Alfred Road

The rain washed away the chalk hopscotch game and drove us all indoors where we improvised a game of dodge ball in the gym. Teachers didn't like idle minds or bodies and it was either that or study hall. I would've been content to sit in the bleachers and read "The Bobbsey Twins" but they were having none of that. Most of us were picked up after school let out but my brothers and I walked home in the rain, a respectable difference apart so that no one would know we were together.

Alfred Road was just one of many side streets that dead ended at Spy Pond - the houses were two and three story walk up apartments, a solidly working class neighborhood, lower middle class, I suppose - not quite affluent enough to own a single family home but heads and shoulders above the nearby Cambridge border where broken down cars lined the curbs, laundry hung from second story windows and you could always smell something cooking. I had friends on Alfred Road though my mother looked down on them and liked to lecture me about what she called the other side of the track people, blue collar families with two working parents and no backyards. Immigrants and Catholics, she reminded me frequently, Not our sort of people. I wasn't exactly sure who our kind of people were, certainly not the kind who lived in the sprawling homes across Route Two with the manicured lawns and three car garages, not the wealthy families in Belmont or rich and historic Lexington, certainly not those who lived across the Cambridge line by the Dow Chemical Plant with it's smoky stench and barbed wire fences. We were somewhere in the middle, hovering uneasily between wealth and foodstamps, never quite sure where we belonged. From our block to Route Two was a community of single family dwellings, not pretentious or well off, but single family all the same with trees and sidewalks and paved driveways - a mile in any direction took you into unfamiliar terrain and radically different landscapes and lifestyles. My daddy seemed to cross these invisible lines effortlessly while my mother honored them with a passion - as if in one world she was at the head of the line and in the other, she feared being found out.

I learned and carried some of those feelings with me when I left home - a free floating kind of anxiety about not quite knowing where I belonged and not sure I deserved to stay once I got there. Sometimes I could beat it back but now and again it would rear its head with a nasty snipe or a subtle reminder that I was in over my head in a world I wasn't used to. I couldn't make the easy, name dropping small talk that was so popular, I'd never made a quickie trip to Dallas just to shop or sat at a place setting with more than three utensils. The only wine I knew was Lancer's Rose, I did my own house cleaning, and I preferred jeans and sweats from the second hand store to a designer scarf from Neiman's. It had never even occurred to me to match my shoes to my purse and I didn't own a single pair of white gloves, elbow length or otherwise.

On the other hand, I had very little in common with the girls I worked with - I was childless and intended to stay that way, I didn't cook or bake or follow sports, I made myself scarce whenever the conversation turned to killing animals for food or trophies, I admitted preferring cats to dogs. I winced at their grammar and lack of education and had no idea what life in a trailer park was like. Worst of all, I discovered I hated catfish and ditch bugs. All in all, I transitioned from one world to the other feeling out of place and a little lost in both - against my will, I began to comprehend pieces of my mother's life and how she must have felt at times - it wasn't reassuring and I disliked the thought of forgiveness in any form.

It could be that we all have a little Alfred Road in us. It could be it's what holds us back and makes us hesitate or what propels us toward the better and the finer things - it could be both. Or it could be that a little uncertainty and a touch of insecurity helps us measure our progress without losing our balance. Or maybe, Alfred Road is just one more two sided street. Some days you're on the even side, and some days you're on the odd.