Corner Lot

I once placed key moments in my life on narrow slips of green steno pad paper, pinning them to my bedroom wall. I had hoped to find a story there, some thread I could follow. For a year those words were the first and last thing I saw while laying in my bed. Those memories offered fuel for my dreams, and quiet moments of remembrance during my days.

In Texas, I remembered running along the perimeter of the dirt backyard at our family’s first rental following the move from Chicago. That was Big Spring. Austin began with the melodramatic scene of me running after my ex-fiance through the rain swept parking lot of my first apartment. Chicago has many, but one particular memory was triggered by a thick metal strip I noticed as I sat waiting at a nearby railroad crossing earlier today.

My family lived in a three story brick building owned by my grandfather. My grandfather and grandmother lived on the first floor, my aunt on the second, and we lived on the third. Two long flights of darkly painted wood stairs led to the world that was our block, deep in the heart of the inner city. At the extremities of this world I lived in there was Walsh Elementary School two blocks away, Halsted and the greater city beyond a block to our left. To our right were factories just after an alley where the bigger kids played stickball. And just beyond that was a corner lot, complete with an abandoned set of railroad tracks. One day I would venture beyond it to the corner store returning glass bottles for a refund, but that’s a different memory.

This day I came across a metal wagon wheel, red paint resisting the dull spread of rust, hard rubber tire holding firm to its rim. Detached from its cart, but otherwise whole. I was only 8 years old, thereabouts, but feeling it’s weight I knew it would roll well along the grit and glass between the rails and ties. With a finger along the narrow surface of the tire, I let that wheel fly, picturing its perfect arc and effortless spin from my fingertip to the ground. I imagined, I wished it to lightly trip across timber and stone and keep on rolling till it was beyond sight. It did, but only for about a half a blocks distance. It was a good roll. Still, I had someplace to go, and I told myself I would find it the next day and roll it once again. I told myself it would be safe where it was, that no one would find it, or take it. That this imperfectly perfect wheel would wait for me.

I told myself that again as I passed those same tracks on the way home from the store. It’s funny, thinking of it then, and even now, there is an attached sadness to the thought, as if I knew I wouldn’t go back, or that it wouldn’t be there. Or that bringing home a rusty wheel from a broken cart would hold no meaning for anyone else aside from me. I preferred to hold onto the hope of a reunion. That was the nice part, the part that kept me warm. That would always be mine.

I went back to my home some thirty years later. Walsh’s playground was redone in concrete. Halsted seemed still and gray and tired. Some houses were gone, and others wore new glass, their shoulders adorned with stone that definitely came from somewhere else. One factory remained, but I doubt they made rags there, too clean. And the ballplayer’s alley was now green and soft, and meant for little kids.

I saw the edge of the corner lot. It was overgrown with tight bundles and clumps of weeds, maybe grass. And not at all patchy, no thin spots, at least not from where I stood. The broadleaves and blades, of a very questionable green, held tight the secrets of the ground beneath. I wondered if the rails were still there. If broken glass still made the soil shine and sparkle. Surely that’s why nothing had ever been built in its place.

I imagined walking into that field of green, feeling for the hard scrabble ground beneath my shoes, perhaps kicking at the undergrowth to stub my toe on steel.

I wondered what I might find if I followed that surviving steel. What if I went just a little further, a half block into that corner lot…?

I stopped, my body buffeted by the very idea of it. I turned around, and walked back to my car. It was better to keep that next thought my quiet wish, my hope.