In the alley, we all played together, despite what age we were. My closest friend was almost three years younger than I was. I had friends in the alley that were a little older, too. The only one who was my age and grade in school was Karl. He mostly kept to himself, and he was a boy, so we didn’t do much together in the alley, or in school. For the most part, we had different school friends, based on our age. We also had different school personas. I might not even barely speak to an alleykid at school, or at least not let on how well I knew them. This was mostly because the ones near my age were boys—Karl, Alex, Ken, Sean, etc. The girls and I were barely in the same school together. Char did skip the second grade, though, so then we had one extra year at Parkwood Upjohn together, and we would jump rope together at lunch-time sometimes.

When we moved to Kalamazoo, Zeke and I went to different schools. First we went and registered me at Oakwood elementary, a lower elementary building in the Oakwood neighborhood. It was a small, cheery building, with a portable classroom for my favorite subject, music. I fell in love with this school at once, and couldn’t wait to start school in September. Then we took Zeke to Parkwood Upjohn, an Upper elementary building with Kindergarten, too. Zeke was a Kindergartner, and I thought this school was even better than Oakwood. It was big, cheerier than Oakwood, and within walking distance of our house. Zeke was registered for afternoon kindergarten, and Sam and Charlotte were in his class.

I had to walk to Fairview school, an old, closed down lower elementary sized building, to catch the bus. On the first day of school, I crossed Parkwood, and walked down the non-hill part of Glenwood to get to the bus stop. I don’t know how I knew the way. I turned at Inkster, and got on University. University crossed Edgemoor. There, I met Penny and Amy. Penny Treece lived on the right side of University on Edgemoor in a yellow house. She had an above ground swimming pool, too. Amy Reyberg lived on the left hand corner of Edgemoor and University. She had a tee-pee pointed club house in her back yard. They were in my grade at Oakwood, and we walked the remainder of the way to the bus stop, which was down University hill from their street. University hill ran right into Fairview school. I noticed that Sean Smith had the same lunch box that I had, with the Flintstones on the its metal top. Amy and Penny were friendly enough to me, but they were best friends to each other, so they didn’t sit by me on the bus. I met Toni Wykstra there, and we rode together to school many times. Toni lived on Westnedge, like me, so we could walk almost all the way home together.

Her house was ½ a block south of mine on the same side of the street. It turned out that children that lived on the other side of Westnedge went to school at South Westnedge school, further south down Westnedge, for 1-3rd grade. One day it was raining while we waited for the school bus. Tom Cox and Jeff Bullard, the two bus stop bullies, just ran and played in that rain! They got soaked, and then shook their heads like dogs, trying to spread the wet around. I didn’t’ like them. They did things like spit at other buses that went by, and talk mean to everybody at our bus stop. Sometimes David Kapelle tried to hang out with them. He wasn’t tough enough to be a bully, but I didn’t like him. He told me that he used to live in my neighborhood. “Oh yeah. I know all about your neighborhood. I used to live right across the alley from you. I had to get out of there!” I was so glad that he hadn’t lived there while I was there.

I knew that the Lyles’, who lived in our house before us, had kind of terrorized the neighborhood. Sylvester, their youngest son, a year younger than I was, had tried to burn down the house. He’d also freely walked into the next door neighbor’s house and took stuff, until they put up a fence. This, of course, happened before we moved in. We had to live down their bad reputation. The house was a bargain because of Sylvester’s fire. We had a lot of clean up to do in their wake. Anyway, David Kappelle seemed to have it in for me because of that stuff. At school, I was the new kid, quiet and trying to blend into the woodwork, which was hard to do, because I really liked school, and most kids didn’t.

In the alley, I was bold, and loud, creative, and excited. It was like night and day. When I finished 3rd grade, and Zeke finished Kindergarten, we switched schools. He then walked to the bus stop with Sam and Charlotte, and I walked to Parkwood Upjohn with Toni Wykstra. I’d cross Parkwood again and this time walk down Westnedge to the big stucco house with the glassed in front porch. The Wykstra’s house looked a little like ours, porchwise. I’d get Toni, and we’d walk to the crossing guard on the corner of Westnedge and Inkster.

He’d help us cross the street, and we’d take Inkster to Park street, where the school was. There was one house on the way with a white dog that would bark at us everyday. I don’t remember that dog ever taking a vacation. That house was a block away from the school. Then we’d walk the other block, and run into the crossing guard that always asked me to play my instrument for him. I started playing the cello in fourth grade, followed by bass in fifth and sixth grades, so I usually had a large instrument to lug the two blocks to school, and this crossing guard always nagged me to whip it out on the street and give him a solo. I just laughed and enjoyed the attention.

I remember being late to Parkwood Upjohn (we just called it Parkwood) most of the time. I would usually put off doing my homework until the day it was due, and then I’d be late to school trying to finish it. I got grace from my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Lyman. She was wonderful. We all loved her.

I knew many of the same people at Parkwood that I had met at Oakwood, but we also got the kids from the other side of Westnedge, like Carol Bullock. She also played the cello, but it wasn’t her first time seeing the instrument at school. She took private lessons, and was very good. Her father was the head of the music school at WMU, and her mother was a piano teacher. She was smart and haughty. She was also in my Girl Scout Troop.

The year before, I’d been in Brownies with Mrs. Shauman, a rich woman from the Bronson blvd neighborhood, on my side of Westnedge. The Junior Troop was on the other side of Westnedge with Mrs. Bullock, (Carol’s mother), and Mrs. Wolfe, the mother of another classmate of mine, Perry Wolfe. These were at-home mothers who also ran a daycare out of Mrs. Wolfe’s home. They had plenty of ideas of Girl Scout activities, and we did a lot of things, including going to camp in the fall, and going to Greenfield Village in Dearborn, near Detroit. I didn’t like most of the girls in the troop, however, neither as a Brownie nor as a Junior. Despite the skills I learned, I quit Girl Scouts as soon as my life got too busy with plays, puppetry, music, soccer, ballet, whatever extra curricular activity I had.

After we graduated from Parkwood, we went to that funny named school Jim Miller mentioned. When I met him, I asked him what school he went to. He said, “South.” I was like, South? South what? He said, “South Junior High.” Now that sounded important. Junior High. It was a school for 7-9th grade in the fall of 1979, when I entered South.

Toni Wykstra and Laura Huster would come and get me everyday for us to walk to South Junior High. Laura Huster was a girl from the other side of Westnedge that I’d met at Parkwood. Sometimes I’d go with Laura and Jenny Fast, too. Those were the girls that moved into Mrs. Friedmann’s house. I remember that Laura, who was very short and very small, my age, was always saying “Father tried to make me eat this, can you believe?” as she threw her smuggled breakfast out. I don’t remember her ever eating anything. She was pretty negative, always complaining, and anti-everything. She and I grew apart after she started dating Jim Fett, a boy I hadn’t gotten along with in sixth grade reading class. Jenny, Laura’s big sister, wasn’t as sarcastic as Laura, and we used to hang out in English class. We were in Mr. Beverly’s Gifted and Talented English class at South Junior High together. She was an 8th grader, but it was an alternative class, meaning there were kids from 7-9th grade in the class. I already knew two others: James Baraka, who’d been on my soccer team, and Eve Goodwin, one of the few friends I’d made in Girl Scouts. She was a ninth grader, while James was in the 7th grade with me.

South was down Glenwood hill, a turn to the left, a right on Crosstown parkway, and then a hike up Maple Street, across the street from the YMCA. It didn’t take more than 10 minutes to get there, but I was usually late; this time because of my bass sometimes, but usually because Junior High was so scary. You had to dress just right, say just the right thing, hang out with the right kids, not stick out, no matter what. I really stuck out, too.

Sometimes in the summer, we’d go to our schools to play in their playgrounds. It was so different to be there of our own free will. We went to Fairview a lot, because we didn’t have to cross Westnedge to get there, and the bike ride down University hill was fun. We’d usually stop at Law Lane on our way. Law was a detour from the playground, though. You’d turn right on Edgemoor, instead of going straight past Edgemoor. I don’t know what the appeal was of Law Lane. Char really liked it. I don’t remember whether she had any friends there or not. It was a little dead end with a yapping dog, if I’m not mistaken. We’d just ride in circles on that street. Char had a rival for the reddest hair in the neighborhood, Ian. I think he lived on Law. Anyway, after riding around Law Lane, we’d go back on Edgemoor to University and ride the hill straight to the playground at Fairview.

It was old and rusty. It had one of those cherry drop curved ladder things, though. I really liked that thing when I was in school. You could climb up to the top and hang with your feet on one side and your arms on the other. The best part was having a friend come up the other side and hang from the other two sides. You’d make a basket with both of your bodies to hang someone else from? I think that was the point. That was one of those things that kids talk about having seen but never having done. It was ever a goal to do that thing.

This playground also had a long monkey bar, like the one at the Hammerskjold’s playground. After having made monkey bars a science at Hammerskjold’s I really liked the chance to practice these skills whenever and wherever I could. Nashville was monkey bar country. When I moved there, I didn’t know how to do any of that stuff, but everybody spent their whole recess hanging upside down. I had really liked swinging and jumping out of swings, (must be a Chicago thing), but I quickly learned Monkey bar science in Nashville. Soon mommy was making matching panty covers for all my little dresses, so I could hang upside down no matter what I was wearing. We did all the swinging from bar to bar too; so much so that I had holes in my palms, replaced by very proud calluses. I had a leg up on the playground in such things as that when we moved to Kalamazoo. Monkey bars just weren’t as big here.

At Oakwood, they’d had homemade stilts for us to walk on. I spent many a recess trying to perfect that skill. I did, too. I don’t remember what the ‘thing’ was up here on the playground. All I remember is when we thought we were too old for the equipment; somewhere after 4th grade, or even during 4th grade.

It’s a shame, too, because the playground at Parkwood was a lot of fun. It seemed real decadent going there from the alley in the summertime. That’s probably because, without the crossing guard, we’d often try to run across Westnedge from my house, a very busy intersection, when the street goes from two-way to one way, or one way to two way, depending on your direction. It was hard to get across, and we didn’t attempt it much, what with the Jim Miller legend going around. It’s just that Parkwood was so much closer to our house than the long way we used to get to school. It was just two blocks east of our house.

We loved the merry-go-round they had there. That thing was old and rickety, too. It must have had at least two big holes in the wood on top. I think it was disintegrating wood, too, a splinter magnet. There were many stories of people being thrown off, maybe Jim Miller breaking his leg trying to stop it, etc. It just made it more fun. The Merry-go-round was a low to the ground wooden circle. There was a pole in the center of it, and to play, you’d hold on to the side with all your friends and run around in circles as fast as you could, and then jump on top at basically the same time. There was no counting, or telling people when to jump on.

Everybody just knew when the right time to jump was. You’d have to hold on tight, or it would throw you across the playground. Really thrill seeking, or foolish kids would try to jump off, or fall off. I was really scared of that. I was also scared of getting sucked down under the merry-go-round and hitting the pole underneath the wooden disc. I don’t know what I was afraid of. It must have been the broken leg.

I used to think that a broken leg or any broken bone was an inevitable part of childhood, but I never got one. I never got to wear a cast. If I had known that I didn’t have to break a bone, I might have taken more chances. I think the kids at Parkwood quit playing on the playground after they took that merry-go-round down. They didn’t replace it with anything. They had a cherry drop jungle gym, and swings, but nothing at Parkwood was anywhere near as fun as that merry-go-round. We had to go there at least twice a summer to play with it while it was there.

We had our vacant lot, where we played our daily game of kickball (or at least several times a week game), but sometimes we’d go down to South to play a game that required more space. We didn’t make it an annual thing, but went down there to play softball a few Fourth of July’s. This was the 70s, when there were no seatbelt laws, and you could pile as many people in a car as you could. We piled into the back bed of someone’s pickup truck to make the trip to South. Yes, we could have walked, but we were carrying equipment, and grownups besides.

The backyard of South is a huge field. It is built beside a marsh, so you didn’t want to be there when it rained, but it was plenty of space for softball. In fact there were several baseball diamonds in that big field, and it was usually full of teams playing or practicing. We’d have no problem finding a field to play on the 4th, though. I wasn’t very good at this game, and Zeke was good at everything athletic; it was a lot of fun for everyone.

Daddy turned out to be an expert, too. Mommy didn’t actually play. I don’t remember any mommies playing, but there were plenty of people on the teams. Those were the days when the Miller boys were still at home, and the Aldags, too. It didn’t matter if you never got a hit; it was still thrilling to have more space to enjoy that alley vibe.