Land's End

Waveland Avenue, a street in Chicago. More then just a street, though.  It’s the place where I grew up. In my poetry I have always referred to it as “Land Ave.”  No more secrets:

In my mind I am again standing in that old house, I see the past floating by like snowflakes caught by a January's wind:

The snow is coming down.  Hours have passed and still it keeps coming down.  Chicago is like some broken watch. All of its parts lay motionless, frozen in the snow.  Nothing is open; all the buses are stopped and stuck in snow banks.

All the neighbors band together and hire a plowing company. They dump the snow in the backyard, to make a mountain of snow.  It rises higher then any kid, fence, or grown-up.

Eileen and I build a snow fort on this mountain's peak and race down it with our sleds.

It was like magic, our own mountain...

It is Christmas Eve.  It had snowed earlier in the day and the ground was covered with a crisp, cool, white layer of glistening snow.

Dad is working at the pizza place and mother says we have to get our coats on to go out and look at the Christmas lights up and down Waveland.

So we go up, down, and around the block looking at all the lights and decorations. Tired and worn out from all the walking we return home to find that Santa was there while we were out!

Even if I had seen Dad's red station wagon leaving just as we turned the corner towards home...

Grandma is sitting up close to her television, cursing the Cub’s Ron Santo.  It is the important game with the Mets and the Cubs are losing...

Laura swings the stick at the piñata.  She only nicks it and sends it whirling madly out of control, to be stopped by her father...

Running to the corner store to buy ice cream bars during the great riots of 1968...

Painting a hockey rink on the basement floor as a gift to Brian, and irritating mother...

Coming home from kindergarten to find mother crying and JFK dead...

Spending rainy days playing catch and breaking windows, upstairs...

The day the picture that now hangs on my wall was taken.  A picture of all of us when we were young...

Images continue to flash before my eyes, more images then there are words to say or un-spent emotion left to express them.

I am gone from Waveland, but I can still visit that old, grey, house as long as I carry these memories within my heart.

K.J.K.

04-14-11 (Revised)

12-02-95