And Now for a Completely Different Genre.....

     I am playing on Monty Python's "And Now for Something Completely Different" line. Earlier this summer I thought I would try something in the Young Adult vein, based on my childhood experiences. The names have been changed because I thought that was a good things to do. But what I describe actually happened. Let me know what you think! So far it is untitled. Thanks.

Introduction

     Everyone has a place they remember with fondness. They older they get, the more places they have to choose from. I’ve been in 41 states on three continents, and in 17 countries. The place I think of the most is a neighborhood full of hills and woods outside of a series of mill towns along a river flowing north. I have loved several other places where I have lived, but this neighborhood and its surrounding area laid the foundation for who I am today.

     Hopefully you have such a place of your own. Maybe you are still living there. Or maybe you are like me, and you had to move away. That’s what happened to me. After a time of adjustment,  felt at ease where I lived then. But I still sound like I never left the place I grew up. I still follow the teams I used to follow, and am proud of the place.

     These days people pay a lot of money to live on a cul-de-sac. They like the privacy, and it sounds better than a dead-end street. That is what Atherton Drive was. It still ends in some woods. On our side there are five houses on one-acre lots across the way there are seven because some of the lots were half an acre. Atherton was not even a quarter-mile long, but there was a hill rising to the right of our lot. That was great for strengthening leg muscles, and for bike riding. Our land sloped downward for the back yard, so that is where we went sledding. No traffic that way.

     We called out street the United Nations, but a more accurate description would have been the European Economic Community. No other continents were represented. There was no EEC at the time I lived there, and no one ever imagined there would be, since the Iron Curtain split Europe into two camps.

     One summer night in 1957, three generations of my father’s family stood in the back yard by the tall poplar trees to look at the sky. The only trees were from the orchards, and they were not tall. As the yard sloped gently past the vegetable gardens and the large cement structure that others would have called a barn, we saw something moving in the heavens. It was not a star or planet, nor was it a spaceship like I saw on television.

     We watched Sputnik, which the Soviet Union had launched. The Space Race was in its early stages, and the United States was far behind. One of my aunts or uncles said that next year the Russians would have missiles up in space to shoot at us. My grandparents talked of last’s years Hungarian Revolution, which chased some of our relatives out of the country. I also thought I heard someone say that others were killed, by my brother remembers it differently. Sometimes we do have different memories.

     Atherton Drive had its own Cold War, which occasionally heated up, and it did involve local Russians, actually second-generation Russians. That means their grandparents immigrated, just as mine did.