A Suitcase Full of Bricks

Just because the monkey's off your back, don't mean the circus has left town.
George Carlin

I left home for the first time at fourteen, then again at sixteen, and for good at eighteen. It wasn't the solution I'd hoped for but it helped - home had long been a toxic environment and a geographic cure was better than doing nothing at all. It took years before I realized a simple truth, that troubles travel with you like a suitcase filled with bricks, that no matter who you marry or how far you run, you always keep that suitcase close by. Sooner or later, you have to open it, unpack it, confront it.

I was raised in a small town just outside Boston - a small city, by Louisiana standards - and our neighborhood was divided by the dirt road that led to Spy Pond. On our side there were single family homes with lawns and backyards and tree lined sidewalks, not wealthy by any means, but not struggling. The other side began with two family homes that eventually led to the triple deckers near the Cambridge line, almost all rent properties and while not poor by any means, not exactly middle class. Arlington was bordered by historic Lexington and Concord with their mansions and tennis courts and country clubs - Belmont, a small bedroom community of old, genteel homes - and Cambridge with it's mix of industry and elite, strip joints and universities, old money and bohemians.

Our house, white with black shutters, a one car garage and cyclone fencing on three sides, sat on a busy street and was as ordinary as could be - three bedrooms, a bath and a half, full basement - a house like any other in what was considered a nice neighborhood. The milkman came every couple of days, my brothers earned their allowances by mowing the front lawn, two dogs and an old orange cat ( and an occasional parakeet ) were in residence, the mailman knew our names. Once or twice a year an immense oil truck arrived to fuel the furnace - my daddy would pale at the bill - and each morning The Boston Globe was on the doorstep. Life on the outside was routine and regular with my daddy's old Mercury station wagon in the driveway and my mother's pink Ford convertible in the garage - there was nothing special here.

We weren't on a bus route, that was several blocks away and we walked it each morning to get to school unless my daddy was running late in which case we hitched a ride. Massachusetts Avenue was shops and drugstores and a movie theater, the five and ten and a small specialty market, the library, and row after row of high rise apartment buildings with real estate offices scattered here and there and a branch post office on the corner. It was all familiar territory, comfortable and slightly cluttered, we walked it all endlessly doing errands, tracing and retracing our steps, window shopping and exploring under the watchful eyes of the ever present policeman at the crosswalks.

We were children then and we didn't talk of the bad things. We didn't have a lot of secrets but those that we did, we knew how to keep. It just never occurred to us that what went on in our own houses didn't go on in all houses.
We were children then and didn't carry many bricks.