Memoir

Playing in the Creek Behind the Glass Factory

Memories of childhood

In a little decrepit town in western Pennsylvania, a small glass factory churned out specialty pieces of glass. Anything broken during the manufacturing process was piled up behind the factory and loaded into train cars that would carry it away.

The men running the operation wouldn’t always place the entirety of the load into the open-top hopper car, and it would form a rather large hill of glass beside the tracks. Most of it was white milk glass, so the mountain looked like snow from a distance. Eventually the hill turned into a small mountain, and would avalanche down the hill toward the creek below.

That creek is where my days were spent as a kid. It traversed the property between the glass factory and ours. As if a creek isn’t dangerous enough for a kid, sprinkle in some glass shards covered in algae and you have a glorious recipe for disaster.

Thusly, my parents never allowed us in the creek. Instead, it served as a backdrop. A cool place to sit on a hot day. A place to sit and ponder the thoughts ten-year-old boys ponder. It was only inches deep in most spots, but it would pool in areas and get as deep as a few feet.

Our attraction to it was inevitable. I’ll never understand what it is about kids and water. Kids are always fascinated by water in almost any form unless it’s in a bathtub. Rivers, pools, lakes, streams, oceans…they’re magnetic. I couldn’t stay away from that creek. My friends and I would toss sticks in and watch and cheer as they raced toward an arbitrary goal. We’d throw rocks and build dams, all from the shore because we weren’t allowed in it.

But we were always in it. Always coming back to the house with wet shoes and socks, pretending it was an accident. I was so good at lying about it I could have passed an FBI polygraph. One day on the way back up to the house, I was rehearsing my lines, “I wasn’t in the creek, I wasn’t in the creek…”

My friend walking behind me smiled and said, “Yes you were.”

Yes, Genius, I know that. Friends can be such assholes.

One day my dog cut her paw on a piece of glass running through there and bled all over the house. She jumped around the house with a bloody paw, and it looked like a Paw Patrol crime scene for weeks. We patched her up with some Neosporin and she was good as new in a few days.

It was such a wonderful time to be a kid. Before the technology boom really changed the way we do everything. Computers were merely a business tool and not a communication tool. When you left the house nobody knew where you were. We lived to ride our bikes without helmets and pick gravel out of road rash. We drank from garden hoses and were perpetually sunburned. Satanism and Madonna were our parents’ biggest worries.

My friends and I played endless imaginary baseball games in the backyard. It was always game 7 of the World Series. The bases were always loaded in the bottom of the 9th, with the pitcher nodding to the catcher who had called for a fastball with a full count on the batter. Nobody ever won or lost, and the game never really began or ended.

My dog would endlessly fetch a tennis ball, begging me to throw it over and over again, even as it became so slobbery it could barely be held. I threw it for her anyway. What I wouldn’t give to have one more throw with her.

My favorite spot was one furthest from the house at the end of the yard had a bank that jutted out into the creek leaving a small, grassy overhang that reminded me of an island. That’s where I sat, as if I wanted to be surrounded by the peaceful trickle of the creek and forget the rest of the world. Even at that young age something told me these moments don’t last forever. The innocence of childhood fades as we wish to be older and wiser, but it is only when we become wise we see what we already had. The grand paradox.

Even as a kid I knew time was fleeting. Now, as an adult presumably halfway through my life, I look at my kids and try to see the world through their eyes.

And I just don’t know where the time has gone. It certainly doesn’t feel like I have 44 years of memories stored anywhere, but I guess they’re compressed and stored in a file somewhere. At least I hope.

Special thanks to my friend Michelle A. Cmarik for this lovely story about a creek from her past that prompted this one.