ALAN writes:

My mother took this color slide on Easter Sunday in 1965.  It shows our good friend Lynn and her children Lori and Mark.  I wrote about them four years ago (“Remembering a ‘60s Housewife”, The Thinking Housewife, Sept. 4, 2018).

They are standing here in the back yard of the four-family flat on Dewey Avenue where all of us lived that year, in a residential area of south St. Louis.  We met them in 1963 and remained friends for ten years.

It was along the walkway in this picture (lower right) that I walked at the noon hour on schooldays in 1962-64, through the yard, up on the porch, and then into our kitchen where my grandfather had a bowl of hot chicken noodle soup ready for me.

It was in this back yard in July 1965 that we celebrated his 86th birthday.

It was in this back yard that my father and I set up our small telescope and taught ourselves to identify stars, planets, constellations, and artificial satellites.  It was here that we first viewed Jupiter and its four large moons, the ringed planet Saturn, the planet Venus, and stars like Altair, Deneb, Arcturus, Capella, and Vega.  On winter nights, we found Orion’s belt and followed it to Sirius, a scintillating beacon in the black sky.  In the hour before dawn and in my winter coat, I ventured outside to see planets in the eastern sky as the lovely melody of Bert Kaempfert’s “Red Roses for a Blue Lady” played in my head.  How well I remember the moon rising above the row of small houses on 37th Street and the challenge of viewing the brilliant red star Antares, low in the southern sky, through layers of air on summer nights.

It was here in this yard and this house that I discovered the joy of playing with uncorrupted children who were just discovering the ways and wonders of life.  Although I was terribly stupid, evidently I did something right, because Lori, at age 1½, trusted me from the day we met, as did Mark a year later.  Of course prolonged periods of peace between them alternated with occasional expressions of sibling rivalry.  And what a temper Lori had.

It was here that we shared Christmas days with Lynn and her family, as well as Thanksgiving dinners, birthday parties, card games, and the ordinary routines of daily life.

It was here that uplifting songs like Bill Pursell’s “Our Winter Love”, the Bachelors’ “Diane”, and The Seekers’ “I’ll Never Find Another You” etched themselves forever into my memory as part of snow-covered winter days and placid evenings in spring.

Of all the grown-ups I knew at the ripe old age of 13, Lynn became my best friend.  She radiated confidence, cheerfulness, and love of life.  I loved her dearly and we spent many wonderful days and evenings playing with her children, sharing Sunday afternoon drives, and going for leisurely walks through the clean, peaceful neighborhood.  They were Lutheran and we were Catholic, but it made no difference.  Those few years on Dewey Avenue were among the happiest in our lives.

Even now, all these years later, it occurs to me that I remember the birth dates of the three people in this picture because I came to “know them by heart” 58 years ago.

Just last week I thought about Lynn and her family as I walked into a store in St. Louis County that sells movies, music, and books.  Fifty years ago, that space was a cafeteria where all of us dined on a Sunday afternoon in 1971.  In memory I could picture where the entry door and serving lanes had been and how we sat around a table near the center of the spacious cafeteria.  It was a place for grown-ups who wanted to dine in a setting of civility, restraint, and quiet.  Today, the store is a place for perpetual adolescents who hate those qualities and prefer the indescribably-ugly noise called “music” that management inflicts on customers.

I am older now than Lynn and her husband were when they died, an eventuality I could not have imagined at age 13.

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