Lessons From the Sidewalk A Memoir

            It’s 11:00 a.m. and its already 98 degrees. The weather man says it’s supposed to reach 108 degrees before sunset at 7:00 p.m. Shade would help a little but there isn’t much shade in the Chihuahuan Desert that covers approximately two hundred thousand square miles across the Southwestern United States and Mexico. I have grown up in this desert, more specifically in Odessa, tucked neatly into the Trans-Pecos region of West Texas. I love my boyhood home of Odessa. I could fill volumes from my childhood memories here. Though some of those memories are now clouded with time, the verisimilitude of my childhood is a permanent resident inside my soul. 

            It is surreal to stand here on the sidewalk in front of my parents’ house as my twenty-one year old self and still feel the semblance of the adolescent boy I once was. In many ways, he is still vividly etched into my mind and character. Like the fragrance of the gardenia on the front porch, the boy continues to be a peaceful, spiritual presence in my life. In years past, I learned many lessons from him and I don’t think I have given him enough credit for teaching me those lessons. Now I realize I had to move a critical distance away from him before I could fully appreciate his contribution to the person I am. I can see the provenance of these lessons from this sidewalk.

            Across the street from me is an open field, thick with fragments of soft, white limestone rocks lodged tightly into the caliche like dried glue with sparkling glitter. I remember drawing a hopscotch board on this very sidewalk with those limestone rocks. My friends and I also used them as projectiles. Target practice with rocks was mandatory for little boys. I place my hands on my hips and scoff at the scattered weeds among the rocks, each trying desperately to punch their way through the hardpack surface. The weeds and I could use the rare rain.

            In the distance to my left is my old elementary school, Burnet Elementary. Our nickname was the Buffalos, the Burnet Buffalos. I was issued my first football helmet there, red with a wide black stripe down the middle. I had a good coach, a fun coach who treated us like kids, not aspiring collegians. The playground is empty but, in my mind, I can see kids all over, in the swings, on the merry-go-round, and climbing the monkey bars. The silly girls are running from the silly boys and the boys are running from the teachers. It was hot back then, too. I can feel the heat from those late summer days.

            Too soon, recess is over and I watch myself return to Mrs. Farley’s second grade class. Mrs. Farley was a great teacher. She taught me the most valuable academic skill of my life which now spans into several college years. We spent hours upon hours studying phonetics. It’s funny now but when I was ten years old, knowing how to spell a sound was a mystery unraveled. I don’t think phonetics is taught in public school anymore. Too bad. The next most important class was how to type; learning the home keyboard on a non-electric typewriter, but that wouldn’t come until high school. I can still see Mrs. Farley with her gray hair that always reminded me of my grandmother. I love my grandmother and I loved Mrs. Farley. Gazing toward a different wing of the building, I wonder if my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Craig, is still there. She might be. That was only thirteen years ago and she wasn’t much more than a kid herself back then. She reminded me of my mother. I love my mother and I loved Mrs. Craig.

I smile to remember what those two wonderful ladies taught the little boy. More than just phonetics, respect comes to mind. It was not written on the chalk board. It wasn’t in the “Kids Creed,” that hung on the wall outside the principal’s office. Respect was not demanded. It was actually never articulated as a behavioral requirement. It was something Mrs. Farley and Mrs. Craig earned, and we willingly offered in return for their genuine interest in us kids.

            The most important scene in my view, between Burnet Elementary and the limestone rock flats across the street, is a baseball field. It isn’t much of a field, having borrowed a good portion of limestone rocks from the flats next door to it, but it was my field of dreams. For a baseball fanatic, nothing beats the smell of a leather baseball glove, the feel of a well-worn baseball or the sound of the bat smacking the ball. If I close my eyes right now and inhale while I rub my fingers to my thumbs, I can still smell and feel those sensations. My teams at that age were never very good, but being good or bad didn’t really cross our minds. We were just playing at being Mickey Mantle, Roberto Clemente, or Duke Snider. That would be the Yankees, the Pirates, and the Dodgers for the uninformed. I didn’t have a third baseman hero even though that was the position I played. I took great pride in guarding my third base empire.

A couple of the older boys would choose their players, usually five or six boys (boys only at that time) per team and start playing. We all played the game honestly. Nobody ever cheated or ever thought about cheating that I know of.  None of my baseball heroes ever cheated, I was sure of that. The thought of cheating was so foreign, I was afraid someone would hear me think it. No, as a baseball player, I learned about fair competition, about honoring myself, honoring my playmates and honoring the game.

            I drop my eyes to the sidewalk to give them some rest from looking into the bright sunshine. Dad had worked hard to repair this sidewalk a few years ago. It had buckled from the heat and was in such bad shape that I couldn’t even ride my bike over it without cutting across the grass to miss the worse part of the fissure. Dad took pride in his green grass and didn’t like me detouring through it. The sidewalk had to be fixed. My dad was not the kind of guy to call the city-works department and complain, then wait three months for a couple of guys to come out to repair it. My Dad was made of hard work, the kind of work one would see stooped over in the finger-bleeding cotton fields of Oklahoma or on the drilling rigs out in the Permian Basin oil fields. He was not a prideful man and would accept help if it were offered, but he was never one to ask for help. It took him about a week of evenings after work and a Saturday or two to complete the repair. I helped a little, mom helped a little, and a neighbor or two helped a little, but dad did the most important part – he mixed the concrete. The concrete had to be the perfect mix of cement, rock-sand, and water to cure correctly and last. My dad was an artist no matter if he was mixing concrete, building a fence, or installing new plumbing. This sidewalk I am standing on was the site on which I came to realize that hard work done well could solve a lot of problems, maybe not all of them, but many.

            I turn around now to face the house and look at our forest green yard of grass stretching between me on the sidewalk and the front porch on the other side. Dad planted thick Bermuda grass because it is the only grass variety that can live through the desert weather patterns of icy winters and boiling summers. When I was a kid, I wondered why his little victory over our desert-like environment was so important. After all, the desert didn’t care what color our grass was, and our neighbors’ yards were all a dead-bird yellow. I asked mom one day why dad works so hard to keep our yard green. She told me that dad keeps it green for her. The yard was her view outside the kitchen window, and it was the first thing she saw when she drove up to the house. Dad wanted my mom to see green grass. I told myself, “That’s what love looks like.” The love wasn’t in the green grass, it was in his heart. It was his desire to create a “green grass in the desert” experience for my mother.

            Just down the street, I see a neighbor’s driveway where a boy I knew in high school once lived. We were never friends so I don’t remember his name, but he was part of another life lesson. I was jealous of him because he always drove a new car. I remember one in particular I would have given my eye teeth to own. It was a brand new, yellow 1967 Oldsmobile 442. Now, that was a muscle car every boy knew could win every race and get a date with just about any girl in school. Sure, I wanted to own one like it but it cost thousands of dollars, well out of my reach. But that kid apparently had that kind of money. So, I asked my dad one day how a high school kid like me could drive a car like that. My dad told me that the kid did not buy the car. His dad worked at the local Oldsmobile dealership and he bought it for him.

            I was stunned. I owned a 1960 Ford Galaxie I bought from my uncle in Oklahoma with a few hundred dollars that I scrapped up from the odd jobs I did when I wasn’t playing baseball. I never looked at the neighbor boy’s yellow Oldsmobile 442 the same way again. It didn’t seem honest. My dad told me that everybody gets different breaks in life and we are all blessed with different gifts. He said I should never be jealous of what someone else has. He said that I shouldn’t chase life, just work hard and life would come to me. The more I thought about my old Ford Galaxie, the prouder I became. I remember I washed it more often after that lesson.

            Now, my thoughts return to my house in front of me and my sidewalk. Our house sits up on a slightly higher grade than the sidewalk, so I get a little taller as I walk onto the porch. When I turn to gaze into the distance, I am looking over the tops of houses and some scraggly old elm and maple trees. I can see the tops of a few buildings at my high school – Odessa Permian High School, the home of the mighty Panthers. It’s funny how a school’s mascot name was so important to a sports minded kid. On quiet mornings during the school year, I could hear the band practice as they got ready for the Friday night football game. The band’s horns and drums were my wakeup alarm on more than one school morning. I have so many memories from my four years as a Panther, my head swims with them. The stink of kids in the hallway, the vibrating green Jello on my lunch tray, the irreverent shouting voices, and the beautiful girls – yes, all the girls were beautiful. These memories are so clear, they could have happened yesterday. Sounds from inside the house interrupt my high school memories.

  The front door of our house is open just behind me and I can hear mom and dad talking to my brother. He just mustered out of the army after two years including a year in Viet Nam. He was wounded, but thank God, came home in fairly good shape. Of course, I don’t know what is going on upstairs in his head. Dad has a clue because he served in Europe in World War II. But that conversation isn’t for me. I am a little embarrassed because I have a college deferment and can’t be drafted right now.

  With my eyes still on the skyline of building tops, my thoughts return to my high school. I remember how life got real during those years. A couple of my brother’s friends were killed in Viet Nam. I had an older friend who joined the Marines and didn’t make it back. Living on the periphery of a war was like living under a daily overcast sky. I had to get up like everybody else and go about my day, but its shadow was always there, hovering over us.

  Every night I returned here to cross over this sidewalk after baseball practice or my irregular nighttime and weekend jobs. I earned my own money to pay the insurance premium and repair costs for my old Ford. I fell in love for the first time and sat in my car against the curb over there, crying my eyes out when my heart was broken. On and around this sidewalk, I made consequential decisions not to drink too much, not to do drugs, and to go to college. In short, this is where I learned personal values and a few fundamentals necessary for a successful life.

I feel a special reverence for this sidewalk. It is more than a place where I once rode my bike and jumped hopscotch. It is not just the concrete my father carefully mixed or the hard-won green grass next to it. And it’s more than the chalk-like limestone rocks, or my elementary and high school campuses, or the smells and sounds of a game on the baseball field. From this sidewalk, I see places where I learned patience, respect, honor, and the value of hard work. This is where I learned how to love my family in a meaningful way, more so than just because we shared the same blood. I learned how to survive losing love from someone I loved. I experienced peace and safety here while getting a taste of the turmoil in the adult world. This sidewalk is everything to me.

I am also willing to admit running away from the little boy inside me from time to time, trying to be someone I am not. After all, occasionally hitting one’s head against the walls of life is part of the human experience. But when I am lost in place, I never lose sight of this sidewalk. It has always been my way back to the essential me. So, when life sends nights of freezing cold or days that are unbearably hot, when I am in an emotional valley or on a mountaintop, I look to that little boy and this sidewalk to remind me of who I am and where I came from.