on an urban childhood

I was listening to my ipod in bed the other night. I can't, for the life of me, remember what song it was, but whatever I was listening to mentioned a Buckeye tree...the visual memory of a pillar from my childhood came flooding back into my head...

For those of you who have never been, Pittsburgh is a very hilly city...and not just rolling hills, but steep hills that made for exhilarating descents on a bike, but for the cardiac workout of a lifetime on the ascent! Our house at 5445 Kincaid street was at the plateaued crest of one such hill. The whole neighborhood of Garfield is defined by the hill it covers, and our block was just one position on one ridge on the bigger Garfield hill (now, mind you, I'm no topographic expert, but bear with me!) At the bottom of our hill, on the far right corner stood a buckeye tree...

...a monstrous buckeye tree as I remember it. In the fall, maybe (?), it littered the sidewalks under it's massive branches with the spikey pods that held buckeyes inside...the seam that divided the pod in half would open and the silky smooth dark brown surface of the buckeye would be exposed. We often collected the buckeyes (for what? I don't remember, maybe for throwing at each other?) tying them up in the blouse of the bottom of our tshirts. This tree is one of those things that brings to my mind a feeling of home, a feeling of the familiar, a feeling of constancy, something that stood there throughout the 10 years we lived in that house, that never failed to produce and shed these little trinkets that we took such joy in.

Looking back on it, I have no idea why we loved them so much, maybe it was the contrast of the harsh spikey surface of the pod, and the smooth silky lining of the pod and surface of the nuts themselves; maybe it was a fascination in the fact that the tree yielded anything at all (in our urban neighborhood, there weren't any other trees that yielded anything at all other than their dead leaves in autumn), who knows. But I have similar affections, still to this day, for squirrels (called "squillers" here in Uganda because of the confusion of l's and r's), pigeons, sirens of most varieties, the cheerful noise of children playing outside, curbs/sidewalks, passing a suped (sp?) up car with deafening base booming from the rear window speakers...

I've realized these things only since being in rural Africa, funny how that works, huh? Similarly, while we were at the beach, I realized again how much of a city kid I was, and largely still am...

I rarely ever walked anywhere without some sort of shoes on my feet...it was just downright stupid to go without, you'd end up with pieces of glass or who knows what else stuck in your foot...this means I was and am "tenderfooted"...because I never walked barefoot, it hurts to now...any little irregularity in a surface - stones/branches, etc. and I'm grimacing and limping...it's pretty humorous to watch, I imagine.

My life was rarely dictated by the weather/seasons/suroundings...other than whether or not I could play outside (if not, I just played inside) or whether to take a raincoat to school with me, these things did not alter my plans...if it rained, I still had to go to school, I just wore a raincoat or carried an umbrella, I still had to go to work, I just put my windows up in my car...it didn't effect whether or not I ate food, just maybe whether there were garden fresh tomatoes or store bought ones in the salad at dinner...even when we went to the beach, it didn't matter what time of day you wanted to build a sandcastle, the beaches we went to were wide enough that whatever the tide, there was still plenty of space for such creations between the water and the boardwalk...

I can't just leave my stuff sitting places and go away and do something else somewhere else...it was just stupid to do that, how naive to think it would still be there when you got back, it was practically your fault if it weren't there when you got back, you were being dumb (not so much that the thief was doing anything particularly wrong...).

I really don't have any interest in touching things that exist in nature, that are not meant to be touched...not interested in touching the sea urchin hiding under the rock, not interested in holding the octopus found in the tide pools, seeing is fascinating, but touching, I'm just not interested...seems cruel and unnatural...always pretty much prefer to be left alone and to leave alone when it comes to nature's creatures.

And I can't really understand why people don't love pigeons and squirrels...I've found that most people I've met, in fact, do not...I just don't understand...

anyways, enough rambling for now.