Four Feet More

My childhood home was not a house, but an apartment. It was a perfect brick apartment, located directly across the street from a wonderful park in which many hours were spent playing on swings, participating in sporting events, and exploring the hidden trails behind the playgrounds. I remember playing in an old tree fort in the desert beyond, and throwing prickly pear cactus fruits at my brother and friends (our “grenades”) as we engaged in “WWIII.” The old rusty car that had been abandoned in that desert, and which served as our play vehicle of choice, is still there today.

On days when we were not playing at the park, my brother and I would build elaborate blanket forts covering the entire living room and stretching down the hall into our bedrooms. We were latchkey kids with a single mom, and under strict orders not to have anyone over to the house when she was not home. Naturally, that didn’t deter us. Our apartment was the meeting place for all the kids in the neighborhood. When mom would call to check up on us, I would answer the phone while my brother frantically shhhh’ed all our friends.

We each had our own rooms, and while we could not paint them, they were decorated fully to suit our personalities and tastes. I remember my room was blue and white with a canopy bed and flower contact paper lining my dresser drawers.

Our neighbors were all family. My aunt, uncle and cousins lived right next door, and my grandma and younger uncle lived a few buildings down. Those people who were not related by blood became family by association. The VH’s were also a single-mother household and lived in an apartment across the way. Mrs. VH was my mom’s best friend; M (the son) was best friends with my brother, and my best friend was J, the daughter. The six of us did countless things together, and they will be a part of my past that I always remember fondly.

While most of my school friends lived in nice houses, with both a mother and a father, I never felt that I was lacking in anything. I was surrounded by family and friends and had the best backyard in the whole world – an entire city park to roam and explore!

Recently, I went back to Tucson and revisited my childhood home. The apartments are not the nice, well-kept units they were when I was a child. Now each building is surrounded by a stone wall, and the park is encircled by a chain-link fence. It was so depressing to see the place where so many fond memories were made fall into such disrepair. It left me feeling a bit homeless, somehow. I think I’ll look back through my old photo albums, to see once again how it was when I was a child. I prefer to let our apartment live on in my memories as it was then, not as it is now.

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