life on the ridge
7182 Chestnut Ridge Road. The house I grew up in.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Included in Just a Little Rain, by Bob Flournoy (copyright 2005).
Now that I’m an adult, I realize how different my childhood really was—at least for the 1970s. Back then, I thought everyone lived next door to their aunts & uncles and that life was all about baseball in the backyard in the summers, and freezing the ball field for pick-up hockey in the winters. It’s funny how the past doesn’t really change, but your perspectives on the past are shaped by present-day events.
I came from a broken family at a time when divorce wasn’t quite so common. The thing was, it was common to me—I was four years old, so I don’t really remember much more than Dad lives somewhere else and I sleep there sometimes. We lived with my grandmother in the house her husband built. I say “her husband” because my grandfather died two years before I was born. I’ve seen pictures… He looked like someone I would’ve wanted to know.
My grandfather was apparently quite a guy, because he bought all the neighboring lots and gave them to my grandmother’s brothers and sisters as wedding gifts. So there we were, one family in four straight houses on the outskirts of the town of Lockport, NY—home of the Erie Canal’s famous locks, the world’s widest bridge, Reid’s Drive-In (where you can still bring a date and eat lunch for about five bucks) and about the only thing wedged between Buffalo and Canada.
I was the youngest kid around and my mom had to work, so I spent a lot of time with my grandmother. We watched Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Romper Room and The Uncle Bobby Show together (the star of the latter, on Canada’s CFTO Channel 9, was a local favorite who I now look back on as a freakish old dude who’s more than a little scary). I can still hear her drilling me about the letters and numbers. I just couldn’t seem to learn enough from her. She was—and is—all about saving things and doing the most with the least. And she had the coolest stuff of anyone I know. Having grown up during the Depression, she saved absolutely everything—she even washed and re-used paper plates!
I learned more during those days, I think, than I learned in my first few years of school. In fact, it was my grandmother who first taught me how to play baseball. She was home and I wanted to learn to play, so we went out to the backyard with a ball and played catch. Every day, we would go out and practice. It confounded the neighbors a bit, who were all right-handed, because my grandmother is a lefty. So, naturally, she taught me how to play left-handed. So, I never had to worry about hand-me-down gloves. I still look back on those days and picture myself as a kid in the backyard, tossing the ball around with a 60-year old woman in a housecoat and a hairnet. Even with that uniform, she was still pretty damned good!
We all played baseball back then—moms, aunts, uncles, cousins, and siblings. My uncles built a backstop in the back corner of our yard, and our home field was the site for some spirited family entertainment. I can still remember the summer we cleared the area for what would be our ball field. There were about ten of us with our generation’s weed whackers –scythes – chopping away at the weeds, fending off field mice, mosquitoes, ticks and local snakes (who got pretty large, even though they were harmless).
Most people think it can’t get that hot in Lockport, NY, but let me tell you, that summer, it felt like we were working on the surface of the sun. We couldn’t wait for the occasional lemonade and bug spray break and the end-of-day trip to Aunt Eva & Uncle Barty’s house (two doors down), where our family pool lived.
There was always pop in Aunt Eva’s downstairs fridge (that’s soda, or Coke, for those people challenged by Western NY vernacular), and Hershey’s miniatures in the candy dish. There were all sorts of other treasures in Aunt Eva’s house too. I vividly remember taking the walk through the 70s beads (like Greg had on The Brady Bunch) into the little bathroom. There were all sorts of funny, little, off-color trinkets, and a sign with some sage advice:
“If you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie, wipe the seatie.”
I’ve never seen that sign anywhere else, so I’m thinking maybe my aunt wrote it herself. She and my Uncle Barty were about the best people I’ve ever met. Aunt Eva was not quite five feet tall—even with the beehive—but she was an absolute spitfire. She had a wonderful sense of humor and a great singing voice, but as long as she lived, I never once saw her go in that swimming pool. Everyone always said she didn’t want to get her hair wet, but I always wondered if there wasn’t something more to it.
Uncle Barty was originally from Canada and had lost a piece of one finger in World War II. He was always in the yard, trimming a tree or cutting the grass. It seemed like he cut that grass every day. When he wasn’t working the yard, he was cleaning the pool, trying to keep it spotless for us and all of our friends. If there were enough of us there, he’d show up with a pocket full of coins and start throwing them in the water. I’m not sure why, but we just loved diving for change. He was my surrogate father growing up, the man I looked to for advice and as a role model for right and wrong. The day he died is still the worst day of my life.
Maybe it was the Canada thing, but Uncle Barty was a huge hockey fan. I think that fueled our love for the game, and I know it contributed to the various home rinks we had over the years. That all started one late fall day, when we (the kids) decided on our own that if we shoveled the snow out to form a rectangle and then flooded Uncle Phil’s front yard, we could make our own hockey rink. It was a pretty ambitious project, since the oldest among us in this conspiracy, my cousin Chris, was about 12. As sure as Buffalo winters are cold, our efforts paid off, and we had a little rink to play on. I was most often the goalie during that first winter. I was five and hadn’t yet learned to skate, so I taped some foam rubber to my legs, and with a hockey glove and stick in one hand & a metal garbage can lid in the other, I defended the area between the two empty crates that served as a net.
My cousin Mike, who is about 10 months older than I am, taught me how to skate and play hockey that winter, no small feat for a six year old. He had started playing on a team, which made me long for real hockey too. When I started playing a year later, we decided we would both go pro and play for the Sabres. Ah, the dreams of youth.
Over the years, our ambitions and home rinks grew together. By the time we were in high school, we had a rink about half the size of a pro arena behind my Uncle Cam’s house. The uncles had pitched in and rented a backhoe, and they dug out the area. We all had fun that first fall, barefoot and knee-deep in water, pulling every plant out at the roots to make sure we would have a smooth surface when it froze. My uncles and older cousins ran electricity and hung lights at either end of the rink, and they built a small shack with space heaters so we wouldn’t have to trek to and from the ice on skates. Our nets were fashioned out of steel piping and chain link fence, and we spray-painted the pucks bright orange so we could find them easier in the dark.
That rink was my sanctuary all through my young life. Even after we moved out of Gram’s house and into our own, I would go there to skate. I’d stop in to see Gram, have some hot chocolate with her, and spend hours at a time working on skating, stick-handling, and shooting. The one-on-one games were the most fun, matching skills with Mike, who I’ve never quite been able to beat. I am an inch or two taller than he is, though, so I guess that counts for something!
Mike was always one age group up on me, so we never officially played together until high school. I remember how proud Uncle Barty was to finally see us on the ice for the same team. It was my freshman year and Mike’s sophomore season, fall of 1985. We didn’t play on the same line, since we were both centers, but we did get to skate together on special teams.
Uncle Barty was convinced we would both make it all the way to the NHL. I can still see him in the same spot, behind the goal at the old Kenan Center, watching through the scratched-up Plexiglas. He was there for about a month of the season, and then, in an instant, everything changed. On October 26 of that year, he got up from the dinner table, clutched his chest and then fell to the floor. Tragically for all of us, he never got up.
I wanted so desperately to make the big time, to make him proud just one more time, but it wasn’t to be. I was never quite good enough, and Mike & I together are about big enough to make one NHL player. I realized though, that I could honor his memory in other ways.
It’s been about the joy of the game for a long time, now. I’m 34 and I still play hockey. I see a lot of my uncle in Wayne, the guy who runs our men’s league team; I guess that’s why we get along so well. I also coach—one of the great joys I have, and I think about Uncle Barty every time I step on the ice.
Those years on Chestnut Ridge Road have really made their mark on my life. Gram turned 90 this year, and I recently found out that she’s selling her house—a house she’s lived in for over 60 years and my home for the first decade of my life. It’s sad to think about someone else living there, but I guess all things must change.
My son, Jake, bears Uncle Barty’s name in the middle, and every once in a while, I see the same twinkle in Jake’s eye as I used to see in Uncle Barty’s—that little bit of mischief under the surface, and I know he’s there, watching and protecting us.
My daughter, Emily, was born on April 9, a day after Gram’s birthday. We scheduled Emily’s arrival for April 8, hoping they might share a birthday. But Emily would have none of it — she wanted her own day. So much like Aunt Eva… so much like Gram.
The past was a long time ago… but maybe it isn’t so far away.
Cheers!
