Bob & Matt & Brian & Alice

Recently I watched the movie Driveways, about a woman and her young son who travel to her sister's house in upstate New York. The sister has passed away, and the woman must sort through the belongings in her house and get it ready to go on the market. An old man lives next door, a Korean War vet (Brian Dennehy, in one of his last roles), and he and the boy befriend each other. That is much of the heart of the movie, and it reminded me of me when I was a kid.

My knee-jerk recollection of childhood is that it was friendless, though that isn't accurate. There were Derrick, and Kyle (more than one), and a handful of others who I hung out with, rode bikes around town with, played outside with until the streetlights came on, etc. We had our fun. Those relationships weren't constant, however. I'm not sure if childhood friendships ever really are? The long stretches of loneliness in between friends, filled with self-doubt and the uncertainty of whether there would be another connection made with a fellow human being, is what looms large in my memory, and likely triggers the aforementioned knee-jerk response.

Enter the adults. In particular, the older adults. I've written elsewhere in these pages about growing up on Draper St. during the 1980s, and the neighbors who lived there. Many of them were older and, for better or worse, I felt an affinity for them. Same goes for the older couple who lived on Westlawn, the street one block west of Draper. Bob & Alice lived in a house on Westlawn, and their backyard abutted our own. There was a fence between our properties, but it was a low divider, and made of (slightly rusting) metal, so it was pretty much see-through. No high, solid walls between neighbors back then.

It's a universal truth that everyone of a certain age seems old to a kid. I therefore have to admit that I've no real idea how old Bob & Alice were at the time we lived by them. They were definitely older than my parents, more like my grandparents' age. Somehow, we struck-up an inter-generational friendship. I can remember many a night sitting on their couch, watching mom and dad and Alice and Bob playing Yahtzee. I was curiously fascinated watching them shake that open-ended cylinder and spilling dice onto the table, keeping score the whole time. While not a part of their Yahtzee games, I was never bored in their presence.

Then came the time when my dad (who worked construction and was around a lot of various materials, some of them dangerous) accidentally dropped his hand into a vat of hot tar. I remember the aftermath vividly -- the photos taken of his damaged hand, mom changing his dressing, and mom being away as she went and visited dad at a hospital in Springfield. Apparently, they had a specialized burn unit there, and so dad spent the first week or two after the accident there convalescing. While mom was periodically 85 miles away visiting dad at the burn unit, I was babysat by Bob & Alice. It was on those occasions that I remember seeing the news coverage of when a man threatened to blow-up the Washington Monument and, on a gentler note, Alice showing me the wonders of eating mashed potatoes with cream-style corn poured over them (a food hack I use to this day).

One time when I was visiting our neighbors to the west, Bob sat me down on the floor of their study and, in a rare moment, preached at me. That phrasing can sometimes conjure negative connotations, though I want to be clear -- he meant well. Bob sat there, his kind eyes looking at me. He knew that mom, dad and I weren't churchgoers. Bob was religious, however, and you could tell this meant something to him. When you care about someone, you want the best for them and, it became clear, what Bob thought was best for me was that I at least consider knowing God. I forget what all he said, but it wasn't too heavy. And, he said that he didn't want to "preach at [me]," he just wanted to say his piece. He did, and then never mention religion to me again.

Childhood seems to go by so slowly that it almost feels like the years are lived in stasis. For me, there was a clear delineation when, in 1986, mom, dad and I moved to a different house. Not far away but, for a kid, it might as well have been the moon. I only saw Bob & Alice together once after that, on Halloween, when mom drove me around to different houses. Their place was one of the stops, and it was a bittersweet reunion. It just wasn't the same as when we'd been neighbors. Sometime later, Bob died. Many years after, I was at a grocery store and saw Alice. She didn't see me. She had a shopping cart, and a younger woman helping her navigate the store. I thought of saying something, but demurred. It just felt too awkward. She has since passed away.

So it was while watching Driveways the other day, with the friendship of a young boy and an old man at its center, where the boy all but admits to feeling more comfortable around adults than with his peers, that my mind was cast back to growing up on Draper St. in the 1980s, with its older neighbors living on the block. And, of course, thoughts ran to Bob & Alice, the lovely old couple who lived behind us. Thinking about them always puts a smile on my face.

Alice and I would often meet at our backyard fence. I would toddle down from our house to the fence, and she'd always have cookies at the ready. She'd remark that, when I was really little, I'd say, "I love you," to her, and how much she enjoyed that. I remember those days, meeting Alice at the fence and her giving me cookies. She was so often dressed in her floral print house coat, with rollers in her hair. We'd chat for a bit, and it was nice. When I'm feeling particularly wistful, I imagine the ghosts of Alice and little Matt standing at the fence where the backyards meet, with cookies and a nice conversation, in perpetuity.