MEMORIES

There's very little from my early life that I remember. Perhaps we seldom do recall things that happened when we were two or three or four unless they were of the momentous variety. I don't think anything of the momentous variety happened to me at that age.

But one thing I do recall as clearly as if it had happened just yesterday. It was a creek in Paxtang, PA, that  ran under Derry Street. My mom used to take us for walks along Derry Street and we used to walk over the creek.

It's official name is Spring Creek--I know because I just looked it up on the Paxtang Borough web site (http://www.paxtang.com/wiki/index.php/Street_Map_-_1/2_Size). But I called it broken bottle creek because there were a couple of broken, green glass bottles in the shallow creek. I think they were bigger than beer bottles; they might have been quart bottles of 7-Up or another soda. There were no plastic bottles in the early 50s, so soda came in glass bottles.

Spring Creek isn't very deep, so the bottles were easy to see on the rocky bottom. At the right angle the sun would glint off them as if they were emeralds.

We didn't live in Paxtang Borough, but rather on the City of Harrisburg side of 29th Street, which is the dividing line between the two municipalities. Derry Street is the main drag through the little borough, which is just 0.4 sq. mile in area and has a population of 1,500.

I have some vague recollections of the house on 29th Street. It was a 2-story row house a block or so up the hill from Derry Street. The house had a small, fenced-in backyard that backed onto an alley where the old man parked his car. Somewhere there's an album with a picture of me sitting on the hood of his pink Studebaker back there. Why would any man buy a pink car with a charcoal roof? What the hell was he thinking?

It's possible I'm confusing or conflating the 29th Street house with the one on Berryhill Street, which is about 15 blocks west of 29th Street. I can't remember where we lived first, but I guess my mom would know. I think it was Berryhill first and then 29th, but I could be mistaken. Doesn't really matter. Memories are often confusing things that don't quite reflect reality. But they are what they are.

In any case, the memory of broken bottle creek is crystal clear, even after more than fifty years.