Thursday, January 17, 2013

YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN

Me and Pop.  Not a recent photo.
 *My dear dad is guest blogger this time.  He tells a wonderful story below of family, memories, and Loveland.   This story will appear in the local Estes Park newsletter and I am proud to publish it here.
 
 
My home is Estes Park. When I walk with protest signs in Estes passersby recognize me. But when I walked with my “Cherish Children, Disdain Guns” poster along 28th Street in Boulder, I felt like an interloper foisting my opinion on strangers.
So starting a wintry walk from Taft Avenue east on Eisenhower Boulevard in Loveland (not my home since 1960) with my sandwich boards, I expected the same ambivalence. The sun would soon be down In a few minutes I would trudge back to my car and drive to my warm home in Estes.
The new 1stBank rising across the street interrupted my doubts. Tellers in the previous building welcomed me by name and cashed my checks for all the 15 years I came from Estes to visit my Father’s one remaining sister Annie.
Another 200 yards took me to the Barnes Ditch. In the fifties we used the dry ditch as a clandestine route to a Big Thompson swimming hole. Today I crossed exactly over its inlet to Lake Loveland. Throughout my youth I heard how the man for whom I am named had swum across that expanse. Once dog-paddling near the dock, swallowing some of the silty water I plunged deep as a speedboat’s propeller passed exactly over me. The Blooms taught me to water ski behind their power boat on that water. Ice-covered and drawn down though it is today, the lake on my left is a part of me.
Halfway to the replica of the Statue of Liberty is a bronze figure of cavorting children, depicting actual youngsters, whom I watched grow. Today, across the busy highway from the replica, even in the cold wind, four bundled children climbed on the ageless World War II artillery piece. Summers in the fifties I sat astride the same metal barrel almost too hot to touch. My parents and my sixteen aunts and uncles pushed aside the emptied paper plates and played pinochle on long picnic tables. We cousins explored the vastness of that block sized park, crossed the quiet road, (not quiet today) and sank toes in the muddy shore.
Here is Garfield Avenue. My elementary school was eight blocks down the hill. I have not used half the time till twilight. I’ll go north till I reach 45 minutes. Then I will turn back. Between the sidewalk and the lake are the homes of erstwhile patricians. Their kids sat in classes with me at Loveland High.
The Loveland Cemetery is in view across Garfield Avenue. The names of those card-playing aunts and uncles are on the gravestones. A football field length farther on Lake Avenue will be Grant Ford’s former home. A veteran of the Tenth Mountain Division who found a place for me in his Alma Mater back east. He forgave me for not staying there. He withstood far greater tragedies of life than my rejection, worse even than the wounds of war.
At 29th Street, I am only a few minutes beyond my time of return. It will be quicker to continue past the high school around the lake. In 1967 I first saw the inside of the “new” school, new in 1961 that is. Geography teachers were pleased to have me report on the Peace Corps in India. More intensely in the 70s and 80s, I kept the opponents’ book for my Niwot Cougar roundballers against my old Indian boys. Across the avenue in the nursing home my mother’s mother died as tranquilly as she had lived. When Aunt Edith visited younger Aunt Leona in that place she was often challenged as a resident as started to leave. My brother’s wife and three youngsters waited for him to return from his remote Air Force posting in an apartment behind the oldsters’ building.
Almost dusk, I find the wide pavement on the east side of Taft Avenue. The cherry trees across the street are long gone. Good riddance to the sticky summer picking job for pay. Mother wanted to buy those abandoning orchards for a price that today would buy a used car.
Having gone around the lake, I am minutes from where I parked the car. The sandwich board signs (the back one says “More Guns, More Dead”) of which I am so self conscious have not kept the past from my consciousness. Several people have given me a quiet thumbs up. Three cars have blared horns at me. I think three. My hearing aid volume is at lowest setting. I turn it up so I can have a conversation.
Lake Loveland
That is because I have reached the Bloom’s house. Their ashes are across the lake in that cemetery . He waded across five Pacific invasion beaches. Her daughter married brother Carl. I knock on the door. Niece Kristi is home from a much longer day at work than my walk around her lake.
“I have been passing so many homes with shore frontages, Ma’am, and I wonder if You would just let me look out your windows at the lake.”
She replies, “You are home.”

1 comment:

nicole iselin (trotter) said...

(smiles) I love it. It was like a little visit back to Civics class, wondering what Mr. P was talking about...what chapter are we on?...and soon realizing how much I enjoy the ride. Thank you for sharing.