A Few Times Around the Track

Well, today (Monday) was one for the books.

The leaves have shown their first flashes of untrained brilliance, color popping forth in unexpected ways like nervous laughter, teasing us with flashes of metered poetry that will soon explode all about. Today the sun shown warm through the puffs of white cloud that clung to the hills moving like caterpillars. The woods smelled of near-autumn and the waterfall ran coldly, invigorated by the week's brisk rain and excited by the sound of itself splashing on cool rocks.

Today was the first day I did the old place up the way it should be done up. The way you can only do with an old friend or close sibling after years of having lived elsewhere.

My sister was in town for a long weekend.

We started off our adventure with a trip to a cider mill where we bought apples and a small pumpkin for Beaver, a great childhood friend. We ate breakfast at 3:00 pm sharp at a diner and lost all control at the diner happenings; a man dropped a forkful of raw onions on a table and ate them by hand, a couple sat eating spaghetti and meatballs not talking or making eye contact, a waitress indulged in an unusually big piece of pumpkin pie with an unusually big helping of whipped cream.

After breakfast we decided to hit a few balls at the batting cages. It has always been a dream of mine. It is the kind of thing all the real boys did. It was also the kind of thing real girls didn't do. When my sister suggested it I nearly jumped into the car. The whole ride out I fantasized about the feeling of connecting with something, of twisting, of ripping a ball to the back end of the nets.

When we arrived at the spot where the sports complex and attached batting cages had always been we looked around stumped. "Perhaps it was on the other side of the driving range?" And, "No it was right here. There is the minigolf course, or what is left of it."

The batting cages were wiped out in the flood. Deflated we circled the parking lot and got back on the road.

Since we had nothing better to do we decided to drive by our old place on Clearview Avenue (so called because it has a clear view of the Susquehanna River) that was just a mile or two from the sports complex.

We noticed right away that something was off about the our old street. It was quieter than ususal. The yards were overgrown. The mailboxes were missing. The houses looked crooked or slanted and shorter. When we pulled in front of our old pad there was a big neon orange "X" sprayed on the front. We broke out in uproarious laughter when we realized that our house, like most of the buildings in the neighborhood, was condemned.

We pulled into the driveway and parked. When we finally checked our jocular laughter. My sister, the advertising executive, said, "Man that is a great tree." She was referring to an old oak at the front corner of the driveway. The tree was rooted atop a 4 or 5 foot embankment that led down into the side yard of the house which is the size of an entire lot. We called the attached lot 'the soccer field.' This tree shaded a good tenth of the soccer field and would drop leaves across 1/2 the yard that we would rake into various patterns in the fall. My mom had taught us a game as youngsters in which we would we would play house or office using leaves for walls.

When we got out of the car we inspected a pile of flood-damaged junk at the back of the driveway. We haven't lived in this house for close to 15 years, but there in the pile were things of ours - baskets, tables, bikes, toys - mixed in with things from other families and caked in river mud. Our things. Their things. Mud.

I guess it isn’t surprising, in theory, that our old house was sacked in the flash flooding that rocked the town. The soccer field usually flooded a couple of times a year. Not only did the street have a clear view of the river it had a clear role as a flood plain. In the winter there would be times when the flood water in the soccer field froze and we would lace up ice skates and go trolling across our 50 foot wide by 2 foot deep pond, tripping over frozen sticks and roots from the tree.

We went to the back door of the house and looked in the three little square windows. The top window, my sister pointed out, was still the original glass, which was at eye level and had a Celtic-looking painted design. The second window was also glass, but with no painted design and it was at navel-level. The third window down was at knee-level and Plexiglas. Unlike the more recent tenants of this house and unlike the owners, we knew exactly what had happened to those windows and why there was only one original left.

The bottom pane had been knocked out several times by roughhousing in the rather large kitchen the back door leads into. My mom, in frustration, eventually put the Plexiglas in because she was tired of going to the hardware store and spending her evenings replacing the pane. The middle pane had been knocked out twice, that I can remember, once by myself in the dead of winter when I forgot my keys and once by a couple of neighbor girls, who broke into the house while we were on vacation.

The window next to the door was open and the screen had fallen out. My sister and I discussed the pros and cons of going in the window. Finally I told her with a shrug, "I can't fit." And that was it. I can' fit through that little window any more. We decided to forget about breaking in and walked around the side of the house. There was the beautiful old Rhododendron. There were dozens of hen-and-chicks that had grown from the two or three my mom had started. There was the ledge that the old frog used to sit on and pick off bees from the swarm that infested the underside of the front porch. The front porch that was now slanted from the flood and was papered with signs that read "enter at your own risk" in several languages.

So we did.

After all that time we had spent contemplating going in the window it turns out the front door was wide open. We gingerly walked into the front room of the house, half expecting the floor to collapse.

Except for a lot of mud and mold it was just how we remembered it. It felt smaller, of course, the two of us having grown at least a foot each, but it was just the same in every other way. I turned to my sister and said, "We were really happy in this house. MOM was really happy." And it is true. I could not remember one time living in that house when any of us were sad for a prolonged time, except at the very end when my grandfather was ill. Every place I looked I remembered happy things, and the things that were a little sad just seemed funny now that the place was so much smaller and covered in silt and rat terds.

There was a random tricycle in the front room and as far as we could tell it was the only thing left in the entire house other than a nightlight. The same exact nightlight that had been there when we left. We walked through the kitchen where we had played many a game of kick the can and my particular favorite: armoral the floor and sock-slide to the door. Then there was the bathroom, just as we had left it. The linen closet. My sister's room. There was the TV room, the living room and the two upstairs bedrooms. Tiptoing around we started to feel like kids again. Teasing each other. Goofy awkward laughing, running our fingers along the walls.

When we got back outside, my shiny car awaited us in the driveway with the Kansas tags still on it. It is the first new car any of the three of us have ever owned. It seemed so out of place, so impossible.

The first day I moved to this house I paced this drive way enumerating all the reasons I would never love living here as much as I had loved living in our little apartment on Chenango Street. First of all we had switched rivers. Second there was no playground, there was no school parking lot for stickball and wintertime games of king of the mountain atop snow bluffs. There was no school to scale the walls of and jump off the roof of. I had no little gang of hoodlums to run around with. There was no Day and Night gas station to steal candy from. There was only happiness and space to play and run and shout with joy. I had thought I would hate it there.

I was overcome in the driveway with the need to snap a photo and no way of doing so. It was an amazing moment. The two of us back in our old house, looking at a part of our lives we never thought we would see again. But we had no camera so this will have to stand as our record of the time we got to go home again for an hour.

We left our house and my sister asked me if I would have any interest in go-carting. "Would I ever." I had been begging people to go go-carting with me for sixth months, but there was never a taker. We sat out front of the go-cart entrance for a good ten minutes working up the courage to walk in and say, "Uh, yeah. We are two grown women and we would like to risk life and limb to race the shit out of each other in little tiny cars."

All the dudes hanging around out front smoking cigarettes looked like seasoned veterans. They stuck to the place like folks who had been going there so long, every Monday for so many years, that they ceased needing senses to navigate. They knew by muscle memory, where to stand, when to light a cig, when it would be done, how far to throw it, how many paces to the front door, what line to follow on the track to win, how high to hold their dicks while pissing in the latrine . . .

We walked up to the girl at the counter. I later described her as the goddess of the speedway, and it was me who said, "We have never done this before. How do we get started?"

The goddess told us we would need to get our racing license which is a laminated piece of paper that costs three bucks. She explained our package options with unusual confidence for a person with such an array of different size, shape and color teeth. I say this not to be mean but because it was fascinating. She was a goddess to the speedway boys and my sister and I later wondered how many guys had gotten their pirates* snagged on a particularly pointy incisor she sported on the upper right hand side of her mouth. The thought occurred to me that the tooth might leave quite the mark and that the mark might be a sign of passage in this odd insular community. This is all fantasy and none of it is founded in any kind of truth accept that deep sort of intuitive feeling you get sometimes about a place and the folks in it.

It cost us $50 for two licenses and 12 minutes each of track time. It takes several minutes for the photo IDs to print and the snaggle-toothed goddess suggested we come back and pick them up after we raced. She must of flagged us as novices because we got put on a deserted track together with two old jalopy go-carts. Afterwards my sister told me she never took her foot off of the gas pedal and I believe it. It wasn't so much racing as wasting time. After the fourth lap we were both trying to invent ways to make it more fun. We would pass each other and make wild hand gestures or cut each other off and try to make patterns as we rode. After a while we just kept going around in circles because we felt obligated to use up all of the time we had bought.

My sister did get excited in about the tenth lap when she passed me from behind. Her mildly pointed nose jutting forwards against the smiling, backwards flung corners of her mouth. Her long blonde hair was streaming behind her hunched shoulders and pinched elbows, She told me she felt like Cruella Deville. It was almost like old times, except I had no desire to catch up with her. It was too fun to watch her win.

After our time was up we went inside and watched the "pros." They were men between the ages of 15 and 45 that were going around a flat track at much higher speeds than us. It seemed to matter to them and to the crowd which color car was in the lead. My sister professed a disgust for NASCAR that was born in her a few minutes earlier while we anxiously looked forward to being told our time was up.

There were two guys behind us in line when we had come in. They bought two hours worth of races each. The only thing more unfathomable than riding around a little track for two hours was paying $100 bucks to do it. These were not rich guys and we wondered how they justified throwing down that kind of dough on go-carting to their wives or mothers.

The goddess gave us our licenses. They were brilliant. I look handsome, Julie looks beautiful. Okay, we both only look mildly human, but they seemed wonderful to us.

We went to Friendly's and my sister got herself an ice cream. Then we went to our new house. Which isn't really either of our's now and we took a nap.

There is nothing left for me to do in this town now. I have gone to the batting cages, though they were gone, I have gone on the go carts, I have had sex in a public place, I was poster child of the month at the gay bar. I just can't think of another thing I would like to accomplish here and it is time to move. This coming week I will be leaving for a long long time, now that I have had one more go at the old place and discovered I am too old and too big to call it home again. And I don't know when the eternal footman will wave me back into port. Me a ship that has sailed to places unmentionable by name and unfathomable to my former self who was shorter in stature and foresight.

*I met a school teacher a few weeks ago who told me that a boy on the playground ran up to her cupping his genitals and said, "Oh, man. I just got kicked in the pirates." So now I prefer to say pirates over privates.