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A New England Childhood - A Great Kid by Colin Sullivan
I aspired to be one thing: a great kid. What else besides a pre-cop or pre-fireman might a five year old be? Among my early career paths, a polite kid rode a superhighway to preschool success. Behavior I took for granted at that time, was taught to me by my parents. These lessons became habits. We might have been the farm team for Bill Sykes's ragamuffin pickpockets, but at least we addressed an adult in conversation using their last names preceded by Mr., Mrs. or Miss. Why? It's simple. Appearance was more important than content, hence the oft spoken "I stole Mr. Smith's hose." or, "I broke all of Miss Hutchins's car windows with a bat." or, "Msgr. O'Brien would kill me if he knew that I stuck hosts I stole from the sacristy and put them on the windshields of the cars in the lot before Mass."
We knew how to speak to adults.
As times have changed I notice among my own children the unwillingness to properly introduce themselves, mumbling instead of speaking and never offering to an adult males a sticky five year old paw. Never, except for their teachers have they called anyone Mr., Mrs., or Ms. The kids don't steal or randomly vandalize property, either. Yeah, it's a trade-off.
Take these little kids we were and drop them into the postcard perfect New England town and you'd have Burt and I (quaint New England humorists) in fifty years. Put them instead in the stubbornly dieing mill towns, where time had simply raced past the hand-made shoe industry, and you got us instead.
Our town, more like a small city, housing 75,000 people, had by the early sixties become more a bedroom community to Boston, than a stand alone industrial center. Many of the factories, Dennison Paper, General Motors, the women's prison and other large employers like them, still remained, but by the eighties they would be shuttered.
Route 9 divided Framingham; North housed the middle and lower middle class; some pockets becoming more established and wealthier, but far more of the neighborhoods seemed stuck in that post-WWII sprawl. South of Route 9 is where the poor lived. Framingham was an enormous spread of houses, one atop the other yet at the same time, subdivided into separate and distinct neighborhood, each with too many kids; each bordered by 5-9 neighborhoods just like it; each with its' own playground. The boundaries between neighborhoods were natural: streams, hills woods, ponds, an aqueduct, railroad tracks, and busy streets. You'd not have been friends with every kid in your immediate neighborhood, but you'd have been an allies against children from another neighborhood.
In all sports, a child played on his neighborhood's teams. We played what we called Park's League. All but the smallest neighborhoods had a football, baseball, hockey, and street hockey team. We managed this, created schedules, championships, try-outs (you played on your team, if you made your team). Older kids, high schoolers, usually tipped the balance. Oakvale, our neighborhood had 3 starters on Framingham North, and one starter on Marion HS (the Catholic HS). We were a good team. I played second base, making the team in fifth grade. We were a very good team, but never won a championship in baseball.
If God had decided to create this place, he'd have dropped the entire sprawl exactly where it was, on an old orchard. My neighborhood always smelled like apples.
The most important lessons we learned growing-up in this environment were taught by our parents and neighbors:
Be a good kid;
Be loyal to your family and your neighborhood;
Hate a bully...beat him senseless ganging-up on him until he changed his ways. Never tell on him.
Never tell on anyone. The neighborhood can take care of itself.
Right or wrong, a kid from your neighborhood could ALWAYS rely on you to support him against outsiders. If he was wrong, and the 2 of you took a hellacious beating, the neighborhood would square him away for his sins: getting you beaten-up, and whatever he had done to ignite the initial problem.
BIG LESSON: DON'T CRY, WHILE or COMPLAIN. If you kept your mouth shut endured what you had to, and solved your own problems, you'd rarely have to call upon your neighborhood for support. The same was true of your parents. Retribution from the neighborhood, or your parents could be swift and severe if it turned out that you could have dealt with your own problem. Maybe that's one reason I'm such a crummy patient today.
I slipped and slid quite a bit here. I'm trying to sketch the framework of the first of my 2 part childhood. I find lessons today in many of the situations that delved in my early years. God, bless us all; my parents and those kids were your angels. It's humbling how often they were right. We are His kids; some of us had the additional benefits that came of a rough and tumble youth. God bless, Colin
I became disabled at age 46 after 2 failed spinal surgeries. I married my college sweetheart. We have four kids. I'm rebuilding my life after having been diagnosed with Arachnoiditis, an incurable, progressive syndrome causing loss of many ordinary bodily functions and characterized by grinding, incessant nerve pain, like a toothache but a lot more severe. I walk with a cane and choke down a host of pills, many of them narcotic.
About the Author
I built a web-site, Chronic Pain Lifestyle that I write with 3 people who suffer the same condition. Our page is not a forum, nor is it a source of medical information. Our page is about how we're rebuiling our lives. Sometimes we're funny, other times sad. We mix nostalgia and disappointment with hope, experiences and fellowship.
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