Unlike Dee, growing up, moving eight or ten times with her mother and two brothers, moving so often that I joke during high school about dropping her off after school one afternoon, going the next morning to pick her up and the neighbors saying, Oh, the Eislers? . . . They moved to another house last night, unlike Dee I know only the Bernardo Street house, the garage behind it, know only the security of sameness of the neighborhood: the Silvio house next door, old man Silvio's vegetable garden and the mums he grows for All Saints Day, the Parent house on the other side and those daughters of all ages, Marlene, Evelyn, Claudette, as interested in things mysterious as a skinny-legged boy browned by the summer sun, the Calvaruso house two doors down, Shirley Calvaruso, always a bit overweight and a little self-conscious about it but available one summer for holding hands and experimental kisses. Catholics to the north of us, Catholics to the south and west, Catholic families with brave Catholic daughters, willing for garage games: House, Doctor, Spin-the-Bottle.
Familiar ground, all but Claudette, someone my years have smudged over. But let's not forgo the days of Nurse Eva who came after the Parents and promised us front row seats at an autopsy.
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Not unlike growing up in the 60s, many years in the same house, on West Jamaica Drive in Villa del Rey.
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