The grey, cyclone gate squeaked as I stepped through it from the yard of my 1960s childhood into the Berwyn alley. Zigging weeds reached through zagging lines of broken concrete.
Across from our garage, Mr. Haney’s scratched, yellow door moaned, “Paint me!” I looked left – south – at the telephone pole rising to where various lines from the houses came together.
And there it was at the top: the skeleton, hanging with its arms outstretched along a horizontal board, its head tilted, its chin resting on the upper bones of its chest.
As I gazed, astonished, his eyes flickered life, locking onto mine. After a minute-long stare, his arms freed themselves from the plank to which they’d been strapped. He proceeded to slide down the pole with trembling energy.
When he touched the alley’s hard surface, he dropped to four legs. He spawned brown, floppy ears, claws and a wagging tail.
Suddenly, he bounded toward me like a lost friend. He nuzzled my feet. I stroked his thick, smooth fur as memories of walking and tossing broken sticks in the park came to life …
How does one’s past reach into one’s present after it’s been neglected, buried or hung in shadowy effigy? Sometimes, it does so through dreams.
During my midlife (my late 30s and early 40s), I, the progressive planner and professor, was pressed by my inner, repressed, working-class, Berwyn self to finally show him some love. For years at meetings or conferences, when someone in Pennsylvania or Indiana would ask where in the Chicago area I was from, I would say, “Oak Park.”
Close enough, right?
After all, people had heard of Oak Park … the legacy of Frank Lloyd Wright, progressive leadership on race, Hemingway’s birthplace. I had grown up only three blocks south of Roosevelt. I went to Fenwick for two years. Later, in 1974-75, I had lived in an apartment on South Boulevard while working as an intern in the Community Relations Department (CRD).
Moreover, Berwyn had been aligned with Cicero during the 1970s against Oak Park’s efforts to integrate racially. In fact, while with the CRD, I filed a report against my parents’ realtor for the subtly disparaging remarks I heard her make to them about Oak Park’s growing openness (https://www.oakpark.com/2020/06/18/peeling-back-the-layers-of-racial-bias/). I had incentives for diminishing my identity with my hometown.
But my deeper self knew who I really was. And as can happen in midlife, the guy I was while growing up, who I thought I had transcended in order to build a professional career, demanded attention.
The dream that the verse recounts above occurred at a time when the old alley behind our former house was a buried memory. The boney fellow hanging from the pole represented some neglected but living manifestation of the Berwyn guy who knew that alley as part of his neighborhood. Grateful for being noticed, at least while my ego slept, he hurried down, touched home ground, and transformed into a creature made for re-bonding.
From then on, the Berwynite and Oak Parker in me have clamored for reconciliation.