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| Me and Pop. Not a recent photo. |
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.
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| 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.”
