When cars slowed down for sweaty kids

By Ed Goldman

We were talking recently—not you and I but someone else and I (look, I can know someone, right?)—about the phenomenon of summer streets. Or more to the point, summer streets after supper, when we were kids.

Why did playing any number of games feel so liberating when darkness was just an hour or two away (depending on how early we ate)? Did we think we were doing something diabolically sneaky—cheating the day out of ending—or was it just that the ambering light of dusk made things seem nostalgic even as we experienced them in real time?

You know that feeling. You’re having a great time and you say to yourself or the person or people around you, “We’re always gonna remember this!” Yet even as we say it, we usually know that no, we won’t remember it. Because as soon as it’s over and we move on to the next whatever in our lives, memories hop into the back seat of that relentlessly moving vehicle we call ageing. Or maybe it’s just living.

My childhood afforded me two coasts, sequentially, to enjoy the phenomenon of summer streets. 

As a child in New York, our summer “street” was the playground in the apartment community of Parkchester. My brothers and I would go downstairs after supper, which was usually served about 5:30 (I now rarely eat dinner before 8:30). My eldest brother Jerry, already a teen, would vanish and go somewhere to visit his girlfriend, Marian. That left Stuart, our dad and me to play catch or tag or something Dad could do that allowed him cigarette timeouts, even though he played stickball with a Pall Mall dangling from his lips. Then he’d take Stu and me to Carvel, a soft-serve ice cream stand about a half-mile walk from our apartment. To this day, I remember exactly how that ice cream dripping down my fingers felt as I licked it on the now-dark walk home.

When we relocated to Southern California, it always seemed to be summer. The blandness of the weather, compared to the definitive seasons of New York, abets this memory, I’m sure.

But now, living in a suburban neighborhood, we had actual streets to go out and play in after supper. My parents had bought their first home on a cul-de-sac called Mamie Avenue. (Our neighborhood had been built by Republican developers, apparently: two blocks over was Nixon Avenue.) 

The street’s light-bulb shape accommodated all sorts of games: one-a-cat (also called One Old Cat), which required only a handful of players—a pitcher, batter, catcher, and one or two fielders; kickball (similarly modified because of the limited space); very painful football (it was supposed to be “touch” or “flag” but we idiotically tackled each other on the pavement; and hide-‘n’-seek, which the older kids didn’t want to play until the older girls down the block joined in (nobody found my brother Stuart and a girl named Kathy, who lived on the corner, for hours.))