Moving on

At long last I feel like my season-of-grief is over.
That is, the grief that came with losing my beloved wife to cancer three years ago.
We were married more than 44 years, despite the nattering nabobs of negativism in her family.
They said I’d got her pregnant, and we’d never last a year. I wasn’t the blonde idiot they wanted, whose name was “Dave Green.”
I snagged a really good one.
She put up with me, so I accepted her for who she was.
I feel like my grief ended with my prostate operation.
It was a HUGE distraction; I had little time to think about the death of my wife.
I haven’t cried for a while.
So now I feel like starting over; going back to my roots, perhaps.
I’m a native of south Jersey. All my siblings feel like Delawareans. But I was 13 when my family moved to Delaware. (I’m the oldest.) I feel like I grew up in south Jersey.
I’ve always said New Jersey is comprised of two parts.
North Jersey is the dump for New York City, and south Jersey is the dump for Philadelphia.
Beyond that, PA is/was a hyper-religious state. One had to buy liquor at state-stores. Therefore, Pennsylvanians driving back from the Jersey seashore would stop at a south Jersey liquor store.
And there were plenty, along with nightclubs, bars, and houses-of-ill-repute.
South Jersey was a den-of-iniquity. My upbringing reflects that. Not a participant, just an observer — of madness.
I always say the world indeed has an asshole, and it’s south Jersey.
Since my wife’s death I’ve been sort of a hermit. I didn’t feel like going anywhere.
But now I feel like I should go visit south Jersey; see my original home.
My first home at 625 Jefferson Ave. in Erlton (“ERL-tin;” as in name “Earl”) is still there according to Google Street-Views. As is “the Triangle,” a vacant lot across the street where kids played baseball.
But I feel like I need to see it in the flesh.
Perhaps see the first-floor addition to our house my father designed with his tee-square.
Our next-door neighbors also built an addition, but it wasn’t as good as my father’s.
Our house was built about 1940, which makes it pre-plywood. It was sheathed and roofed with tongue-and-groove.
I’d like to visit “Christopherson’s Woods,” and see if it’s the same as when I played there. Back then the Christopherson children had to cross a creek in that woods to get to school. Last time I visited that bridge was gone.
I’d also like to visit Camden County Park and Cooper Crick. Erlton is in Camden County. (“Crick” was how “creek” was pronounced.)
Last time I visited the park was different.
A dam had washed out, or was removed.
And my elementary school is gone; apparently torn down.

TERRIFIED in corduroys and StrideRites. (First day in kindergarten, September 12th, 1949 — Erlton School has been torn down.) (Photo by my mother.)

I was terrified when I started kindergarten there. Never before had I been away from my parents. —There was no Pre-K back then.
And in the background was always the threat of nuclear annihilation. We practiced “duck and cover,” but how does one survive a direct hit from an atom bomb?
And in the early ‘50s it became even worse, the hydrogen bomb.
‘Lebenty-Times-Seben!
Isil beheadings seem tame compared to being vaporized by the Russkies.
I feel like I need to make that climb up Kings Highway to Haddonfield (“ha-din-FIELD;” as in “at”) to pass the old high-school where my father took me to a Thanksgiving football game.
We hiked to it.
And pass the stately Haddon Fortnightly near Grove Street, and the house where my piano-teacher lived. She was choir-director at our church, and would get my sister and I crying over Clementi exercises. Then blow her nose in triumph into her soggy handkerchief, which she then stuffed into the front bodice of her dress.
And find Centre St., where I went sledding with my father.
That hill was so long, they only closed the bottom third.
I’d continue south on Kings Highway past ancient Indian King tavern, where supposedly George Washington once stayed. Haddonfield is an old Revolutionary-War town, and has a cemetery with grave-stones from the 1700s.
I’d continue south and cross Haddon Ave., the main east-west drag from Camden, south Jersey’s extension of Philadelphia.
Hard by the intersection on Haddon Ave. was the Haddonfield Fire Department, with its incredibly loud fire-horn, that terrified me every day at noon. Auditory hallucinations, plus parents that raged when I got scared.
After Haddon Ave. I might pass the building that housed the old Acme (“ak-mee”) supermarket, where my mother refused to shop because it was “Of-The-Devil.”
Farther along I might pass the building that housed the A&P supermarket where my mother did shop, and where my maternal grandfather stole plums.
If you think I’m making this stuff up, I’m not.
My grandfather also begged, stand on the corner in his frumpy suit and fedora shaking a tin cup. How many times did we have to rescue him from the police-station?
Supermarkets are now 10-15 times bigger than that old A&P.
Finally I’d come to where Kings Highway crossed the railroad-tracks, though no longer at grade. That railroad is now a rapid-transit to Philadelphia. When it was converted, it went through Haddonfield below grade.
Kings Highway crosses the Haddonfield transit-station on an overpass.
It was that or elevate it. That grade-crossing was a bottleneck, both for drivers and trains.
After that I’d drive east out South Atlantic Ave. next to the tracks. When I was a child, S. Atlantic was a dead-end — now it’s through — and the railroad was Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines to Atlantic City.
South Atlantic is where I first watched trains at age-2 with my father, and became a railfan for life (I’m now 71).

Where it all began in Haddonfield. (Photo by Robert Long ©.)

So ends my visit to my roots, although I’d also try Pakim Pond, where a Navy Corsair fighter-plane from Willow Grove Naval Air Station crashed and disappeared.
Plus eight Campbell Soup tomato-pickers drowned when their top-down Oldsmobile convertible sailed into the pond.
I was also told a railroad-locomotive was in that pond, but last time I visited, the dam that backed up the pond had washed out, and the pond was empty. No Corsair, no Oldsmobile, and no locomotive, although I wondered how it could get there with no railroad nearby.
So now I think I can go back.
A lot has happened since my childhood, including sublimation of myself in order to get along with a really good wife.
But now I am back to being unmarried, so I can be the person I once was.
This involves starting from scratch: going back to the madness that was my childhood.
I can’t say I’d wanna live there, but south Jersey is who I am.
If anyone wonders why I have a jaundiced-eye, it’s my south Jersey upbringing. Nothing like having your hopes dashed by finding that little hottie I lusted-after was nothing but another south Jersey slattern — sunning naked on Bare-Ass Beach.
I think I can make the visit.

• “Erlton” is the small suburb of Philadelphia in south Jersey where I lived until I was 13. Erlton was founded in the ‘30s, named after its developer, whose name was Earl.
• “Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines” (PRSL) is an amalgamation of Pennsylvania and Reading railroad-lines in south Jersey to counter the fact the two railroads had too much parallel track. It was promulgated in 1933. It serviced mainly the south Jersey seashore from Philadelphia.
• RE: “Bare-Ass Beach.........” —There actually was a Bare-Ass Beach (“B-A-B”) south of Christopherson’s Woods, a sandbar along a north branch of the Cooper River not far from Kings Highway. And I did see my little hottie there sunning herself bare-naked. But I’d say that was more the social pressures of south Jersey; she may not have been a slut. —No hanky-panky was going on, at least not during my viewing. And this was despite some hard-rock greasers also sunning themselves bare-naked.