Virtual Fences by Patricia Abbott
I grew up in a row house in the West Oak Lane section of Philadelphia. The tiny backyard was more mud than grass. Fences were few because barriers would’ve taken precious inches away from the lot. Clotheslines strung on metal poles were as close as we came to fences.
thistle shudders
when a bouncing ball
kneecaps it
There was one exception. Mrs. Pershing, an elderly widow, kept her dog in a small fenced-in area. If you got too close to his pen, which was easy to do in those narrow alleys, Buster went wild. Although there were other dogs on our street, most were kept inside, a practice endorsed by my father who had a set piece he delivered on the city being no place for dogs. His “How to avoid getting bitten by a dog” still troubles me today.
against steel fabric
woven into mesh
you press your nose
On summer nights, twenty or so of us played various games in the alley until dark. If left outside, Buster’s barking was incessant. If he barked too long or with a certain panic in his voice, Mrs. Pershing would appear with a baseball bat in hand and wave it at us. We were more afraid of her than the dog tied to the clothes pole. Over time, our cohort outgrew playing in the alley and turned it over to a new crop of ten-year olds. Buster would break the new crowd in but got hoarser and more lethargic as the years passed. He eventually outgrew his grit and lost most of his teeth. As did his master.
the dog struggles
rope twisted tight on a pole
the zing of metal
A few years later as I was passing Mrs. Pershing’s house, she tapped on her window. She was frail by then and not frightening to a sixteen-year-old. I went to her door, and she asked me if I could pick up a prescription at the drug store. We talked now and then after that small favor, and she confided how frightened she’d been living alone in the years after her husband died. With no children of her own, the kids in the alley scared her as much as she scared us.
Why didn’t I tell my parents about Mrs. Pershing and her dog? Why not alert them to the possibly explosive problem just down the street? It never occurred to me, nor to anyone else on Gilbert Street in the nineteen sixties. The alley was our province and we handled things in our own way. No matter what the issue, no one brought in a parent. Maybe children didn’t expect adult intervention in their lives. And maybe an elderly woman didn’t count on help from her neighbors either.
A neighbor or two
the priest fumbling for her name
ground frozen till spring
8 comments:
A little "Eleanor Rigby" by the end. I like it...and I admit i was lazy/sleepy enough to not look up haibun after your first few citations of it...seems a natural-enough follow-on genre with haiku ("talking" songs would be a kind of Anglophone correspondent, sometimes with actual singing punctuating the spoken passages, sometimes with just a sort of pre-rap/non-operatic nor oratorio recitative).
I know I more or less assumed that my parents were aware of what bad adult behavior was visited upon me/us when I was 5-7yo, or that there wasn't much they could do about it. By age ten, I think there was more a challenge in giving as good as one got from the more obstreperous teens and adults, though sometimes my friends would think me more foolhardy thus than most. The only time I've been actually shot at, albeit in a warning-shot capacity (I think), was when I was nine or ten and my friend and I were feeding long grass beyond her fence to a Hazardville, CT, neighboring farmer's horse, for the thrill of her enjoying us hand-feeding her.The farmer decided we Must be up to no good, and shot to shoo us, very effectively, rather than waste time asking us what the hell we thought we were doing.
I've had a couple more guns and at least one knife pulled on me at later dates, though happily so far not since once I got past my early 20s...
I really like this approach to poetry, Patti. I've never tried it myself, but it's a fascinating way to tell a story.
I like your story and I like that form. Your story made me look back to my childhood neighborhood at about that age.
I do think communication between adults and children in the fifties-sixties suffered from a lack of thinking such a thing was possible or a good idea even. My parents kept their secrets and I kept mine. I hope things changed by the seventies-eighties when I was a parent. I think my kids were not very interested in me then-and in fact, did not even know I had finally finished my BA degree in 1998.
Thanks for the feedback. Strangely enough, only two of us remembered to write about fences and the other woman wrote about fences as in crime. A senior group has its issues. I almost wrote about the August Wilson play but decided biographical was better.
Re fences as a theme or topic, it always surprised me how many different interpretations there would be for one theme.
I wish I could remember more about my childhood, and I often wonder how accurate my memories are.
I remember so much about mine but my parents seemed to remember little about theirs. Or at least they rarely talked about it. Sometimes it feels like I am still in that house on Gilbert Street or at least some part of me is. I can remember my footmarks on the pink wall of my bedroom because I read with them propped on the wall. It drove my mother crazy.
And tacking up some butcher paper would've solved the footprint problem...but would've robbed your interactions of that much zest...
I can still be mildly surprised by some of the revelations, or at least possible surmises in retrospect with current understanding of human behavior, casting back in memory can finally bring to the surface. I think my memories tend to be fairly accurate, in the First In, Last Out manner my brain seems to work in, as opposed to anyone-new's name or where I put, y'know, that thing I just had in my hand.
I think my parents were mostly afraid to talk too much about their youth, except in the occasional reminiscence of their great pleasures, and assumed that things Must be hunky-dory for me, and my sister eventually (she's 6.5 years my junior), since we never suffered the material depredation they too-often did. Well, no. As adults, some more trickled out from both of them, usually just between either one of them and me. I still don't know all of what they might've told Jeri instead, or similarly...and wonder how much they actually told each other.
I'd be amused to see a Wilson review-essay in that format as well...
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