Lonely on the Street Where We Live

05.12.09

IT was sensitive watching Mom become the old-timer on her street. I had my own family by then, was busy with work, busy with our four children, busy living 250 miles away, so, so Baroque that I'd get back to visit her just a few times a year.

"Who's living in the Nankin house now?" I'd ask.

"Oh, I don't know," she'd say.

"When did the Hurleys move?" I'd ask, remembering the daughters my dad acquainted with to call the five beautiful Hurley girlies. "Does the new family have kids?"

She thought she'd seen children, but wasn't unswerving.

It bothered me that she wasn't keeping track any more. She lived on that street in Quincy, Mass., nearly half a century. It was the inner artery of my childhood. When we were little and didn't have money for a second car, my younger brother and I would walk up the alley with her to the First National to do the grocery shopping. To make the time go faster and educate us -- Mom was always educating us -- she'd have us judge the number of the next house. "That's 192 ... 196 ... 200 ... 204 ... " my 4-year-old brother called out, long before I had figured out the trick.

Source: Pittsburgh Post Gazette