Porches in My Life: A Remembrance
by Glenn Gregory
Seeing from one’s front porch is not a one-day epiphany. There are many days and there are many front porches. Or, as Shakespeare might comment on our current housing market, "One porch, in its time, plays many parts…"
I never really grew up with a legitimate front porch. Both homes I lived in had front entries with simple landings, small without room for a simple chair. The first, at 7808 Greenbrier, had a three-step, elevated stoop where, in my third-grade years my father taught me to play chess. We sat there every day for a week during one summer, he must have been taking some vacation time, and he demonstrated game after game the moves, the goal, and strategies to the game.
That same summer a teenage boy living down the street convinced a high school girl to let him drive her car to the gas station and back. He promptly drove a hundred feet, lost control of the vehicle, and crashed into our house. My sister and I were watching Saturday morning cartoons when this teen, revved on James Dean, crumbled the front of the car into our home's solid-brick corner walls. We ran from the TV to our parents’ bedroom, stood on chairs to look out a window only to see this kid’s face splash-painted with his own blood with all his front teeth - top and bottom - knocked out or pointing down his throat. Fear and numbness gave over to pain as he cried out for help. Several neighbors were striding into their front yards and the street to comprehend what had just happened before their eyes in a matter of only seconds. My sister and I watched the neighbors give first rescue, the ambulance arrive and depart with the boy, the car towed away with the girl now free to shed tears over her set of wheels that would no longer take her to Frisch’s’ Big Boy Drive-In on Friday nights. My dad made sure my sister and I watched the whole event.
The second front porch, at 7440 North Timberlane, was even less, merely a concrete block positioned between bushes and hedges, one step up to the front door. No roof afforded protection from the seasonal conditions of nature. One summer afternoon while in high school, I was watching from that place for my girlfriend and her parents to drive over, as we were going to a Cincinnati Reds ballgame. Instead, two police cars slowly drove up the driveway. Five minutes later, my girlfriend and her parents arrived and we all sat at our kitchen table as the officers questioned me about my involvement in a fencing operation that was breaking open, and its members would be known as the Madeira Six. I was innocent. Burglary was the crime.
My parents were sitting there too, of course. The questioning was lengthy; we were now certain to miss the first inning. I was innocent of burglary, and innocent of any knowledge about stolen goods stored at The Hut, a shack of plywood and tar-paper, the clubhouse I built with my buddies deep in my parents’ backyard. When my mother had witnessed enough, she declared my innocence as the truth and that the questioning was now over. After the police left, my father ordered that The Hut was to be demolished the very next day. We eventually took our seats during the second inning, my girlfriend wanting to change the subject, and her parents snickering about my predicament. That very next day, the original builders assembled, then razed The Hut, ripping every remnant out of the ground, to the cheers of several backyard neighbors.
My family has always been back porch people. At our first house, my father had an extensive back porch added, one with a shingled roof, low brick walls for the perimeter, and tall screened windows which he removed each winter. At the second house, he added a pool, patio, and garage. I imagine there’s a difference between front porch and back porch people.
I still do not have much of a front porch. Its elevated, cement block steps down from the second floor front door to the ground level gardens and driveway. There’s hardly enough space to set up one fold-out chair. However, to sit at the top step this day in October, I can see the start of autumn on the leaves of my fruit trees, the garden of pumpkins, raspberries, rhubarb, zucchini, and strawberries, the street which gives the south boundary to my property, the irrigation ditch beyond the street, then the highway, and in the grey distance houses and farms that stretch a few miles to the next rise which gives a northern bank to the South Platte River. I have a good view of swirling thunderclouds that race down the front range across the plains. And that is also the problem: the view is great, but it's still a one-person porch.
The front porch of my childhood was that of my grandparents who lived in Passaic, New Jersey. Their house, built at the turn of the 19th century, was not originally fitted for electricity, but due to the thin, hollow walls of plaster, wires and outlets were easily installed, installed in whole neighborhoods as electricity transformed daily city life.
I knew my grandparents’ house as a narrow, two-story home a half-block off the main street of Passaic, where trains moved freight and trolleys moved people. Actually, they lived in the house next door for much of their adult lives but moved to this house when Bill died, the husband to my grandmother’s sister. Below is my grandparents’ house in Passaic, New Jersey. Actually, they rented the second floor. The house directly to left has the porch where Brenda and I played competitive Chinese checkers.
John, my grandfather, was an Army combat veteran of World War I, and now he looked to a quiet life, working in a machine shop and raising his two sons with his wife, Elsie. Prohibition was the law of the land, but not universally enforced by local police or federal agents. He made elderberry brandy in his basement and drank it while sitting on his front porch. His parents were immigrants from Italy, and by 1930 John thought he had made it in America: he owned a home, had a job, and was married with a family. As America moved squarely into the 20th century, it became a land of new families, immigrant families. The old American families exhausted their cultural influence fighting the Civil War and governing Reconstruction, making hallowed the War of Manifest Destiny, and mistaking the Gilded Age as the fulfillment of American Independence.
The main street of Passaic, one block from my grandparents’ house, fed into New York City, a route followed every day by thousands of European immigrants and northern African-Americans to the factories and breweries of the city. New York City was the wettest city in America during the span of Prohibition. Booze was everywhere and sold as bootleg. My father tells stories of his mother and seven sisters sneaking shots of alcohol at Sunday gatherings, but that was after the repeal of Prohibition. There’s a photo of them and the two brothers all sitting at card tables on the backyard patio. Eight American women hoping that Prohibition would reform the American working man so he would put his family as his priority, not the saloon.
This was the third front porch that was meaningful to me in my youth. It seemed spacious to me. The tall windows of metal screen towered above me. White cloth curtains were gathered and tied, giving connection from the porch to the goings-on of street life. Untied side curtains jostled in the morning breezes.
One morning, my grandma had set up a card table with two chairs and placed a game board of Chinese checkers at the center of the table. Across from me sat Brenda, a wide-smiling girl seven years of age, and whose family live two houses down. My grandma then had me sit down, and she proceeded to explain to us the rules of Chinese checkers. We asked a couple of questions, and then played this board game for the next two hours. Constructing longer and longer ladders of stepping stones gave us amazement and wonderful funny bone laughter. We were evenly matched, and soon I went inside to fetch paper and pencil to track victories. It was all too much fun. We were vacationing with my dad’s parents for the week, and the week had just started.
The checker board was made of tin, its shape flat and round. A bump would send marble rolling in random directions, ending that game outright. The out-of-bounds on the board’s surface was painted black with a dragon outlined in yellow along one side. Each color of marbles had its own corresponding triangle of home base. The in-bounds of the board was painted a classic white and was criss-crossed with thin red lines.
Brenda’s black fingers studied and vaguely pointed out optional moves. Her black hands moved marbles across the white game board. Once, I saw her observe my white thumb and finger as I rested them on the black perimeter of the Chinese checker board. When Brenda won, or enjoyed a long- stepping move that she in mere seconds realized was possible, she smiled a joy-of-fun face, let go a laugh that giggled into another loud laugh, and her ribs seemed to be tickled by invisible fingers. She was beautiful. I looked into her brown eyes all that week. I could not enjoy her enough. Inside that front porch of screened windows, slow-billowing white curtains, I remember Brenda and the games of Chinese checkers we played. The purity of two children at games: beyond race, beyond gender, beyond the street where she and my grandparents lived.
I don’t know how many pure moments a person has in a lifetime. And, I guess that most of these pure moments usher us through childhood and into society where we layer newer events that weigh out the pure moments of our innocence from our working day meditations. I have remembered a few, and I feel humbled when recalling such a memory, for I understand more each remembrance. The front porch, on a street in a city of mixed immigrants and transplanted Southern blacks. The year was 1962. What a tumultuous decade lay ahead and outside of everyone’s front porch.
