Distant lights. Distant memories

This is the house I grew up in. My parents moved here shortly before I was born, and I lived here from then (October 1946) until I went away to college in 1964. I didn’t move away permanently until I got married (September 1969). I was in the Navy then, and took up residence in Birmingham, Ala., where my wife had a job.

It was a large house, and we never occupied all three floors. For years, a couple rented the third floor, and the Wingards lived on the first and second. When I was about 12, the house was reconfigured to make the first floor the rental space, and we lived on the second and third. By this time, my two older brothers, Alan and Jan, had moved on with their lives, and having the apartment on the first floor meant the tenants could come and go with minimal disturbance to the family above. My mother, Dot, had died of cancer in the summer of 1952, so by 1960 or so the Aylesboro Ave. family was just my dad and my younger brother, Mark, and me. I shared a bedroom with Mark in the back room on the top floor; the view pictured here is from the south, front side of the house.

We had attended a Presbyterian church within walking distance of our home. In the early ’60s, the congregation there merged with another, about two miles away. I was about 15. That’s where I started to have a social life with girls. Previously, I had my crushes, but like a medieval knight, I felt unworthy to voice my feelings to any girl. Through the youth group at the new church, where somehow the milieu seemed less threatening than my high school, I met a girl, Mary, with whom I started hanging out. And making out. She lived another mile beyond the church, in the neighborhood of Highland Park. As its name suggests, it was on high ground, as was Squirrel Hill, my neighborhood.

In those teenage years, I spent a lot of time gazing out my bedroom window to the north. In winter, I could see the alternating red and green lights of the Nabisco plant, a mile or so away. Beyond that, I could see the lights of the neighborhood where Mary lived — or I allowed myself to believe it was her neighborhood. Puberty had me longing for romantic love, especially, I suppose, because there was virtually no womanly love in our house, certainly nothing steady. The distance between our house and Mary’s seemed enormous to me; it was walkable, but that took more than an hour, and I couldn’t drive. So I would often sit at my back bedroom window and long for her. Subconsciously, I suppose, I was also longing for my mother, dead at 42. Anyway, this song by Johnny and Joe was the theme for those gazing times. I can see myself, chin in hand, looking fondly out that window at the Nabisco sign and the lights of Highland Park, thinking of my sweet girlfriend, and hearing this song on the radio or in my head. “All the mountains in the world couldn’t block your love from my heart!”

For the summer of 1952, I had been sent to live with relatives in New Jersey The idea, I guess, was to spare me the pain of watching my mother die. At one point, she was given a frontal lobotomy — to reduce her pain, I was told. But it meant she didn’t recognize anyone. Supposedly, that would have been too hard for five-year-old me to take. When I was brought home that August, she was dead and buried. My memory of the day is of running up the street crying and having to be caught and brought back to the house by an adult – my father or one of my older brothers. I’ve never had confirmation of this by anyone who would have been there, but it is my emotional truth.

I also remember a childhood dream in which I was in our neighborhood – near the corner of Barnsdale and Woodwell streets, with a girl. I don’t know what we were doing, but the salient points were that she had dark hair, was older than me, and loved me in some vague way. For years – as in into my ‘20s – I thought that dream was prophetic, that I would one day bond with a woman who fit that description. Of course it was Dot I was dreaming of. In college, I allowed myself to believe I had found the girl – a short, dark-haired beauty named Daryle who was a year ahead of me. We were a couple for about three years, but in August 1968, I left Pittsburgh for grad school in Kentucky, and Daryle stayed behind to start her working life. Our romance faded. In Kentucky, I met, started dating, and swooned for Carolyn, also a dark-haired beauty who was older than me – by a year and a day. I thought that was especially significant. In December of that year, I got my draft notice; in February of 1969 I enlisted in the Navy (rather than be inducted into the Army, and, I feared be killed in Vietnam like my cousin Jimmy Morrison had been about a year before). I was confused, alienated, and lonely. So lonely, that in September of 1969 I married Carolyn. She had landed a teaching job at a two-year college in Birmingham; we set up married life in a suburban apartment. Soon after, I was assigned sea duty and had to go to Norfolk, Virginia, to meet the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. As part of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, this ship would deploy to the Mediterranean for six months at a time. Although I was safer than I would have been in Vietnam, I was nevertheless sad and lonely, longing to be with Carolyn, certain that she was the love of my life.

She wasn’t, it turned out. Part of our life-fantasy was we would both get Ph.D.’s and become college professors. After my second deployment with the Forrestal, and with the prospect of the ship going into drydock for a major overhaul, Carolyn and I moved to Virginia. She got a teaching job at Tidewater Community College. I escaped the horrible ship for a shore-duty assignment, and it was almost like a normal life for two 20-somethings: I was able to go home after work every evening, as she did. I finished my Master’s Degree, and Carolyn and I wound up at LSU for doctoral work. Everything seemed copacetic. But after two semesters, Carolyn announced she was leaving me and graduate school and going back to Virginia. She said she thought she could get her old job back. She did – because, it turns out, she had not resigned from that job, merely taken a year’s leave of absence from TCC. So our (or my) dream dried up and blew away. I stayed on and completed my Ph.D. Nearly 50 years later, I am retired after 35 years of college teaching. It’s been a long, long while since I gazed out the window of my third-floor bedroom in the house on Aylesboro Ave. But as long as the house stands, I will remember my callow youth in which Mary, Daryle, and Carolyn had their places. Along with Dot.