When I was born in 1949 there were two worlds, with many
old ways remaining alongside those of the new post war era.
My grandmother brought me from school on the trolley
to the last stop where she bought the afternoon NewsPress
for two cents before we walked the five blocks home.
Her parents, sister and often my brother and I stayed with her.
There was a piano, and a cupboard with cards and board games
that transformed a table into matches of Monopoly or Canasta.
I jumped rope and hopscotched in squares made with chalk.
My newly divorced mother drove our only car to work.
Under the avocado tree in the back yard, my brother and I
planted coleus and pansies, immersing our hands in dirt like
generations of our family who had farmed the land.
Television was new; we watched cartoons in the afternoon.
In the evening, the family gathered for the fifteen-minute news.
After my great grandfather died, my great grandmother loved
a Sunday drive for lunch at Van de Kamp’s with its car-side service.
We walked everywhere, to the library, to downtown, each evening
around the block, more slowly after my grandmother broke her hip.
Time came when, in her 90s, she could no longer walk at all.
My grandmother is gone now; so is my brother and my parents
along with the last vestiges of the old world I was born into.
My hometown lies under concrete, freeways and highrises.
I still hear my grandmother tell stories of fields of wildflowers, of
the pony bolting after school, overturning their carriage in a ditch.
