Our Trip Blog

Events of Sunday, November 28, 2010

          First an update on my back. Thank you for all your prayers and all the physical therapy help I received from my internet network of PT friends. I have delivered four children and had kidney stones three times and I have NEVER had pain like I had early Thanksgiving morning. I have spent the past few days fairly heavily medicated and moving slowly and stiffly, and sleeping a lot. However, what Abby failed to mention about our room in the Quality Inn & Suites was that it came with a huge Jacuzzi bathtub! So after the rest of the family was in bed I popped a Percocet, filled the tub with hot water, turned on the jets and climbed in – heaven. For the first time in days I felt my back muscles relax and was able to move without pain. In fact, after my bath, I was halfway through cutting my toenails when I realized that I could touch my toes‼ The kids or Jim have been tying my shoes for me up to this point. Then I fell asleep on a real bed with a firm mattress. Blissful pain-free sleep.

          The plan for today was a day of reminiscence, a stroll down memory lane for Mom. My family moved to Wilmington, Delaware when I was about five months old, in 1965. We moved to California in 1976. So the first ten years of my life, some of my earliest memories, happened in Wilmington. Like most of the people in the state, my father worked for DuPont Chemical Company. My childhood understanding of his job at the time (human resources) was that my daddy “hired and fired people”. I attended A.I. DuPont Elementary school. We watched fireworks at the DuPont Country Club. We canoed on the Brandywine River and went sledding on hills around the Brandywine battlefield. I often tell my kids that, when I was a kid, I thought Santa was pretty smart. On the winters that it snowed in Delaware, he brought me a sled for Christmas. On the winters that it didn’t snow, he brought me a bike. Pretty smart, don’t you think? I was really looking forward to today. I wanted to take my family to every place that I remembered and share stories of my childhood along the way.

          We started by attending church at Concord Presbyterian church. This was where our family attended when I was young and I instantly recognized the interior of the church when we entered. The service was brief, under an hour (compared to last week at the Brooklyn Tabernacle where the singing lasted for at least an hour and the sermon perhaps an additional hour more). I enjoyed singing some familiar hymns and celebrating the first Sunday of Advent, but the message was disappointingly brief and bland. So I shared with the kids my memories of receiving a Bible with a white cover when I was in fourth grade. Several people came up to greet us including the pastor, but despite the congregation being mostly elderly, no one we met had attended back when my family did. The pastor did tell us that the roof had been replaced as recently as two years ago but other than recognizing the outside and the sanctuary, not much else was familiar.

          The service began at 10:30 and was finished by 11:15. Given our hearty hotel complimentary breakfast, no one was hungry for lunch yet, so we set off to find a picnic spot. I have memories of picnicking with my family at the Brandywine Creek State Park so we headed there. Armed with three maps, Caitlin on Google Maps, Ben following our progress on the GPS and me guiding us with a Wilmington city map from a Delaware AAA map, as well as Lindsey and Abby pointing out road signage, our directions to driver Jim were occasionally conflicting and confusing. Eventually we found an entry gate, but found that it now costs $6 to enter the park – more than we wanted to pay for a lunch on memory lane. Then the real adventure began. We followed the road one direction and at a fork in the road, Jim went left while I had thought right looked like a better option. After enjoying driving through some beautiful scenery, we decided to turn around and found ourselves in the Applecross development. The sign at the entry way said “No Outlet” so we drove around a bit until finding a large cul-de-sac to turn Harvey around. But the houses were huge and beautiful, each seemingly bigger than the next and most with three or four car garages. We often thank Jim for getting “lost” because we get to see such interesting scenery.

          Finding our way back to the fork, we took my choice of direction and crossed a bridge. Caitlin piped up that she had found us a park, Sharpley Park. Now why did that name sound familiar? We were following her directions when suddenly I looked up and saw a sign for Brockton Road. I almost screamed at Jim to stop. I had lived on this street! Turning in we started looking at house numbers, but I didn’t need a number to find the house. There it stood – two wings coming out toward the street on either side of the front door with a little gated courtyard in front. The greenhouse was even still up on the side of the house. Parking across the street, we poured from the RV. Too shy to ring the doorbell, I gave the kids a tour of the exterior of the house, pointing out where my bedroom was and explaining the layout. We peeked in the backyard. It is fenced in now, but I was able to show the kids how all the other houses didn’t have fences. Then I shared with them that our triangular shaped block was just one big park for the kids of the neighborhood. We piled back in the RV and drove slowly around the block as I pointed out where I had played kickball and the path I took to school. At the end of the road, running along Sharpley Park, was my elementary school. Only it is now a strip mall. Disappointed, we turned the RV around and parked next to the park and had lunch.

          Driving back along the park, we stopped again opposite where my block was. Years ago, our family had been robbed and the thieves stole all the souvenir tie-tacks and cuff links my Dad had collected in his travels. At the time, there was some evidence that some of the loot was dumped in a pond in the woods of Sharpley Park. After explaining to the kids what a tie-tack was, we sent off on an adventure to see if we could find the pond and the stolen loot. We found a creek running through the park, but no pond and no jewels. Oh, well! I still had fun sharing this adventure with my children.  

          Next it was off to find 2708 Doris Drive, the first house we had lived in when our family moved north from Savannah, Georgia where I was born. Again, I recognized the house before seeing the number. There was the gentle sloping driveway where I had learned to ride my bike. (But not how to use my brakes as it was much more fun and noisy to crash into the metal storage shed parked at the bottom of the driveway.) That shed is no longer there, but there is a nicely framed wooden shed towards the back of the property where we used to have our sandbox – which eventually became the litter box for the cats in the neighborhood. Missing was the huge tree and branch my dad had tied a rope, giving us a disc swing. The yard looked so tiny now, so much different from my memories of sailing over it all on that swing. I pointed out where our swing set had stood, the corner where the flower garden was, and where my father had put in a log cabin playhouse for us. Looking at the yard next door, I realized something else was missing although I could see the remnant of a stump. Our neighbors had this gigantic willow tree with umbrella-like branches drooping all the way to the ground. The boys had built a tree house here, mostly just a platform, but sitting up there we were invisible to the world, especially to being called in to set the table for dinner. I showed the kids where we walked down the block as very important first graders to catch the bus and where, after a trip to the beach, we set up our “seashell store” only to have the little girl across the street set up a miniature store as well. I don’t think we had any customers, but it was an early lesson in marking down prices to attract customers.

          Again I explained the floor plan of the house and how it was arranged basically as a circle of rooms. The front door led to the dining room and living room, next to that was my parents’ bedroom, then a small bathroom, then the boys’ room and then the girls’ room, another small bathroom and then the kitchen. To travel around the house you had to pass through the two doors of the room I shared with Pat. When we grew old enough to warrant desks, my desk was placed blocking the door that led to the kitchen and we liked to crawl under my desk to enter the kitchen. I told the story of my dad mis-stepping in the attic and my memory of a shoe appearing through the ceiling of the living room. I also described the set-up of the basement, and how, one Halloween, my parents, with our help, transformed it into a haunted house. I had helped set up all the masks and filled clothes with stuffing, so I knew it was pretend. But then my dad exchanged the main light for a blue light bulb. Asked to retrieve something from down there, I remember racing down the stairs, grabbing the object and running up the stairs and slamming the door behind me. My parents were very amused by my fears. We left this “cracker jack box” house when I was in second grade to move into the two story house across the highway that we had found earlier.

          Next it was off to find the swimming pools. For as long as I can remember, water and swimming have been a part of my life. First we headed to Silverside Swim Club, where I had swum every summer for as long as I could remember. This was back in the day of swim teams when there were no starting blocks, no Lycra suits, and no goggles, and the entire team practiced at the same time. I found the woods that we biked through to get to practice on the days my dad used our car for his turn driving the carpool. (Everyone was a one car family back then.) The parking lot was roped off so we had to park a bit away and hike back. The set-up hasn’t changed much. The cinderblock changing rooms and snack bar were still there. The shape of the pool is still the same, although it is drained for the winter. In the shallow end, there is a small slide where a lifeguard stand used to be, and, in the deep end, the low diving board has been moved to where the high dive had been, and in its place is a high curving water slide. The shuffleboard courts are still there as well as the badminton and basketball courts. The tennis courts where I learned to play tennis look like they have been newly resurfaced. After sharing a few stories of my memories there, we headed back to the RV.

          The Brandywine YMCA was next on my list. This is where we swam in the winters, and where, for a time, my dad coached our team. The place looked just as I remembered it, but it was surprisingly busy for a Sunday afternoon. I asked at the front desk if we could see the pool and was directed to it. The hallways and locker room set up have changed a lot, but when I stepped on the pool deck it all looked the same. We walked over to the record board and surprisingly enough all my swim records are now gone. The oldest record was from 1992. Oh well. My dad, who swam in college, used to marvel at how swimming changed over the years and how the same human body moving through a body of water could somehow go faster and faster, swimming the same strokes that had been swum for years. I showed the kids where our family had posed when we were the YMCA family featured on the front of their program magazine. As we headed out, we stumbled on a second pool, which must have been added after we left. Leaving there, we headed over to the Jewish Community Center, where we had swum the last few years before we left the state. I know, we aren’t Jewish, but our favorite coach at the YMCA took a job coaching at the JCC and we followed him there. The JCC was closed, but we got pictures, before getting rid of our recycling, much to Caitlin’s environmentally friendly delight. The JCC’s parking lot is on the edge of the Brandywine Creek State Park, and we started down a path to see the Brandywine creek when Abby stepped on a rock and twisted her ankle. The rest of the kids had to pick her up so I could examine her ankle without bending over and hurting my back. As Abby was laughing through these shenanigans, I diagnosed her ankle as tweaked, but not sprained. However, considering her ankle and my back, Jim wisely suggested that we call it a day.