Smoky Mountain Surprise: Chapter Two

Two

            I grew up on Belmont Avenue in Baltimore near the Woodlawn section of town. My name, Janel, was a combination of my mother’s mother’s name, my Nana who was called Jennie and my father’s mother’s name, Nellie.  I preferred to spell it Jan el.  Janel.

            Our neighborhood  was typical of most tract communities lined with hundreds of white carbon copy Cape Cods, built in the ‘50s with scalloped shingles. Few people had more than one car per household. They were content to be a simple community and had the blessings and curses that come with it. A motley assortment of people, the blue collar and emerging white professionals, aspired to get out of the crab basket and seize the American dream.  One hundred sixty houses, lined up like desks in a schoolroom, only four streets, one street in front of another.  They were identical in size, not a Levitt tract home community, but on a smaller scale.

“We’re like a giant easel,” the neighbors would say. Stock houses, the homeowners added their special touch just enough to differentiate them from their neighbor.

Within these homogeneous Cape Cods lived a dutiful generation of people.

Nearly everyone belonged to the PTA or risked being shunned from the PTA President. Others volunteered in Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, Brownies or Girl Scouts and for the fire department.  And there were many other organizations as well.  It was a generation of volunteers.  Commitment meant something.  They were working to improve their world.

Neighbors helped one another complete their basement recreation rooms or pour concrete from the community concrete mixer that everyone pitched in to buy.  When I was young, I thought my family was special because we were chosen to store it.

The children in the neighborhood were raised by the community.  People knew what was going on in one another’s lives.  You didn’t dare get into trouble, lest everyone knew what you had done.  It was an instant guarantee your parents would know, too.

Behind my home was a very large and wooded area.   An escape.  I remember the short story about the Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It was James Thurber’s story about Walter Mitty, a timid person who had a two day daydreaming escapade. Walter Mitty fantasized about one exciting adventure after another.  It was in those woods that I became whatever the Walter Mitty in me would allow.  There were turtles, some snappers, crayfish in the creek, skunk, muskrat, and every kind of foliage you could imagine.  A large rock pile some several miles in diameter created a limitless playground for me and her friends. 

I’d would work all day sometimes to clear the foliage to create the special little ground fort only to come back the next day to do it again. 

“You start out early in the morning when the ground is soft to pull out the greenery.  With a slight squat, you bend toward the root of the shrubs and give it a firm yank.  If you are lucky, you won’t fall backward,” I remember telling a friend.

“There is so much work to be done.  If we do it together, we can finish early. Then we can sit back and enjoy it and we can eat our snacks.” 

They looked a long time to find the perfect spot.  Nirvana means you find a spot near the water where it is cool even if you are only a child.  A large, brown boulder with marble-like mica running through it became their throne.  Upon it we imagined they were bigger, that they were in charge. 

In the winter, the creek formed a glistening ice skating rink.  My friends and I would skate for hours under road bridges along the abutting psychiatric hospital.  No one ever worried about us.  Whether we walked along the railroad tracks, or swam in the nearby rivers, it felt safe.

We watched with admiration the shanty across the creek the teenage boys were building.  They even had a wood stove.  We longed for a peek in the shanty, but were too timid to snatch a glimpse.  It was only when the police finally tore down the fire hazard that they saw the Playboy magazines, Camel and Marlboro cigarettes and the tiny refrigerator.  A few years later, we would learn that two of the boys, both brothers, went to prison because they broke into a convenience store.

The woods were also next to the Meton Psychiatric Hospital.  Once in a while someone would escape.  The remains of a troubled man were found near my fort around my fourteenth birthday. He had shot himself in the head.  The Police and Medical Examiner brought his body through our her back yard on a stretcher.  I never returned to the woods after that.

It was in that community where everyone knew each other by name and although my street had some thirty houses, even as a child, I felt that I belonged.  I called mother’s friends Miss Tillie, Miss Mary, Miss Beanie and Miss Madeline, in keeping with Nana’s southern Maryland roots.

Nana, a petite and warm woman, came to the United States in the early ‘20s from London, England.  Over time she lost most of her accent except when she would speak of tomatoes.  She pronounced them “toe matt toes.”  It always made me laugh.

Nana had eloped in her early twenties to marry her handsome boyfriend from Maryland. He then enlisted in the Canadian military long before the United States got into the first World War.  That is where he lost his left arm. Nana later learned his family owned the land on which Cape Canaveral is built.

But in my tightly knit community, the neighborhood had a block party once a month rotating throughout the community.  My brother, Charles, and I relished the times when our parents hosted the event.  Even though they we were just eight and ten, I remember well the anticipation we had early each morning after our parents hosted the parties just waiting to check out the leftovers. 

“Charles, wake up.  There are some goodies left. C’mon down,” I would whisper in his ear.

Down we went into to the hickoy panelled recreation room.  Still in the heavy double cement sink, they would find Nehi, Grape Soda and Root Beer, and a few bottles of  Fresca.  The ice block purchased the day before had melted.

Dad’s family were originally from Wales although he was born in New Jersey.  Most of his family immigrated to the south.  They lived in Virginia and North Carolina.

It was Dad who was the social organizer for the community.  He started the first baseball league in Woodlawn, an honor for which he was long remembered. 

But Mom fostered traditions.  Like the Friday afternoon we went clothes shopping, picked up a few items at the local Acme grocery store in Woodlawn. The final destination was always a stop at the Rexall Pharmacy.  It had a long, 1950s soda fountain. Mom always took black coffee.  I always ordered Coca Cola, a small one and ate her standard pretzel stick with dipped on the end with a little dollop of mustard.  Sitting at the green counter, Mom continued with one of her Agatha Christie books while I revelled in her my wardrobe folded neatly in the Stewart’s bag on the black and white checkerboard tiled floor.

Mom was an original.  A more than determined spirit with a Margaret Mead orientation to life and a Phyliss Diller sense of humor. She could do anything  - tune a car, wire a room, sew a dress.  She was a middle school science and math teacher/supervisor with a masters degree in physics and was the daughter of a Londoner.  She was also one of Baltimore’s first sex educators.

Mom was a phenomenon in the 1960s, the first wave of feminists who were suddenly single. Although she wanted to be a physician, there was no money for that.  So she went to college while raising Charles and I.

Sewing was another tradition among the women in our family.  Often Mom, Nana and I sewed together.  Once we even made yellow and gray checkered blouses with matching skirts.  I loved when we wore them together. Nana, who taught Mom the art of needlecraft and how to sew.  Mom taught me sewing.  I learned needlecraft in my twenties.

At ten I was sewing simple crop tops.  Working on the unfinished side of the basement with its painted yellow cinder block walls, shelves lined with old newspaper upon which fossils were stored, the room warmth was everywhere.