The Smelko Effect

06/18/12
This past Sunday was, of course, Father's Day.  Hung out with my dad and my family, went to a grad party, etc.  Something rather intriguing went on within me, however--quite by accident.  I went to my cousin Breanna's THIRD birthday party.  They were swimming and being children.  Good times.  However, she lives in Hubbard off of South Main St.  This is significant because much of my early childhood was spent growing up at 117 South Main St.  I drove by my childhood home.  Well, where my childhood home USED to be.  Right after my parents sold it in 1985, and we moved to Waugh Dr. in Hubbard--a company bought our old house on South Main and turned it into a parking lot.  So, my childhood home is gone.  So is the home to the left of our house there--which was once occupied by a woman who had THOUSANDS of those plaster figurines.  Nice enough, she was.  However, the figurines gave her a level of creepdom.

Anyhow, I came to grips with my childhood home being gone long ago.  Like I said, they knocked it down in early 1986.   I told my mom to drive by so I could see the hole where the house was.  There is was.  Eh.  I have memories, and I could still describe that house--every inch of it--today.  I wasn't BORN living there.  I lived in a trailer park on Belmont Ave. for the first four months of my life--then it was to South Main. 

Point is, there was an old man who lived to the RIGHT of us on South Main named Bert Smelko.  I don't recall exactly how old he was.  He seemed DAMNED old when I was 7.  I'd say he was in his 70s.  He had a wife there for a few years.  She died.  I remember the delicious pies disappeared that she made, and he was sad.  But, he spent more time on the porch, and that was okay with me.  That's where I wanted him to be.  When I was bored (especially before Donnie was born), I'd hike over to his porch and sit and talk with him.  He talked to me like I was more grown up.  I mean, he wasn't dropping F-bombs.  But, you know, he'd have intellectual conversations with me, even though I was like, five.  Once we moved to Waugh (I had a neighbor THERE named Ernie, so I had Bert and Ernie as neighbors.  Thought that was goddamned hilarious back then), I lost track of Bert.  A handful of years later--like in the early 90s--he died.  I didn't go to his funeral.  I really wanted to remember him as the guy on the porch. 

That was shattered as I drove to Bree's party on Sunday.  His house was never ABANDONED, that I can remember, since his death.  Now, it is.  The swing on the porch is gone.  Trees are overgrown, swallowing the rickety home.  I'm sure his garden is overgrown and long forgotten.  So is he, I'm sure.  He was a quiet dude.  But that house had pictures of all of his family.  His child.  His dead wife.  Now, no one cares about it really.  Except for me, I suppose.

My high school is gone now--knocked down.  I couldn't care less, really.  I thought high school was utterly stupid, which is why I try to make it NOT that for the students I have now.  But that porch was really the last visible bastion of my early years.  Sitting there next to him, I would think about being an actor, or becoming a major league baseball umpire, or playing a new Atari game that I wanted--and he would just listen to me ramble, and he'd ramble back.  He made me feel like I could control ANYTHING when I got older. 

Seeing the brush swallowing up the area where I once felt like I could control it all.  And now, for some reason, it brought a sense of a loss of that control.  I wouldn't mind talking to that old man one last time.