Update from Owl Road

Previously on Owl Road, when I last wrote about it, back in 1986, we had freshly emigrated from center city Philadelphia, Fitler Square. I was nursing a sick lawn mower, we were weighing gutter guard options, sizing up storm doors, and propping up a sagging carport. Kids were a consideration, but not a reality. I was unaware of the BK/EC great divide: Before Kids and Ensuing Chaos.

A couple of nights ago, Monday night, about seven, I was heading out to take son Steve for a lesson in the lost art of driving stick shift. Something seriously more harrowing than teaching him to drive automatic a year or so ago. If Steve stops for any reason on a hill while driving stick, we’re roadkill.

I’m coming out of the house and down the street a mammoth white tractor-trailer is attempting to squeeze onto Owl Road. Must be 30-40 feet long, high enough to break tree limbs. Owl Road has no sidewalks and is probably 30 feet wide, enough for two cars to pass. This massive tractor-trailer is like some spaceship gliding through the neighborhood. Completely alien.

What the hell? Is someone moving? No. Furniture being delivered? There’s a round fellow in a white tee shirt going door to door. Maybe he can’t find the address. I motion him over. “I’ve got a permit,” he yells, waving a laminated piece of something or other. “From the township. So we can go trying to sell this furniture.” He points back at the truck. “We got stuck with this load. Came up from North Carolina and the place we were to drop it at is out of business.” He’s got thick southern drawl. The tired eyes of a long distance hauler. “We’re selling High Point, North Carolina furniture right off the truck. Go see for yourself. Side doors are open.”

This guy is lost in more ways than one. First, he fails to realize in our little neighborhood any stranger coming a knocking at your door will scare the shit out of folks. That southern accent just makes matters worse. You simply don’t come across southern accents on Owl Road. In fact, Owl Road is absent of accents. Neighbors are peering out their windows, drawing the blinds, locking doors. What kind of con is this?

One neighbor down the street is out in his driveway when one of the good old boys approaches him. “Got real good furniture here. Sofas. Take a look.” My neighbor, a Long Island transplant and inherently suspicious New Yorker, keeps his distance like the guy’s carrying the H1N1 virus. “No, no, no thanks, not for me,” he shakes his head. Is this stuff hot? Possibly, but doubtful. This is a pretty damn clumsy scam if that’s what it’s about

I hop up to take a look inside the trailer. Steve is back in the house. So is everyone else. Batten down the hatches. No one ventures out to see what’s up. Sure as hell isn’t the ice cream man. There is some fine High Point wood furniture packed tight inside the trailer. Large, over-stuffed sofas and leather chairs. A grandfather clock. Some elegant wood carving. “This stuff is nice but too damn big for my house,” I tell a guy who says he’s from Winston-Salem. “We got another truck,” he says. “Selling it wholesale. Spread the word.”

How this whale of a trailer ever got from the turnpike to little old Owl Road I’ll never tell you. But they picked the wrong neighborhood for peddling, that’s for certain. Owl Road homes are tidy stucco ranchers from the mid-‘50s. You’d never get their big-ticket furniture through a front door. They should be up in one of the new developments with all the sprawling decks and cathedral ceilings. First came the pharmaceutical companies out this way, then the old farming families around Valley Forge sold out to the developers. Next came scientists and engineers from around the world. Accents abound up in the developments.

In contrast, Old Road is a throwback neighborhood. It’s proven to be sturdy and resilient in the 23 years we’ve been here. The neighbors on either side of us moved in more than 50 years ago, original settlers when this old pig farm was bulldozed into Birdland. It’s Birdland because the short, curvy streets have names like Owl, Sparrow, Thrush, Cardinal, Lark, Pheasant. You see, the first American home of John James Audubon, built in 1763, sits only a mile down the road.

Ten homes sit along Owl Road, each on a half-acre lot. Developers today would put 20 or 30 up. Of course right now nothing is going up anywhere, except “For Sale” signs. Not on Owl Road, though. Like I said, folks here are resilient. It’s probably 17, 18 years since someone new moved to Owl Road. That’s not counting the very quiet, almost invisible black man, Ben, who rents at one end of the street. A Mexican family moved in around the corner a couple of years ago. A small shrine to the Virgin Mary, with a mound of stones, pinwheels and a concrete statue sits square in the middle of their front yard, lit at night by two small spotlights. Soon as they moved in with their flaming red pickup the guy to their left planted a “For Sale” sign in the middle of his front yard.

On Owl Road today live a couple of widows, couple of grandparents, a divorced fortysomething father, a husband and wife who own a barbershop in the mall, an office products sales manager, a programmer for a defense contractor. Then there’s me. I write and edit from my home office, that sagging carport long ago enclosed. Right off of the kitchen, the office has been operational since 2002.

Owl Road provides the solitude for sustained concentration. Neighbors keep to themselves. If a police car drives by it’s unusual. Houses are sealed tight, central air in the summer, so you hear nothing, really. Even the youngest kids are in middle school or high school now.

One topic that does draw the neighbors out some, at least the moms, has to do with the notion of how much damage has been inflicted on the kids by growing up in the dwarf houses of Owl Road. Any number of their friends in this sprawling school district of ours live up in the developments where the sidewalks have no end, and no purpose, really. In the far reaches of the district, there are brick castles that would not be out of place in Beverly Hills or Bel Air.

It can be tricky talking to eight-year-olds about materialism. They are already consumers, of course, they just don't know it. Only a few times over the years have I heard Kate and Steve complain about living in confined quarters. Mostly when they were denied a sleepover because “there’s just not enough room; we’re all on the same floor and the TV will be too loud.”

Somehow they’ve managed. How their parents did is another story.

Now after 23 years the kids are pretty much up and out. That storm door has been replaced once. Maybe. Gutter guards never have been replaced. Never worked in the first place. I planted a pine sapling out back that Osborne gave me; the thing is now a good 30 feet high. Got two dogs, a five-pound thing with one eye, and a 50-pound cross between a polar bear with white fur and black, blank eyes, and a wolf. Don’t believe it’s a dog at all. We keep the grounds trim enough to avoid being shunned by the neighbors.

Solving the world's problems

“Look at Randy over there putting clothes on the line. He’s been trained good. Hey, Randy, man, you are trained.”

From across the backyards: “Heh, heh.” Randy’s loud even chuckling to himself. He’s wearing shorts, a yellow tank top and leather high-top work boots. He’s a builder. Don’t know how much building he’s doing these days. Which might explain why he’s hanging wash.

It’s Suze’s birthday. It’s also 70 degrees in the sun this afternoon. Such is March. I had to get outside, so I went to bust up twigs and shove them into Home Depot bags. The branches, accumulated winter debris, are nested in and piled up above our cinder block fireplace, what remains of it, which sits alone in our half-acre backyard. We live atop what once was a pig farm and has been known for decades as “Birdland” (Owl Road, Lark Lane, Pheasant, Thrush, Sparrow… it is part of Audubon, Pennsylvania, after all, with John James’s first home in America, 1762, a mile down Pawlings Road). In 1955, a developer built 1,000-square foot stucco Cape Cod and ranch houses with carports and large living room picture windows on half-acre lots; each had a fireplace on a cement pad in the back. Ours is the only one left. We were also the last to enclose the carport. Now a developer would put 2,400-square-foot boxy moving cartons, no windows on the sides, on lots half our size. Actually, with no buyers, no lending and no construction these days, the pigs would still rule.

“Hey Dominic.”

“Hi Dave.”

Dom ambles over from his driveway. (Two things I’ve always liked about Birdland: few fences and no sidewalks.) Appears he neeed to get out of the house as much as I did. We’ve been neighbors for a quarter century, 26 years this Labor Day. Dom and Loretta, his wife, are one of a handful of neighbors who have lived in Birdland since the beginning. Tina and Allen across the street. Helen next door on the other side from Dom. He’s been retired as long as I’ve known him, permanent disability after a heart attack almost finished him in his early 50s.

“How was Kentucky?”

“You know what, it’s boring down there.”

I haven’t talked with Dom up close all winter. Haven’t talked with him at any length in several years. He’s older, frailer, voice huskier, skin whiter, slower walk, a kind of hunched shuffle. He’s been put through it. Close calls with his ticker, clogged arteries, emergency trips to hospitals. Rode a helivac to a downtown hospital once. Lost his first wife to cancer, and his first son Donald only a day old. His sweet daughter Lori lives not far in a home for the mentally disabled. Dom must be pushing 80 now. He’s the dapper little Italian today, with black slacks, black and gray shirt, and black sports coat. A slight man with thinning hair, large ears, and a large, crooked nose. Big heart, glint in the eye, wide grin. Tough. Carries old-time Norristown prejudices he voices without giving them a thought. Excellent cook. Hard worker around the house. Always pushing it, worrying Loretta. He’s not pushing it like he used to, nowadays.

“What’da people do down there, anyway?”

“You know old ma and pa on the front porch? Just sittin’. That’s about what they do. My sister-in-law hates it down there. Her husband wanted to move out of Orlando because, you know, it was getting too crowded. So they moved to the wilds. They like it. Or he likes it.”

“Can’t imagine a lot of jobs there.”

“No. There’s a Corvette plant near. But not much. It’s mostly farming.”

He says “Corvette plant,” something hard for me to picture. They still roll out ‘vettes in the states? I think of Dodge Chargers, Gran Torinos, Mustangs, eight-cylinder, 351-cubic-inch engines, muscle cars to go with a pumped-up mid-century America, Ali in his prime, Gunsmoke, Mercury and Apollo programs, steel mills, the Big Three networks, the Big Three car companies, union rule, cheap gas. My kids call it the black and white days, before color came to TV.

“So, what’da think, Dom, we gonna come out of this recession?”

Dom frowns, shifts his feet, looks down at the grass clumps starting to sprout, and shakes his head.

“I don’t think so. This guy (Barack Obama) is just throwing our money away. It’s bad. And our kids, like your Kate or my grandkids, what are they going to do?”

“Dante (his son) has three boys, right?”

“That’s right. Dominic is getting out this year. Wants to teach fourth grade. But he fooled around beginning of this year and has to go to summer school to get credentialed. Benny is two years behind him at Del Valley up in Doylestown, taking turf building.” Dom pauses. Smiles. “Then there’s Chris. He’s 12. He wants to go to Yale,” Dom says with emphasis.

“A brain, huh?”

“Oh yeah, he’s smart. But his dad’s going to pay for Yale?” Dom shakes his head, looks up at the rich blue sky and cloud puffs, and laughs.

“I don’t see things getting back to where they were,” I say. “I’m as bad as anybody, just spent and spent, never thought about it. Took a lot great vacations. Now… it’s something how fast you can turnaround and look at thing so differently.”

“I think it’s going to get worse,” says Dom. “People aren’t going to be able to get jobs. Some may be able to buy a house, but are you going to be able to meet the monthly mortgage? There are going to be people out on the street.”

“Watch out. Then you hear people talking about riots and marches.”

“I remember coming out of the depression, in ’36 and ’37. It was bad. People trying to sell you all kinds of stuff. Everything. Just to make a little. Come dinner time people’d come over and try to get something to eat. I mean, a lot people were barely making it.”

“In Norristown?”

“Yeah.”

Norristown is a half-empty, dangerously poor shell of its former self, a lively county seat in the first half of the 1900s. A mural on a brick wall in town says, “History reborn,” but it’s faded and peeling.

“How’d your family make out?”

“My dad, he managed to keep food on the table for us. We did alright.”

“He’d have to hustle? Different jobs?”

“He worked for Lee Mills. He was a machine operator. He did alright. Then, you know, they moved. To North Carolina. He lost his pension.”

“How’s that?”

“They said they were moving and he had to move or lose his pension. He was 61. You know Helen moved down there until she retired.”

Helen’s husband Louie, who was disable by a stroke before we moved in, spent those days in Carolina watching Braves’ games and walking the dog. A real gentle man, Louis was.

“Suze heard somebody on the radio yesterday say fairness has been thrown out the window.”

“Was a long time ago. Happened to my dad 50, 60 years ago. Happened to me, too. I was working in a sweater mill in Lansdale. I was ready to leave. It was a good business, they were selling sweaters all over the country. Jewish family owned it. But I could see it ending. Then they said, ‘Oh, Dom, we’ve got plans for you. You can’t leave.’ So stupid me, I stayed. Then two months later my supervisor comes to me, ‘Dom, I got something to tell you.’ I said, ‘Don’t even tell me. You’re doing me a favor.’ He was crying, feeling bad he had to let me go. I wanted to leave. I wasn’t going anywhere there. Mill’s been gone a long time.”

“There aren’t even mills down south anymore.”

“No, they’re in Mexico.”

“A lot of people are getting screwed.”

“It’s not right for our kids. We’re leaving a mess.”

“Where’s Dante work?”

“He works for the sewer authority.”

“That sounds safe.”

“Yeah, he’s pretty good. It’s like at the courthouse. Once you’re in, you’re in. How’s your business?”

“Publishing, it’s like you at the mill. It’s not going anyplace. It’s going down. Advertising will never be like it used to. You know, it’s all going to the Internet. I was talking to an advertiser this morning. Sales manager asked me, ‘You talk to a lot of people. Do you see anybody who’s… doing normal?’ I said, ‘In a word, no.’ President of this company, they make gloves, says, ‘I know the recession will be over when we get back to sales levels what they were before the first two weeks of last October. That’s when we started to go off the cliff.’ We’re not gonna get back to those old times, I don’t think.”

“You gotta be worried,” Dom says, looking straight at me. “Newspapers are folding all the time. I used to get the Times-Herald four or five times a week. Now, I’m not going to pay seventy-five cents for something this thin.” He holds his thumb and forefinger together. “All I get it for is the obituaries.”

“Well I’m in too long to get out. I would if I was younger and didn’t have this.” I motion back to our rancher, with the enclosed carport that turned into my office and in addition in the back to give us more breathing room from the kids.

“Yeah, you got too much time…”

“It’s something how publishing’s changed. I did a job on a newsletter on the side not long ago. This company, down in Virginia Beach that’s doing the newsletter, they used to have their own designers. Well, they laid ‘em all off.”

“Sure, they didn’t want to spend the money.”

“So they shipped out the design to the Philippines. They sent me the first draft of the newsletter, I looked at it. It was all wrong. Like they did it backwards. I said, ‘This looks like it was done by someone who never saw a newsletter before.’ They said, ‘You’re probably right’.”

“Yeah, they don’t have proofreaders anymore. Don’t want to pay for them either,” says Dom. He’s evidently given more thought to publishing than I ever would have given him credit for.

“You’re right. I got the final newsletter emailed to me today. There was a typo right on the first page.”

“People won’t notice. They’ll go right by.”

“You’re right. It’s like everyone’s ADD or something. Nobody concentrates on anything. Driving around with cell phones stuck in their ear all day.”

Dom smiles. “Well, I guess I better be getting back.”

“Yeah, I gotta take these bags out front. See you, Dom.”

“See you.”