Category Archives: memories

Ah, summer. Those sweltering, lazy days of respite from the rigors and anxiety of the school year. Summers in Carmichael were like that: days filled with nothing but time and opportunity.

Right in our own neighborhood we had loads of opportunity. For just up the street and around the corner civilization ceased and a vast, unexplored prairie began.

An empty field. Spreading out over one hundred and fifty thousand square yards, it sat entirely unmarred save for one gas station on a far corner.

This field was the setting for many a summer’s adventures.

Legends were born of its crossing. I remember bigger kids coming back to our street along dusty, foot-worn paths telling tales of conquest and exploit. It was a world of unknowns, a land of endless opportunity filled with thistles, dirt clods, rocks, killdeer nests, snakes, bottle caps, soda can ring tabs and countless other treasures.

From my earliest memories I had heard of the glories that awaited those who could make the distance: a grocery store where candy and slurpies could be purchased in air conditioned splendor, a gas station with a soda machine and free air to fill up your bike tires, a small diner that served charbroiled burgers and French fries, a frog-filled pond surrounded by trees, and other more apocryphal tales of the “Heere Be Tygers” variety, like the tale of the cranky old lady living in the woods nearby who had a shotgun loaded with rock salt.

It was a magical place.

There was an unwritten law amongst the neighborhood kids that traversing this expanse must be done barefoot. During the summer, unless in dire need, shoes were not to be worn. My oldest brother took his code of conduct from Mark Twain’s chronicles of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and enforced this barefoot rule despotically. Any and all who wore shoes during the summer were shunned. And if you were unfortunate enough to be caught wearing “Dude Shoes” (that is, dress shoes, such as those worn for church-going), you were openly derided.

Shoeless summers presented a unique challenge to those wishing to make the journey across the field. Because to get to it, you first had to cross the Glass Road.

This was a short stretch of roadway, no longer than 60 feet, that was entirely covered in broken glass. It began just past the driveways of the two houses on the corner and followed a short curve into the field. If there was asphalt beneath all that glass, I never saw it. The shards were of all shades and thicknesses, and were layered as deep as you dared try to feel down with your fingers. It stretched the full width of the two-lane road and covered it right on into the field where it was swallowed up with soil and weeds.

How the glass road came to be remains a mystery to me. Some had suggested that the children of the earliest residents of the neighborhood smashed bottles there so often that it became a normal, natural feature. Others said it was all that was left of the lumberyard that existed in the field while the neighborhood was being constructed.

But whatever its origin, the glass road was a fixture in my early life, a hard fact, an inevitable impediment, a very real demarcation separating the courageous from the cowardly. So it goes without saying that I walked that road barefoot more than a few times, to prove my worth to my brothers and friends.

While the night belonged to the bigger kids, the mornings were mine. This was the time when I would often find my next older brother readying himself for a field expedition. He’d invite me to go with him, and we would walk up the street and into the field (wearing shoes) to look for killdeer eggs, bottle caps or other treasures. One time my brother found a few glass tiles, such as those used for making mosaic table tops. He returned to the same spot the next day with a broken hoe, and began digging. He’d struck a vein rich with tiles, which he saved in a bucket. Over the course of the next few years, he filled that bucket with tiles, beads and other wealth.

We only realized how truly fortunate we were to have that field to explore when it was taken away.

At some point signs and stakes began to appear, followed by men with bulldozers. The inescapable claw of property development had arrived. Trenches were dug, forms were laid and pipes installed as plans for a new retail complex were realized.

We made the best of it, playing on the massive dirt mound they’d left as though it were a volcano, and running through the trenches like Theseus pursuing the Minotaur through the labyrinth.

Along with the erasure of most of the field came the destruction of the glass road. In what seemed a single day, where once the glass road had been lay a beautiful new road, straight and complete, creating a connection from our street to the main highway.

The developers built duplexes on one side of this road, and office buildings on the other side. Soon came apartments, a movie theater and a convalescent hospital.

By the time I’d reached my fourteenth birthday, there wasn’t a trace of our wonderful field. The dirt, the weeds, the paths, the possibilities: all gone.

Now, I couldn’t complain about the closeness of the grocery store, movie theater and doughnut shop. My friends and I had some great days just hanging around at the department store and drug store there, and some fantastic evenings at the carnival they would set up in the parking lot each year. And I spent part of one year working as a dishwasher in the new convalescent hospital.

But I would pay big money to have just a few more sunny summer days with that field, to show my kids what fun could be had without a dime or a cell phone. While barefoot.

Next: The Back Yard and The Flowering Pine

It is said that you are shaped by your environment, particularly the one in which you were raised. I wholeheartedly agree with this.

As a man I very often find myself referring back to places and things in my childhood, using them as a point of reference for comparison to where I am now as a husband and father. And I spend a lot of time reminiscing about that time as well, as those days hold some very good memories.

Growing up, our family was not by most standards “well off”. But even so, life was rich and good, and I often find myself wishing I could provide my kids as prosperous and inspiring an environment as the one I had growing up.

For me, history began in 1963, and the center of the universe was a street in a typical little suburban neighborhood at the north end of a town named Carmichael. It was a world ripe for exploration.

There are so many tales to tell, it’s hard to choose a single starting point. From the great expanse of our home’s back yard and thick jungle vines there that reached forty feet into the trees, to the enormous vacant field just behind the houses across the street, to stunts we pulled on Halloween nights that would be remembered forever, to trips with the family to destinations around California and long summer days spent with my buddy at the state fair.

Our house was built in 1958 as part of a small tract house development. My parents chose that particular house before it was built, based upon its location and layout. Our three-bedroom, two-bath ranch style home was scarcely over 1200 square feet, but it was huge to me. And the sizeable lot upon which it sat (far more generous than those found under new homes these days) provided a vast amount of room for exploration and creative play.

The extent of the known universe was, to me, bounded by sidewalks.

One of my earliest memories is of being pushed up and down those sidewalks in a stroller and playing with the blue and pink beads that ran along the front. My older brother delighted in steering me along, providing exercise for himself, a change of scenery and some adventure for me, and peace and quiet for our mother.

I knew that when we got to the top of the street it was time to turn around; going on up would take us around to the next street; the one behind our house. That would be Too Far. It might as well have been deepest, darkest Africa; it was unknowable territory. That part of my map would read “Here Be Dragons.”

But that little 150-yard excursion was plenty enough excitement for me. I liked keeping close to home; where my room was, where my family was, where I felt safe and secure.

One of the unique features of our house, out of all the houses on the street, was our driveway. All of the houses on the street were slightly elevated from the street level, and thus had sloped driveways. All except ours. Our house had the only flat, level driveway on the street. And because our garage was built parallel to the street, the driveway curved around to meet it. It was a veritable oceanic plane of smooth concrete.

This feature was a natural magnet for every kid on the block. For tricycle riding and chalk drawing, our driveway was the place to go. And of course in those days, there was no concern over the fact that random children would appear in the yard at various hours of the day or evening, as it was considered perfectly normal to let your kid wander off to a friend’s house, as long as they were back before dinner. My mother paid little attention to the number or identity of the children who were riding and/or drawing on her driveway at any given moment. During the first summers of my existence, the driveway became a landscape of bare backs and crew cuts hunched over massive aboriginal masterpieces.

In a few years my own crop of friends and I would take over the driveway, claiming it as our own venue for artistic expression, be it in the form of chalk, tempera paint, building projects or filmmaking. The driveway became the backdrop for a lot of epic cinematic tales, mostly involving my buddies showing off their kung-fu moves or shoes menacing innocent victims, brought to life through the magic of stop-motion.

But as my world expanded, the driveway would play a less central role as the grand and glorious vacant field took center stage.

Next: The Field and the Glass Road