It is the sweaty summer of 1952. The Boston Red Sox are well on their way to finishing 6th in the American League. Only the Saint Louis Browns and the Detroit Tigers offer a more pitiful set of players than our favorite Bosox.
As it was written in a poem long ago, “There is no joy in Mudville, or Boston, etc., etc.” for Ted Williams, Dom Dimaggio and Jimmy Piersall can’t keep up with the fast moving competition, i.e., the Yankees, the Indians and the Chisox.
That is, indeed, the over-riding bad news from the New England region. But, there is still a tiny element of good news to whet our appetites, or my appetite, at least. I have successfully managed another year of academic learning and social experience at l’Ecole Saint-Louis, a quiet place neatly tucked away in a residential neighborhood on Boisvert Street, off West Sixth Street in Centralville.
That, my friends, was the seventh grade, which everyone in my circle of friends claims to be the toughest of all the elementary school grades. According to folklore, it is the one that makes or breaks the aspiring student. How? Why? I can’t answer. I still scratch my head wondering from where this piece of cherished conviction emanated. Who created this local truth that tends to frighten all sixth graders?
Clearly, I will need to work out a summer program of fun and discovery with scheduled activities at Nick’s Happy Hour at Lakeview and some baseball practice at Richardson’s Park up the street off Hildreth. Life is loaded with mysteries. Usually, we refer to this park as “The Mayflower”, but why? No one ever asks why this large grassy territory loaded with tennis courts, baseball
diamonds and a wading pool has two official names. Maybe, there is a story here?
Since I often have gone to the lake with my cousins, Richard and Florence, it makes perfect sense for me to walk over the Merrimack (Merrimac, en français) River on the Aiken Street Bridge to check out the plans that Richard might have concocted about out next swimming adventure. Surely, we all could hop onto the Lakeview Avenue bus, on my side of the river, and find ourselves at the Lakeview drop-off point after a twenty minute bus ride. That is something to check up on.
But as I approach my cousin’s tenement at 53 Austin St., I see him standing outside, on the pavement, distressed over some happening, an accident, maybe?
Apparently, a ten-year-old boy, who is cousin Richard’s Austin Street neighbor went off with friends the previous weekend on a warm summer day to enjoy the calm of a few relaxing hours at this pleasant lake in Dracut, Massachusetts.
There are two, fresh water lakes – Lakeview and Red Top – each located about five miles from this boy’s inner-city surroundings where large, decrepit, three-story,
gray, urban, clapboard buildings constitute a busy neighborhood of mixed, retail businesses and human housing structures. Only Charles Dickens could do
justice in describing such neighborhoods as he did successfully in his stories about daily life in industrial London in the 1840s. Curiously, Mr. Dickens did visit
such dwellings during a visit to our Spindle City back in 18xx. He must have felt very much at home.
This young boy’s family lives in cramped quarters within the poverty-stricken, racial, ethnic confines of such gray, retail structures.
Perhaps, It is no wonder that this vigorous and energetic young man might be tempted to launch off on a bicycle excursion to enjoy a variety of affordable refreshments by the lake’s tree-studded shores.
In contrast, much that is verdant and alive is not found near his home. All that he seeks is an afternoon of relief from the city’s clammy, stagnant air that is so amply provided in his home grounds, that murky, Moody Street/Austin Street ghetto area.
But, since I seldom go to play with my cousins on Austin Street, the street decor is far too depressing, I know of this story only through the description that Richard related to me a day or two after the tragic event occurred.
Apparently, Olivier (a pseudonym I gave him) had been swimming in the cool waters of the lake in the general vicinity of Willowdale , near a well- frequented tavern and restaurant equipped with an inviting, wooden wharf extending well into the lake’s shinny surface.
Private homes in the area also have rowboats, canoes and wharf entry slots adjoining their terraced grassy backyards facing the waters’ edge. Olivier had been resting near the solid granite wall that acted as a breaker to any serious waves impacting the property’s stony edge when, without any warning, the wall’s very foundations were loosened by a wave, thus toppling the massive stonework onto the unsuspecting lad. Several thousand pounds of rubble crushed the vital organs of the energetic Olivier. His life was snuffed out in an instant of Mother Nature’s unprovoked fury.
As I reflect upon this lesson, I am patiently learning one of life’s central themes:
“Beware, there are hidden forces that can sweep away the moment and change your life and everything you cherish in a split second. Life can be a dizzying crapshoot, and you cannot always be ready for many eventual events. So, be
careful.”
In that split instant, Olivier learned about the strength and buoyant force behind those very same waves that had calmed and nourished him many times in summers past. For me, however, Olivier is someone that I never knew personally. He remains simply a foggy presence in the sepia images of my youth.
But like many other cases, much else in our daily life is also a curious and surreal picture-show that blends the ordinary with the bizarre.
Thank you Oliver for this poignant lesson from the days of my youth.
