Simpson, and Richey families with three, four, two, and two kids respectively. They were the public school kids, who went to Whittier. Across the alley, fronting Cooper were the Mallows, with eight kids, the Dougherty’s with four, and the Koperski’s, with five, just like our family. They were the Catholics, like us, though the Koperski kids went to Whittier instead of St. Mark’s.

Until I was in sixth grade, I was an unrepentant tomboy and played football, softball, and basketball as often as I could. Then one day as I was playing tackle football in our front yard with the public school boys, some of my St. Mark’s class mates came riding by on their bikes and they saw me. The horror! The embarrassment! My two worlds crashed and clashed, and I sadly hung up my cleats, another victim of the pressure of gender stereotypes.

The Dougherty’s had the only basketball hoop and driveway around, and we would play there even if there was no Dougherty kid around. Kickball was a more integrated sport than football, and this we played, also in the long-suffering and tolerant Dougherty’s back yard. As I remember, we spent more of our time arguing and inventing new rules to cover the improbable places the ball would go than actually playing. The whole thing reminds me of the evolution of the law: organized, non-violent arguing where the decisions are often not final.

We had great games of hide and go seek, spread over a half a square block, where we worked as teams. As the days lengthened, as they are now, our television watching time of Gilligan’s Island, the Brady Bunch, and the Wonderful World of Disney decreased, and we usually had to be called in as night approached. In July, I can remember looking out my bedroom window at 9 pm, tucked in for the night to see the street light in front of our house come on and also one of the neighbor kids on their bike, the beneficiary of more liberal-minded parents than mine. Life could be so unfair.

The Mallows lived directly behind us, across the alley. They had a huge oak tree in their backyard and also a very cool club house on stilts. I hung out with Becky, Tina, Pat, and Connie, the four youngest kids in the family.

It was from a tragedy in their family in 1968 that I first realized the terrible concrete reality of death. Dennis Mallow, the family’s oldest child, died at 16 after a car accident. He was driving his black Volkswagon beetle with the white interior. Smart, kind, with-it Dennis was gone. People weren’t supposed to die so young, especially when they were your friends’ older brother.

And then 38 years later, his mother Virginia Mallow, a hard working, gentle woman who loved her children and the neighbor kids too, was the victim of a crime of bewilderingly, senseless proportions, perfect for the part of the 21st century that insists on being post-modern.

Some things about childhood lose their ability to disturb; but, then, some don’t.