This is a work in progress ( my 1st attempt at this). I'm a wannabe writer; mostly I write poetry and scribble in a journal about my discontent and malevonence.
I was in NJ recently and drove to my hometown - Bayonne. Very strange, surreal,twilight zone material. Drove down my street with my 11 yr. old son. I think he he was thinking "this looks very ghetto". A far cry from the squeaky clean white suburb he lives in.
I grew up in a brick row house which consisted of two blocks of connected houses. There were three rows of them; it was called Parkside Lane. First I drove down the backside of the street, when we got to #34 I saw that they had paved over the backyard and put a little shed on it. Then I drove around to the front side of the house. I parked the car and we walked down to my house, past Tommy Sweeney's, my best friend when i was 6.
Yeah, I was a tomboy ; we used to ride our bikes and make believe that they were horses or spaceships. We also used to make elaborate trails on the sidewalks with chalk and follow them for hours. A simple piece of chalk would keep us entertained for hours. Now it takes kids a PSII , widescreen TV and several high priced video games to keep them busy. I remember playing Simon Says in the driveway(which was just the right length for this game) and other games like Blind Man's Bluff that we played out in the street for hours; our mothers would have to yell to get us in for dinner or to take a bath before bed. And we'd make these great hopscotch boards with the chalk and use a rock for a marker and played doubledutch or Chinese jumprope(remember tying all the rubberbands together). But I'm getting off track here or falling back in time to the days when we made believe we were Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee (ever hear of her? she was from Bayonne).Well I'm definitely dating myself now.
So back to the story: he invites us in and we go in through the old finished basement and I immediately recognized the tiles on the basement floor. If you had asked me beforehand what they looked like i couldn't have told you; but i recognized the black color speckled tiles immediately....... To be cont
8 years ago
