Prologue

 I grew up in Carney, Maryland. It is buried in the quiet suburbs of Baltimore County nestled somewhere between Parkville, Cub Hill and Perry Hall. Carney was named after the original landowners, but years later I have to constantly explain to non-residents that Carney was not a training ground for learning how to bark for the bearded lady at the carnival.

I lived on a dead end street called Uxbridge Road.  It only had houses on one side of the street, as the other side was a small incline that led to a stream and a grove of woods. We lived in the third house, which was originally light green before being painted barn red and eventually gold aluminum siding with white trim. Our address was 9705. Next door to us lived the Bells and next to them were the Chadmans. I was at least 10 years old before I realized that families didn’t live in alphabetical order.

Every time I looked out the front window or embarked from my house to marvel at the wonder of Uxbridge Road, I would see the woods across the street. They looked creepy to me and I knew that trolls, dwarfs, werewolves and Bigfoot lived in there somewhere. Of course, there were little elves making cookies too, so that made it worth living near.

Uxbridge Road dissected Appleton Avenue, which went up hills on both sides. You could say we lived in a valley. When you rode your bike out of the neighborhood you had to immediately climb a hill in either direction and had your choice of the little hill or the big hill as the neighborhood kids called them. These names referred to the grade of the hill and you were considered a genuine neighborhood resident if you could climb the big hill on your bike without stopping. Serpentine back and forth like a cow or mountain goat traversing a mountainside was totally acceptable.

The woods were on a plot of land that was lower than the surrounding streets so when you looked out at the trees, you were actually staring over their tops or mid-sections to the houses that were speckled up the hill on the other side. I figured it was at least two miles or so to those houses but in reality it was only about 75 yards.

Every house in our neighborhood averaged 4.72 kids. They varied in age of course, but in the 60’s you played with whoever was around. We had softball games with 26 players on a side and everybody batted. We played in the woods, in yards, in the streets, the streams and during a massive game of freedabox (translation “free the box” which was nothing more than a giant game of hide and seek) stranger’s basements were somewhat allowed. We all got along. The only fight I ever participated in was with the paperboy and he came from some other neighborhood so I took him as an invader. After all, this was at the height of the cold war and he could have been a Russian spy, but most likely just went to a different school.

Between Uxbridge road and the woods there was a stream of constantly running water called Jenny Run. You could jump over it easily, but because of the wild and vicious water animals that I was sure resided there, I never went first. The mouth of the stream was unknown, and was thought to have originated as an offshoot of the Nile. As it entered our neighborhood it went under Appleton Avenue through a huge black pipe that you could walk through standing straight up. We called it The Tunnel and it was about 40 feet long. When you were in the tunnel, light could only be seen directly in front of you or directly behind you. This was of course a design from the county who had special workers employed in the field of scaring children to death. The agency was called C.U.P. or the department of Cruel and Unusual Punishment. These same workers also invented that park toy that would spin you around until you puked and of course paper cuts.

I used to get up at 7am on a Saturday and say, “See you at dinner” as I blew out the front door. I’m sure our parents would check up on us, but it never seemed that way. You ate lunch at whose ever house you were visiting and if you had to go to the bathroom you just knocked on someone’s door and they would let you in. Of course to a young boy the world was your urinal and you got pretty good at writing your name in the snow.

We didn’t have sun screen, we didn’t have anti-bacterial spray, we didn’t have the ability to see the creepy crawly microscopic stuff that lived under our finger nails, we didn’t have helicopter parents, we didn’t have many fences, we didn’t have remote controls or wireless telephones. We had a milk or bread-box on the front porch, we had the good humor man, we had the world’s best snowball stand, we had a gas man that would just walk right into your unlocked basement and we had four channels of television and we loved it.

The adults in our neighborhood were equally cool and just about every weekend someone was having a cookout. People we didn’t even know handed us watermelon, disciplined us, laughed at our antics and told us wondrous stories of their youth secretly wanting to participate in ours. We had the best trick or treating on the planet and at Christmas our world became magical. We lived in Carney.