One morning I wake up to the news that we are moving again. We’ve lived in this house for a few years and I was just getting used to the suburban lifestyle of Carteret. How am I going to tell Leo, Karen and Anthony that we can’t be friends anymore? I was just starting to feel rooted and here we go again.
We moved in a hurry to a rented house over in Perth Amboy.
“Just a layover till you finish High School next year,” mom says.
MY parents sold their house on Warren Street and moved on. For some reason though, we left a few things behind. Lots of boxes, my bike, my baseball card collection and my records. Mom called them unnecessary items. Oddly enough, with those unwanted boxes we also left my father behind.
This new house is nice with lots of windows. The living room has a bay window that looks out, over the lawn, to the tree-lined street.
The window of my room faces out to the side driveway and every morning I see the landlord and her husband leave for work. The backyard is large with lots of trees and an above-ground swimming pool. Every weekend I hear the neighbors laughing and splashing in it. Unfortunately it is off-limits for us.
The neighborhood is urban, but quiet. Too quiet compared to the house on Warren Street. No kids outside playing just lots of cars going by. The road is very wide but doesn’t have too much traffic. Wide enough for two lanes of traffic each way and an isle of parking on each side of the street. It seems like they were expecting this to be a major roadway.
On the second floor, above us, lives the landlord and her family. They are a traditional family and nice neighbors also. The landlord, her husband and two daughters are extremely quiet. The only sound we ever hear from them is the shuffling of the dining room chairs. The deep bass-y sound is backed up by the 6pm chime of their grandfather clock. Almost like a beautiful Aria, I hear the sounds of them sit down together for dinner as a family.
I can only imagine the dad saying “pass me the butter, honey”
and the mother happily doing so with a soft reply “here you go, dear.”
At that moment, almost as if waking me up from a daydream, my mom yells out “turn off the TV and take out the trash!”
I can’t believe it – I’m missing my favorite episode of Leave it to Beaver. This is a rerun and they will never play this episode again!
So now Joe shows up to the door in his boxers & immediately says “Hey, I didn’t do anything!” This is Joe’s instant reaction when seeing a police officer at his door. The image that Joe & his brother’s have is that they are criminals and we are friends with those “criminals.” The neighbors have always questioned my mother “why do you let your kids be friends with criminals?” My mother always replies “I don’t have any evidence that they are bad people.”
Sitting there in the back of the bus, he reaches into the breast pocket of his coat and pulls out a magazine. He hands me the January 1979, 25th Anniversary Edition of Playboy magazine, and says “this is a special issue.”