Cul De Sac

It’s called a ‘court’ more often, I suppose, just a normal street that doesn’t (at first glance) go anywhere. You make a turn on to the house lined road and it ends in a wide circle. Just large enough to turn your car in a lazy arc, porches gliding by, and drive back out to the stop sign. I’m sure they begin as a drawing in some city planning office. A way to deal with some weirdness in topography, an answer to getting more housing in around a creek or water course.

As a kid I lived on a couple of courts. My grandparents had a little ranch style on one in Michigan and even earlier there was a house my parents had in Tennessee. When your young and just getting your curfew extended (or allowed in the first place) that layout of a half dozen homes becomes your first world of discovery. There’s a sort of safety in the way the wagons are circled up. A sort of limiting to the fish bowl , creating a small pond to angle in or be angled. Hell on a regular street you could just keep walking and, heaven forbid, end up down town.

My grandmother’s place was located in the ’sac’ of Brookside Ct.. It was one of the first plots with a driveway that emptied in to the circle. A plain round about without any sort of planter or grass patch. No this is Michigan and it’s the eighties and little niceties like those are more of a southern or west coast thing. Just the blue gray road surface about as wide as, oh I don’t know…a basketball court? And behind her house was the ‘brook’ in Brookside ( the city reused that name several times, for an apartment complex and at least two other streets). Really more of a creek  it ran parallel to the street and emptied at one end into a park with two ponds. The other end started somewhere west of what little boys or middle aged writers remember, but made its way past and between that apartment complex and our street. It capped the street there, forcing it into a cul-de-sac.

         There was ‘beach front’ at that end, behind the Jone’s and the Harris’ houses, a little wooded hill  sloping to our mini shore, where we built damns and initiated clubs. Newly independent ‘yard apes’ making our plans, and building our forts. Within view of kitchen windows and ear shot of raised voices we played army (or ‘house’ with the girls) or raised armies for kick ball or kick the can. Or quieter pursuits like frog stalking or crawfish catching, maybe those as cover stories for the mischief of ten year olds when all ‘what’ questions are answered with “Nothing”.

And the front yards, where we rode bikes and big wheels in the circle, where we used the side walks and ash fault for toy cars and rubber balls. Out front where we tried to be on better behavior because you might be in the middle of doing something dumb and Mr. Harris the fireman drives up and busts you. We caught hell once for walking the side walks with leaky paint cans jury rigged to our feet. It felt like ten year olds believe walking on the moon is like. Slow and ponderous, the sensation of falling off your perch and the extra height and mass replacing actual weightlessness. We must have done three good laps of the street, with plenty of time spent in a single spot rough housing, leaving beige flat latex circle fragments on the sidewalk slabs. Even the Schneling’s complained, and their two sons had ‘graduated a level’ in trouble making, with Chris in high school driving a loud beater and running with rowdy friends.

  Two good years when I could convince Kasey Harris to follow me into the basic little boy lessons: Fire burns, and a big fires burn a lot. Cinder blocks are heavy when dropped from height. If you mess up, older brother, Kyle Harris’ model with said cinder block you may pass out from the head lock. Two summers spent camping in the yard you played some invented ball game in all afternoon. Odd memories of deciding that little Jennifer Jones was somehow better than o.k. And not understanding why Mr. Jones seemed a little freaked out by that. Trying to make sense of this piece town, this square footage you could handle on your own. Not the stuff seen from the car window or at the grocery store. Your world and the mystery in it’s exploration.