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Childhood memories

soupcan Mar 06 2008 07:42 AM

I took this from the thread on Lunchbucket's book in the Member :Promotion forum Benjamin Grimm wrote: ="Matthew Silverman"]“Shea Stadium is one of the last familiar places in my life,” Silverman said. “Someone I don’t know lives in the house I grew up in, and now I have my own family, and I live in a new house, in a new town. But Shea, at least for another season, it’s still there.” Me too. Now that my grandmother has died and her house is being sold, Shea is the last remaining place from my childhood that I can still visit. I had an odd experience yesterday. MetroNorth train service was suspended for the afternoon/evening rush because of a building collapse near the 125th street station. Instead of waiting for that to be fixed, I borrowed my sister's car - she lives in Manhattan - and drove home. Yesterday morning, I drove back in to return her car. My sister lives on 105th street and Broadway in a building directly across Broadway from the building where I spent most of my childhood. The walk from my sister's garage to the subway brought me past my elementary school. I literally made the same walk from the school towards my old building that I did when I was in 1st thru 6th grade. When I got to Broadway and made a left to get on the subway at 103rd street it was the exact same route I took when I would go to my Junior High School on the lower east side. As I was walking with my briefcase over my shoulder, newspaper folded under my wing and coffee in hand I realized that this was also the exact same route my dad (and grandfather before him because the apartment I grew up in was the same one my dad grew up in) used to take when he was my age and going to work downtown via the subway. Maybe some of you live in the same neighborhood you grew up in and things like that are no big deal, but it made feel more than a little melancholy.

cooby Mar 06 2008 06:42 PM

My mom lives in the house she was born in; I grew up there too. My elementary school was Flemington School, the same one she and my dad went to, and I had some of the same teachers that they did. Anyhow. I "graduated" from sixth grade in about 1970, I suppose. We girls all wore our granny dresses. The school went a on for few more years, then was closed and was used by the school district for various purposes -- head start, special education, business offices. It's a big yellow brick building with a enormous playground and just miles and miles of hallway, or so I thought. In 1992 or so, when my son wasn't even in kindergarten yet, I was halfheartedly looking for employment when I was hired as an office temp by the school district. I was assigned for a few weeks of typing IEPs and the office I was employed in was in my old elementary school, in MY third grade classroom. Imagine peeing in the same restrooms you last used as a 9 year old, walking down the same hallways, looking out the same windows that were once level with your chin. It was unbelievable. I stood there one day looking out at the playground and a little head start student stopped to talk to me-- "think it'll snow?" Soupcan, I can relate to walking around in the same lawn, the same sidewalk, the same playground (now a parking lot). I half expected to see Mr. Sweeley any minute. And Doug Sheets, so we could skip out and dig holes in the stone wall...