Moritz

Id like to give you a guest post today. Remember my friend Alisa from all those years ago who recently came over for dinner? Well, she has written a short memoir of our neighborhood and described some things she remembers. It really brought back memories for me too, so I wanted to pass it along...

MORITZ

I don’t think it is presumptuous to say that for us kids who grew up on the block of Moritz between Oak Park Blvd. and Northfield, the city of Oak Park was the center of everything. For a city of about 36,000, it was a bustling place with a small downtown consisting of a couple of strip malls, a large bowling alley, several restaurants, mostly in the fast-food – diner range, and neat, ranch-style houses, with clipped lawns and mature trees. It had five elementary, two middle, and one high school, graduating about 1,500 students a year. There was a sizable municipal area which provided wholesome entertainment and learning opportunities for the myriad children who took advantage of the extra-curricular activities offered at the community center, the ice-skating rink, the library. There was an 18-hole miniature golf course and a dozen tennis courts – hardly ever a wait. In the winter, crowds of mitten- and scarf-clad children hiked their sleds up to the top of the steep hill – the Oak Park Hill - located at the perimeter of the Oak Park Park, only to hop on and speed down, flying off with glee at the bottom of the hill where the repeating action of the sleds would form an ice-ramp. Children lay in the snow wet and laughing, then get up and do it again. But as soon as Memorial Day rolled around, the main attraction became the Oak Park Pool.

The Oak Park Pool was large with something for everyone. Three- and five-foot areas dominated the bulk of the pool, but there was also a good-sized, 12-foot diving tank which offered three diving boards: low, medium and high – very high. If you got in trouble for splashing you might get five minutes under the big clock in front of the lifeguard office, watching wistfully while your friends still played. Every 45 minutes of splashing, diving, and cannonballs were followed by a 15-minute adult swim in which all the children jammed the grassy area, drying on towels or lining up for Sno-Cones and popcorn at the concession stand. We burned off the calories immediately by jumping back into the cold water as soon as those lifeguards’ whistles blew! For us, those days at the pool - warm salty snacks, sugar-laden icy drinks, the joy of hot-weather abandon - they were the embodiment of summer.

Every July 4 there was a long parade that went from the bowling alley at 9 Mile Road and Coolidge all the way up Oak Park Blvd., ending at the park where there were games, food, and visiting with everyone you missed from school. Any kid could decorate his bike and join in. That night, after bar-b-ques, we would gather at the high school for a fireworks show which lingered late into the night, amid oohs and aahs from enchanted children and adults alike.

There were so many kids on our block. One house had a family of five girls, but mostly there were just one or two kids per family. Some of us went temple, some to church, but it didn’t make a difference which holidays were celebrated – we never even thought to ask. Usually all you had to do was drift outside and there was someone to play with. If no one was outside, you just rang their doorbell and asked if they could come out – we never thought to use the phone to make plans! Sometimes the whole group of us would coordinate a large reenactment of our favorite TV shows, Lost in Space and Gilligan’s Island were the favorites, with the girls all clamoring to be Judy and Ginger, the boys Don or the Professor. We spent time at the large Catholic school field down the block climbing on the monkey bars and smacking balls on the fine dirt of the baseball field.

When I look back at those days, it’s as though we all moved together, en masse. We grew to be a part of each other, whether we knew it or not. We were not all best friends, we didn’t get along one hundred percent of the time, but it was the natural thing to do to hop on our bikes and ride around together, lay on the grass and talk, throw a ball back and forth, shoot some baskets. In the midst of the hum of lawnmowers, the scrapes of shovels, the blooms of new lilacs, the fall of leaves, our days began and ended on the block. Our world was our families and each other.

Like always, time has passed; we have gone our separate ways. We have all grown and now we inhabit our own blocks. I long for my daughter to be able to drift outside and fall into step with the neighbor kids, but it’s just not the same. The kids are inside playing video games, punching computer keys, watching Nickelodeon. When they are outside, it is under the watchful eye of parents who know that these days things are different, that the idea of sending your kids outside to do their own thing has become dangerous. My subdivision has a little park with no hill and no pool. Although I delight in the sounds and laughter of the children as they bounce balls, build snow forts, rollerblade up and down the street, I miss the days of Oak Park and Moritz.