Park Road Diary

By Karl Kendall

A young man, Andrew, looks back on his early post high-school years, as he balances work, attending community college and dating, while living at home with his mother and grandmother. He is anxious to find his way in the world while feeling he lacks any sort of guidance, with his home and his immediate neighborhood offering the only stable refer

• Language: English
• Publisher: Karl Kendall
• Release date: Jan 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9780578364599

Book preview

Prologue

Let me just say that I would be the first one to recognize this isn’t a diary in a classic sense. There are no entries, August Eleventh, Dear Diary, today I went shopping for new clothes.

It’s nothing like that, but Park Road Recollections just didn’t have a good ring to it.

What it is, is indeed a recollection of an odd incident that happened on Park Road, to a degree how it came to be, how it even happened and its immediate aftermath. In the total scheme of things, it certainly is a small to inconsequential affair, neither war, nor battle, nor famine or pestilence.

Nevertheless, it left consequences. For a small cadre of people, it was not small. I would argue instead it was quite impactful to their lives, one even losing his. That’s pretty impactful. I’m writing it down, recording it as sort of a historian, but also as a participant who was in the heart of it. I can’t guarantee to offer total impartiality in relating my experiences.

I would also say my attempts to reconstruct dialog are done on a best-efforts basis, and are as close as I can come in recreating any truth, whether or not in-theory accurate. My prejudices inevitably must come into play, but with hope I have minimized them to the extent possible. Or is that to the best extent practicable? I’m still young enough, maybe I should go to law school.

Chapter 1

Geography

Park Road is two city blocks long and runs north-south in the low-lands area of our town. It’s effectively the outer border of a once proud if never exactly toney residential district, abutting what has become an area of heavy industry. The flat buildable land, and nearby railroad with adjacent highway, are usually credited for the encroachment of industry, plus for the interested geology cognoscenti, some convenient subsurface rock formations that allowed foundation work for simple installation of even the heaviest of machinery.

Although I’m too young to remember it, Park Road once had a rather nice town park at its now dead end, hence its name. I’m told on weekends the street used to be lined with automobiles as families gathered for picnics and barbeques, sports, pleasant recreational sorts of things.

Now, at the street’s end there is just a dense stand of not-so-tall pine trees, and a driveway leading to a gated service road. The pine trees form a green zone. At least that’s what the owners of the petrochemical plant called it in their literature. Beyond the pine trees and just barely in sight is the plant’s cooling pond. It takes up most of the area of what used to be the municipal park. The pond, a leaden-colored lozenge shaped thing, is a nice recreational feature for the seasonal geese.

Park Road is still overtly residential. Both sides of the street are lined with homes of varying size and age. The houses represent a range from aspirational middle class to solid middle class. Mostly, the homes are well kept up and with nice gardens, eighteen in all. It’s a pleasant neighborhood, quiet with little traffic, and stable with most families having lived there a long time.

And it may sound strange, even the petrochemical plant is a good neighbor, arguably so on most days at least. It never stinks at all and is mostly quiet. Even the employees access the parking lot from the highway side, and doesn’t impact Park Road in any way. Albeit we hear the occasional safety alarm and once a month on the first Wednesday at midday, the plant’s safety truck roars up to the gate at the end of the street, employees unlock the gate and enter the plant through the chain-linked fence from this side. Sometimes only the glow at night from that end of the street reminds one of the plant’s presence. As the phrase goes, it could be worse, a lot worse.

As for the rest of our neighbors, one could say they reflect a usual mix of an unplanned and mature community with no especial age or ethnic or occupational demographic. Even during election times there is always a happy mixture of yard signs, incumbents and challengers, and a healthy proportion of no signs whatsoever, reflecting no particular political bent, or at least the very American view it was none of their neighbor’s business.

Our house is in the middle of the block, neither the newest and far from being the oldest. That honor goes to our next-door neighbor’s house, rather small, brick with dark trim, which was built at the very beginning of the twentieth century. There’s an old black-and-white photograph occasionally used by the local civic association in their brochures, an early aerial picture, and you can see maybe eight houses in total on Park Road, with our neighbor’s house the only one still standing. Most of the current houses are post war as they say, larger but closer together. Also in this same photograph, you can see the park with its picnic tables, paths, and a gazebo. The street did not need the separation provided by the green belt of pines. Where the petrochemical plant sits now was then partially an orchard and mostly a cow pasture.

I guess the only other historic house, pre-war and all that, is coincidentally the house on the other side of ours, a two-story four-square, something like that, a big brick house with a porch up front, painted pale yellow. What’s interesting is a tiny guest house in the backyard, hardly more than a big shed, but I’m told with electricity and running water.

My grandmother calls it an ohana which is a Hawaiian term and god knows where she got that, but my mother once told me it was built to house a person who required an iron lung, a term I had to look up. That’s pretty sick and I mean it in both senses of the term.

Otherwise, we’re surrounded by post-war houses on the street, or at least houses that have been updated or renovated or added on to that they’re not recognizable from their original state. I would argue that’s a good thing, as old houses can be pretty depressing if you think about it. I’m talking about all those generations and illnesses. Family tragedies were more common than not, but maybe I’m biased by all the old timers about.

That’s another thing about old neighborhoods, at least in comparison if you live in a suburban development, all recently constructed, all with newly scrubbed families moved in, you have most occupants reasonably youngish, healthy and optimistic, having kids and planning for the future. Right now, on Park Road some of the old timers are starting to kick the bucket, and maybe four houses have younger couples with only a few children about.

I would give as an example a family across the street and one door down, relative newbies as they’ve only been here two years. The couple, Ike and Judith, have two tikes, a boy and girl, with the boy just now walking. They’re always cheerful and optimistic and proud of things and I shouldn’t hate them for it, but I do just a little.

Even in their presence my mother refers to their house as Karen’s place, who was the previous owner. Karen was a good friend of my grandmother’s, and when she was still able, used to come over all the time to our house for tea. She was, as they say, a gregarious old lady, ex-journalist for the local newspaper and if I did my research correctly, a rabid wobbly, probably one of the last.

Then Karen started using a cane, and then my grandmother started taking the tea over to Karen’s. For about a year there, I was still in high-school then, about once a month you’d see an EMS van parked in front of Karen’s house. Sometimes they would take her to the hospital for observation and sometimes not, and the EMS technicians seemed to take it in stride and with good humor. One day Karen never returned from observation and my grandmother was terribly sad.

See what I mean about old houses? I need to save my money when I start making money so when I move out, I can buy a new house in a new subdivision. And no, I do not believe in ghosts.

Now living next door to Ike and Judith, next door to Karen’s house, directly across the street, is an elderly gentleman named Joaquin Sandoval. Not so old as Karen was, but retired and keeps to himself.

Architecturally speaking, his house is the newest on the block, mid-century modern my mother once called it, while in the same breath calling it an eyesore. It is a plain thing with little ornamentation, almost a box, but seems to match the owner well. He grows tomato bushes in his front yard during the season, and never seems to pick any of them, letting the neighbors take what they want, and the squirrels the rest. When I was in middle school, he once lectured me on the need to use horse manure every year to keep the plants healthy. I assured him I would abide by his instructions when I started growing tomatoes.

Mister Sandoval as I call him, although I once heard another neighbor call him l’ingegnere di dottorato and I don’t know if he was joking or not, had been a chemist or something, and has some patents to his name, enough to have allowed him to retire relatively young. My father, when he was still living here, used to say that Joaquin could have been a multi-millionaire if he had continued in his profession, and had simply applied himself further, or had gotten a smarter attorney. Apparently, he chose not to any of that and is content with what he has. Like my father, I don’t get it.

Now our house doesn’t look remarkable, a post-war colonial, there’s that hyphenated word again, red brick in this case, probably the most common looking house in the area. I guess our house would be one of those with major renovations. As of about ten years ago, I was just a kid at the time, we had what was determined to be an electrical fire due to faulty wiring behind a kitchen cabinet.

It was freezing cold that night and somebody walking by outside smelled the smoke, looked up and could see our roof was smoldering. He ran up and pounded on the door. We were all asleep and by the time we all got coats and shoes on, and ourselves outside, the flames were coming out of the roof’s edges. We barely made it out before the second floor was totally engulfed.

The fire department came and did their work quickly enough, I guess. Hearing the sirens as they approached and watching the flames as they spread over your home tends to distort the sense of time.

Me and Grandma watched them work from Mister Sandoval’s living room, while Mom and Dad stayed on the sidewalk, even though it was so very cold, watching with many of the neighbors. Mister Sandoval made hot chocolate for us, and all three of us cried. I remember Mom and Dad on the sidewalk standing apart, staring at the flames. Some neighbors came up and hugged Mom, but my parents never did hug, nor cried. I remember thinking that was odd.

In the movies when the fire department puts out a house fire, that’s it. Maybe in the next scene they show the insurance adjuster or police detective, walking among the smoldering ruins, but that’s the end of it. In real life that’s just the first day, and no one walked among our smoldering ruins because of all the water the fire department sprayed. The water ended up in the cellar destroying everything and collapsing the first floor which may have otherwise survived.

In our case our belongings and the house were a total loss and of course the house had to be rebuilt, and that took the most part of a year, factoring in demolition of the old house and actual construction.

The insurance company put us in an only slightly seedy furnished apartment complex, catering to corporate clients and government officials deployed on some sort of medium-term assignment to our town, and people just like us. It was OK, and we even had maid service, but Mother had to take me to school and pick me up. Grandma hated it and reminded us of the fact often, while Dad always stayed silent about everything.

Finally, when we moved back, the new house sort of looked like the old house but seemed somehow fake, doors that were once solid wood were now hollow, brick on the front but not all the way around anymore, composite not wood siding, that sort of thing.

I also think when we moved back in some neighbors held a slight grudge against us because of all the construction, and Grandma’s very important garden was a total mess. They had ripped up the crepe myrtles during construction. Debris filled the pond and even the three large rocks, which she said were symbolic in their arrangement, were pushed into a pile in the corner.

Before this happened, I remember my parents used to talk about friends of theirs, the Darcys who live uphill from us several blocks over, and how one spring many years ago lightning struck their house, and what a big deal it was. I didn’t understand what the fuss was about then. Their house had been rebuilt and nobody was hurt. I understand now.

And so far, lightning has not struck twice for the Darcy family, at least not yet, and I will not say I sleep with one eye open, but the truth of the matter is it has been ten years since our house burned, and as I mentioned that was because of faulty wiring in the kitchen. Well, that kitchen had already been renovated including with its ultimately faulty wiring, just shortly before my parents bought the house and moved in, before I was born. That renovation was about ten years old at the time the wiring decided finally to short out. I’m just saying. There’s nothing like the smell of burnt toast to wake me up in the morning.

I’ve mentioned to my mom about having the wiring checked, but she thinks I’m a little scaredy cat. She then invited me to move out or pay some rent, knowing I can’t do that right now. I’m already kicking in on the groceries.

I thought Grandma would side with me on this prudent safety measure, but I know Mom sometimes scares her too. And I tried to get Dad to call her and convince her but he said it was none of his business anymore. He said I should move out to the coast and go to school near him, but as always, I don’t think he means it.

Mom is a nurse. She works odd hours at the hospital. That makes her grouchy a lot of the time. She used to work for a doctor and had a regular daytime schedule and she was much happier then, but one day they had a big blowout argument and that was that. Still, he helped her find her current job, made recommendations and such. The doctor is a decent guy.

Mom is sometimes kind of crazy, if you look closely and pay attention. A couple of weeks ago she came home from a walk with a bunch of vegetables, eggplant, okra, squash, and peppers. She didn’t have any bags and was using her coat to carry it all. She said it was free for the picking from the community garden two blocks over, but there is no such garden. I figured out which yard she got them from, a nice house with a large side lot. They probably can’t see all of their garden from the house. They should really put up a fence.

I’ve asked Grandma about Mom, whether she was always like this. She says it’s because my grandfather was Irish and they don’t show good restraint like Koreans, even though she loved my grandfather very much. They met when he was over there in the service. This was after the Korean war by several years. Grandpa was in some sort of intelligence group and my grandmother’s brother, Hyun, was working for them as a translator. He apparently introduced them, and her parents were apparently fine with her marrying an Irish-American. It was a long time ago.

Grandma is OK, but she just doesn’t have much energy left. In some ways when Grandpa died, she came out of her shell, and I, until that time, didn’t realize how Americanized she had become.

Part of the problem for many is that her English, knowledge of idioms and such is superb, but she doesn’t think she has an accent and she has a really heavy accent. If I’m out escorting her when she’s shopping, many people will ask me to translate what she said, and I end up just repeating exactly what she said. This makes her angry and on one occasion over lunch she just started calling the waiter racist. It was not a good meal.

Since we’re on the subject, my dad says he is of German ancestry, which accounts for our last name, but likes to call himself a Nord. So, I’m a mix, the perfect American. My girlfriend’s housemate tells me I look Estonian. I had to look that one up. From an internet search of the country and images of the people, I didn’t notice anything special, but I guess at least she wasn’t insulting me.

My girlfriend’s name is Jehanne. We met in Calculus-one during my first semester at the local community college. It was her third semester. She’s studying for and is targeting a business major when she transfers to the state university next year. That’s a two-hour drive if we’re still together by that time. I like Jehanne a lot.

Myself, I’m targeting Computer Science as a major as I’m OK at math and pretty good at reading instructions. There’s a track at our community college where if you maintain a certain grade point average over your two years they place you on a priority list for admittance to the state university. The problem with that is