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.