David's Back Yard

In second grade the teacher taught us how to slant our papers so that our handwriting would come out neater. If you were right handed you slanted the paper one way, and if you were a lefty you slanted it the other. Since there were only four of us lefties in the class, she separated us out into the “left-handed corner” and had us all slant our pages the same way so we would remember how it was supposed to go.

That’s how I met David. He sat in front of me in the left-handed corner. When we found out we lived a few houses apart on Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, our friendship was sealed. Soon after we became friends I began playing in his back yard, the place where I spent many hours of my childhood.

David’s back yard was nothing special to look at. He lived in a private house and you walked down the tarred driveway into the yard. His yard actually served two freestanding houses, David’s house and the house belonging to the Kraybills next door. David and the three kids whose parents rented the upstairs part of the house shared the yard with the three, and later the four Kraybill kids. But to me, it was always David’s back yard.

Gravel crunched under your feet as you walked in David’s back yard. In the center was a corrugated metal shed, painted a brownish peach shade. I don’t remember ever seeing that shed open. I wondered often what was inside it. Once, it snowed so much that snow piled up between in the narrow space between the fence and the shed. We climbed up the snow hill, and found ourselves nearly level with the roof of the shed.

There was a garage under David’s bedroom window, but his parents parked their car in the back of the yard unless the weather was nasty. On either side of this yard were the back yard spaces of two adjoining apartment buildings. Those yards were stark and ugly. There was no space to play, just a narrow area where you could do nothing but walk and stand around. It was fenced in, and the ground was concrete, like the sidewalks out front. My own back yard behind our apartment house was the same, and I never went down there except to accompany my parents to the garbage room.

By contrast, David’s plain back yard was luxurious.

Honeysuckle grew by the fence. I forget which kid showed me how to pinch off the back of the flower, pull out the tiny stamens and get the sweet drop of “honeysuckle” to well up at the base of the blossom so we could lick it off. If you pulled too hard or too fast, the drop would be lost and a flower wasted.

At the back end of the yard David’s father had scratched out a small tomato garden where he tended tomato plants every summer. My parents got to know David’s mother and Dad and we got some of those tomatoes too. Beyond that, it got scary. The back fence was built at the edge of a cliff, a sheer drop down to private houses that were on a level with Broadway, which begins in lower Manhattan and runs all the way upstate. We could go to the fence and look down onto the rooftops of the houses below, and at their lush green lawns. Standing near that fence made me dizzy, and I was afraid to put my weight on it. What if it gave way?

Big kids from the apartment houses sometimes came down into their yards and taunted and threatened us little kids through the fence, but for the most part never did more than bluster. None of them had the nerve to come down the driveway and fight us on private property. Some of them were daring and climbed over their fence, to walk that narrow cliff edge while clinging to David’s back fence. We watched in horror, expecting one of the older boys to fall to his death. That never happened.

On the Kraybill side of the yard stood the house I thought of as Charlie’s house. Charlie was the eldest of the Kraybill children. His parents were Mennonites and his mother always dressed in black with a small cap and a white apron. Charlie’s house had a metal staircase that led up to the back porch, and I used to sit on it with the other kids, eating ice cream from the Bungalow Bar truck or pouring powdered sugar Lick’M’Aid down our throats from striped straws. David used to chant, “Bungalow Bar, tastes like tar, the more you eat the sicker you are!” but we bought their ice cream and enjoyed it.

Under Charlie’s porch there was a huge flat tire, probably from an eighteen-wheeler. I don’t know how it got down into Charlie’s side of the yard but it was always there that I could remember. It was big enough for three or four kids to sit in and hold a pow wow, planning our next carnival or figuring out which roles we would play in our next game of Superman, and how the story line would go. Charlie, two years younger than me, always sported a crew cut. Before his family caved in to modern culture and bought a TV set, Charlie lived to plan carnivals. He wanted all kinds of booths where people would pay money to play different kinds of games. He figured the money would support the next carnival, and that money would support the next one, and so on. We planned and plotted, sitting in that great big tire, but never actually put on any of those carnivals.

I always came back to David’s back yard and I always came back to play with David, even when we had a fight. It seems like it was always summer there, except for my memory of that big snowstorm that left a blanket of knee-deep snow. In summer we would play baseball, sometimes with a real ball and sometimes with the pebbles from the ground. Once I hit a pebble with the bat and it went sailing through the garage window. What a disaster!

In David’s back yard we played Superman, we played “baseball,” we played freeze tag. We played Simon Says and Red Light, Green Light, all the games kids played outside in the fresh air before this generation’s computers and Nintendo lured them all indoors.

Sometime in the late seventies, the neighborhood changed. David’s parents decided to move away to Queens. One last time I walked down the sloping driveway into David’s back yard. The Kraybills had moved away years ago, to a tiny Mennonite town in Pennsylvania, population 70. When I reached the back yard, I was amazed at how tiny it really was. Seen through an adult’s eyes, there was barely the space to turn around in. It was fall, and the last crop of tomatoes David’s father would ever plant there was wilting. Where I remembered a “baseball field” there was hardly the space to swing a bat. But I remember David’s back yard through a little girl’s eyes. Seen that way, it had all the space a child could want.