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'Ou sont les neiges . . .?'
Many years ago, during Spring Break, accompanying my daughter Jessica to the East Coast to visit some colleges she was interested in attending, I thought that while she was interviewing I might hop a local train from New York City to Larchmont, the little suburban town where I'd lived from age 5 to age 25, when I got married.
I hadn't been back "home" in a very long time, and I was possessed by a yearning for the old and familiar. Nevada, Mo., hadn't yet become home, and I figured I'd been away too long.
When I reached Larchmont's little railroad station, in the middle of town, I recognized the bank but not the stores. There were a lot more stores than when I lived here. This little clothing store here, for instance, was once a hardware store where I'd bought a couple of clamps for my model planes. Well, that had been 20 years ago. And this jewelry store was once a music store, where I used to buy 33 rpm records of Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman. Well, that had been 20 years earlier. With the advent of the CD, my records would soon be collectors' items.
On this particular day, since I hadn't driven a car, and had never been thriftless enough to hire a cab, I now started to walk the roughly two miles from the railroad station to my old house.
It was a beautiful, warm and sunny early afternoon, and I felt really good.
As I walked up Chatsworth Avenue, then Mountain Avenue, toward my old home, I noticed that there were new houses in places that had been open fields. We kids had used these flat fields to play all sorts of games. We hadn't known that, in the adults' eyes, they were simply "vacant lots" up for sale. The one opposite my house in Normandy Lane, for instance, had been a favorite "venue" for the neighborhood gang to play softball and football for roughly 10 years. It had long seemed a blessing to us, and which we, as typical kids, had long taken for granted. I'd come to know the lay of the land intimately, the gradual rising of the land as it stretched from home plate out to second base and beyond; the pool of dirty water that collected around home plate after a hard rain; the wire fence between right field and the glassed-in porch atop Mr. Daitch's garage (which one of us had shattered with a foul ball).
Now, revisiting the place after so long, I discovered that someone had built an ugly house on the premises. Well, I hadn't seen it for 20 years.
| Where, I wondered, would today's neighborhood kids go to play a pick-up game of softball? But, come to think of it, there seemed very few kids in sight. My parents had been the famous post-World War Two generation, the famous "Silent Generation," who had come back from Europe to populate the U.S. suburbs with children and silently mind their own business. |
As long as I was in Larchmont, I figured I might as well trot over to Barnard Road School, where I'd gone to kindergarten through 6th grade. It was -- and is -- a beautiful building made of granite, built in the 1920's in the ornate style common to public buildings in those days, when labor and building materials were cheap. When I first arrived on foot, shortly before lunch, class was in session, and I had a chance to walk around the building and observe its niceties that had escaped me when I was a student here.
| When a bell rang, a moment passed before the heavy oak doors flew open and a mob of chattering kids emerged. |
What surprised me were the numerous black and oriental faces. In my day, some 15 years earlier, the era of "separate but equal," there was only one Negro, Willy Drake, who was in my class and who carried himself defensively, like the social pariah he was, keeping to himself and speaking to no one unless first spoken to. These kids today were outgoing and sociable. In my day, I hadn't thought twice about the uniformly white complexion of my classmates. After all, wasn't the whole world white? In time, it would seem to my thorough-going liberal self that some social progress was being made. But, still, at the time it was a shock I wasn't prepared for.
I would've preferred the white faces I was so used to. I hadn't taken into account the intervening years of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
On the train back from Larchmont to Grand Central, I decided to visit a couple of the midtown Manhattan offices where I'd worked before I was married. The first I wanted to see was the branch office of American Oil on Lexington Avenue, where I'd worked in the early '60's, while I was taking a year's break from college. Walking up from 42nd Street, I arrived at 57th Street, where the familiar building rested. In the lobby I looked for the familiar American Oil ceramic tile logo on the wall. It wasn't there. I took the elevator to the 20th floor, got out, and was met by a host of unfamiliar faces at desks I hadn't seen before.
When I asked the receptionist at her desk in the hall, she told me American Oil no longer had a branch office since its merger with British Petroleum. Suddenly, two years of my young life seemed to have been swept away.
| All the young kids I'd worked with here would be working elsewhere in the city. What was Lenny Macaluso doing? Bill McGuin? |
Who did I know now who might remember all the Friday afternoons after work when we young guys gathered at the nearby bar, The Cat and the Fiddle, and imbibed a couple of drinks before riding the train for home and the weekend? Those moments seemed to have been suddenly expunged from my life.
| Likewise, when I walked down to 33rd Street and 10th Avenue, on the margin of "Hell's Kitchen," I looked for the old building where I'd spent three years editing "The Official Railway Equipment Register" during the day, while, at night, I was earning my master's degree in English at Hunter College, on Park Avenue. |
There was a cadre of young guys who worked with me in those pre-computer days, and I liked most of them. As with the gang of guys at American Oil, we at Railway Equipment Register gathered either in Central Park on Friday afternoons for a game of softball or in a neighborhood bar for a couple of drinks.
When I reached the location where the office building used to be, I saw with amazement that the whole building had been torn down and removed, leaving only the parking lot next door, and the Market Diner and Catholic grade school across the street. What was left was rubble.
| What would be built in its place? (For this being New York City, there would surely be something built in its place. There were no such things as empty lots in Manhattan.) |
I looked in the telephone directory, to see if the company had moved, but there was no listing: the company to which I had given three years of my life seemed simply to have gone out of business. Then it occurred to me: we at Railway Equipment and Publication Company had provided for the railroads a service that could now easily be provided by any railroad employee with a computer. Now that computers had become as basic an office instrument as the typewriter, our company's service to the railroads was redundant. Where were the fellows whose weddings I'd gone to?
Whose parties I'd attended? Who had shared cigarette breaks on the fire escape overlooking Pennsylvania Station?
"Ou sont les neiges d'antan?," ("Where are the snows of yesteryear?") wrote a medieval French poet, mourning the passing of his youth.
Anyone who passes into adulthood can share that feeling of sadness, but maybe only an American, who lives in a country where nothing ever remains the same from day to day, can feel it to the same degree.