Drove to Santori's yesterday morning to stock up on fresh veggies and feta. On impulse, I continued on down the parkway to Ventnor. Checked the outside of Betty's house and picked up some blown papers on the lawn. The house looks fine, though, with no changes I could see.
Then I went to Rosborough Avenue and parked across from the big, gracious house where we grew up. Rosborough is one of a handful of double-wide streets in Ventnor and I think that was a taken-for-granted, but significant factor in our childhood. You can see the ocean from the wide porch and, when we lived there, we had a big lawn on one side and a vacant lot on the other. Now there are four houses on those spaces.
Our house, 15 South, has been painted a hideous blue (it's supposed to be green and white), but aside from that, looks about the same.
The Osborne's house next to ours is long gone, but across the street, the Bluth's, the Campbell's, the Wheaton's, the Ottenberg's, and the Gordon's are still there and relatively unchanged. Of course, no members of those families have lived there for years and many no longer live at all.
I remember walking home from a friend's one April day and having somebody--maybe Stevie Ottenberg--tell me, "The president's dead." That was Roosevelt, of course (no, not Teddy!), and I said, "Frankly, I don't believe you."
I was nine years old and had recently heard the word "frankly." I thought my response was the height of casual sophistication--guess I blew that Stevie Ottenberg away.
I stayed only a short time. Was going to check out St. James--to be called "Holy Family" after the merger, I understand, so that will be gone with the undertow, too--but changed my mind and drove home.
Sometimes, it seems my life went straight from hopelessly constricted and inhibition-laced childhood to free-thinking old ladyness without the Ewing decades in between.