Memory of a past life

I was born at the southern extreme of Megalopolis. Neither of my parents are from the city or the state where I was born. In fact, my birthplace was just a brief stop on my father’s rising career path with a major oil company. He's from metro New Jersey and my mother's from a small farming community in Iowa. They had met in Washington, D.C., at a party for the alumni of a now-defunct liberal arts college in the Midwest called Parson's and were married in a lovely white wedding in small church resting on the southeastern slope of Watchung Mountain in suburban Newark. They seemed to be constantly on the move during their short marriage; my dad had been transferred from York, Pennsylvania, where my sister was born in 1969, to Baltimore shortly before I was to arrive. Then, ten days after I was born, in 1971, it was on to the next stop. We moved on August 19, while I was still on a diet of mother’s milk, to Orange, a historic, rural community nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia’s piedmont. I can just imagine the hustle and bustle of this major move taking place in the short days following the release of my mother and I from Greater Baltimore Medical Center, which is actually in suburban Towson, not Baltimore city. As the story has been told to me, my mother and sister had been staying with friends while my father was in Virginia paving the way for the move even as my mother’s labor was induced. He apparently made it for the delivery. The next ten years in Orange proved to be relatively calmer than the first ten days of my life. We lived for three years in near perfect domestic tranquility in a ranch-style house situated on a five-acre lot on what had been in the last century a plantation before my parents separated in 1974. It was then that my sister, mother and I moved into a small apartment on the steep incline of Hickenbottom Hill, near downtown. Meanwhile, my father stayed in the sophisticated modern neighborhood out in the hills near the Rapidan River where my sister and I would visit him Sunday afternoons. During the week, I would anticipate the ride along the pebble-paved country road that stretched out through hilly and lush farmland, crossing fresh babbling brooks and passing by the banks of muddy rivers. I fondly recall being picked up every Sunday morning and attending Orange Presbyterian Church on Main Street before being whisked away for an afternoon in the country with Dad. My father would always slow as we passed a local swine farm along the way, yelling out “sooooooey!” to the pigs in the field. The street where I lived in town couldn’t have been more different than Spicer's Mill. Rather than being lined with patches of forest and homes on five- to 10-acre lots, it was lined with unremarkable apartment blocks and run-down town homes. Still, I preferred life in town and quickly took to the independence of town life. My favorite pastime was riding my bike down to the local market to buy Hubba Bubba, Big League Chew and Bazooka chewing bum. I would meet up with friends and ride until twilight, popping my gum and popping wheelies, trying to outdo the other roughneck neighborhood boys. Then I’d return home to my mother’s call, that went out to my sister and I but could be heard by all. “Aaaaaa-lli-suuuuun, Briiiiiii-uuuuun”. It was loud as the siren at the rescue squad. Yes, Orange is my true hometown, even if I only lived there for 10 years to the day. But my memory of this place is a romantic one to be sure. At the center of Orange I remember the historic town hall, and that Main Street still had an old-fashioned soda fountain and wasn't overrun with national chain stores. Sure, there was a 7-Eleven, a McDonald's and a Hardee's, and of course a Safeway grocery store and a Leggett's department store, but mostly the streets were lined with mom-and-pop shops where my mother would take my sister and I to "run errands". One of my favorite spots to go with my mom was a fabric store where she would buy patterns to make our clothes. See, my mom divorced my dad when I was three, and while we weren't poor, we had to be frugal. Money didn't grow on trees, or so I was told. Still, wherever we went mom would get us some kind of treat. At the fabric store once she bought me some yarn and a pattern to do a needlepoint project. The design was a cute little dog with a blue bird on his nose. Later, when I'd finished the project, she bought me some brown crushed velvet fabric and some stuffing to make it into a pillow. I slept with that pillow for years. Sometimes we would go to a store called Mack's, somewhere on the edge of town, along a stretch of road that for a few miles was a four-lane divided highway. There wasn't much traffic at the time, and I think it headed toward the smaller town of Gordonsville, but the Mack's shopping center was usually as far as we'd go. Inside, mom would buy us a kind of homemade dried fruit roll, a full decade before the commercial Fruit Roll-Ups would hit the market. This always made me feel special. Mom had a way of doing that, making you feel special. She made it a point to treat everyone equally, whether they were rich or poor, white or black, fat or thin. It didn't matter who you were or where you came from, she would always make a person feel they mattered to her, that they were important. One afternoon when I was shopping with her in Leggett's, looking for a pair of jeans, I got the typical "mom" treatment. I was always bigger than the other boys in my class. Not fat, I was just taller and thicker than the rest. This meant I had to wear "husky" jeans. This made me feel terrible. I was embarrassed because none of the other boys in the store were shopping for these husky jeans--they were just getting the regular old Wrangler and Lee jeans like everyone else. My mom turned this around and pointed out that the husky jeans made me special. I was growing up big and strong and had nothing to be ashamed about, she said. I could be proud of who I was. We only lived for a year in that a small apartment on Hickenbottom Hill. For $200 a month my mom got us a house on Peliso Avenue that might as well have been a mansion. We lived here for much of the time we spent in Orange. It was a huge four-bedroom house with a nice front porch, complete with a wooden swing, and a big grassy yard lined with a fence and big oak trees. On days that I was sick, or pretending to be sick, mom would take the day off of work and lay out in the back yard. She usually bought me some little toy to play with so I wouldn't be bored, and tried to keep me away from the television. But at 12:30, I would sit with her and watch The Young and the Restless, which had been a tradition of ours since before I started school. One of my first memories is from before my parents' divorce, watching The Young and the Restless with my mom in the downstairs den at the house on Spicer’s Mill. I remember seeing President Richard Nixon come on the TV, and mom was less than pleased. The year was 1974, and I guess now it had something to do with Watergate. Mom hated politics and couldn't stand having her favorite show being preempted by a special report. I think we left and went shopping, but I can't exactly remember. Most of my best memories of Orange involve my parents, and I guess my sister, although she was a bit more independent and usually did her own thing when she wasn't fighting with me. While visiting my father we would either go fishing at a neighbor's pond or just lie around on the hammock in Dad's huge screened-in porch while he tended to the barbecue or did yard work. During the week, Allison and I would be back with Mom, where the three of us lived together in that rented house across on Peliso, across the street from an old abandoned school. My mom worked for a time for an employment agency, oddly based in a Winnebago that sat parked in the school's parking lot. Orange Elementary School was just around the corner a block away, and I would spend every afternoon there on the playground with friends, spinning on the merry-go-round, running around in the woods or kissing my girlfriend Kelly Apperson, whose mom was my fourth grade teacher, beneath the pines. In 1980, when mom got remarried, we all moved to a house in the country. There, my sister and I got closer, mostly because we didn't like our new step-father and were no longer close enough to town to play with our old friends. We would usually rollerskate together on a thin stretch of sidewalk just outside the front door, or go down to the creek to play with our new neighbors. There were several kids in the neighborhood, if you could call it a neighborhood. It was really just countryside interspersed with houses every five acres or so, and there were often fields of tall grass, high fences with rusty nails, railroad tracks or swelled creeks to contend with if you wanted to make a visit. More often then not we would just congregate at the creek that formed a border between our properties and practice building damns, bridges or other engineering projects, led by the Harvey boys, Michael and Chris. Mike came to be my best friend, but unfortunately we moved away from Orange after just one year at our step-father's home. My father got remarried, too, around that same time. Soon after, my dad, his wife, Vicki, and my two stepsisters, Emmy and Jenny, moved to Olney, Maryland, located in suburban Washington, D.C. We would visit them on weekends and went to school back in the Shenandoah Valley during the week. In 1982, I finally got the brother I'd always wanted when Zac, who is 11 years younger than me, was born. He never got to know life in Orange, and probably barely remembers Winchester since after just five years there we moved a few more hours north to Pennsylvania. Now, Orange remains even a hazy distant memory for me, but one that is as rich and whole in some back part of my mind. My father keeps me up to date on what’s happening there; he still owns a commercial property near the McDonald’s and an apartment building across the street from the elementary school. Still, despite the distance and the lapse in years, memories of Orange provide the basis to my sanity even today. While I love cities, and the thought of living in such rural confines as Orange all but freaks me out today, it is an important part of my roots that keeps me grounded, no matter how far I roam from those quiet streets and streams.