Sense of place

As long as we stayed outside, we could live in our own world. Inside, the adults made the rules and we became the kids we were instead of the people we wanted to be.

We didn’t have any money anyway, so the Globe Hotel with its fish fry and cigarette smoke aroma was off limits to us. Hanging out behind the Aurora Theater was as much a thing to do as seeing the movie inside. There were always packs of skate rats, hair hanging over one eye, doing ollies and grinding their boards across the cement of the theater parking lot. That was usually where things got started. Rumors of parties floated like pollen. But mostly there was nothing, and we’d stay until the adults rolled out of the theater and drifted through the parking lot to their cars.

Other kids would go to the Boys Club at night. Kids whose parents would likely pick them up in a minivan promptly at 10 p.m. I went there a few times. Its gym and the game room didn’t appeal to me. There weren’t any dark corners where my secret life could be led. It provided a choice between basketball or foosball, but what I wanted was to make up my own rules.

We’d move in a huddle, down Main to South Grove. Hamlin Park was there for us, with its canopy of trees and the swings that beckoned like our own version of a living room. Sometimes it was the train tracks. Sometimes the corner of Sycamore and Linden. Going home wasn’t an option—even though for all of my fantasies of a game of Mexican hide and seek—nothing ever happened. It was important to be there in case Sarah did go off with Jason, or Pete’s parents did go away and that meant that he and Amy would go to second base. Or in case, that night, he did notice me.