Junior high school was agonizing for me and many others. It was a crucible of terror into which were poured the human contents of a handful of grammar schools, blended and stirred vigorously, simmered in emerging hormones, and shipped off to school on buses for the first time in our young lives.
My day began a half block from my house on the 900 block of Goodwin Drive. It was a convenient location for a bus stop. My mother could even see me from the living room window if she chose to stoop beneath the level of the front canvas awnings and crane her neck far to the left. I wonder if she did.
I waited with one or two other kids I knew for years when we trekked together from kindergarten through the sixth grade to James Madison School further down the street. Ours seemed like the first stop on the route, an illusion shattered daily when the doors shooshed open and we mounted several steep black stairs. A look into the dead eyes of our driver, already fit to be tied with the ne’er-do-wells at the back of the bus, we turned to face our daily threat.
The first stop on our unfortunate route was in front of the trailer park store on Algonquin Road, between Oakton Street and Touhy Avenue. Behind the store, of course, was the trailer park. For various socioeconomic reasons, that little parcel of land was a mortar and pestle that ground resident human children into beings that in 1966 were known as greasers.
There were five of them, a coterie of black leather-jacketed thugs who owned the back of our bus. I remember several of their faces, carved into my long-term memory with a switchblade of fear. One was a giant man-child who would be a formidable opponent for the outsized Dean of Students once he crossed the bridge to Maine South. Another was a handsome, silent but deadly James Dean type. I felt he might have the courage and heart to step out of his scripted existence if needed to save a victim like the one I assumed I might become. A third was most likely the model for the character Scut Farkus in 1983’s A Christmas Story, with red hair that writhed like Medusan snakes in the non-existent wind that swirled constantly around him. His green eyes were feline and his perpetual elvish grin had fangs.
The bus loaded quickly as the driver sped through his route, always running late and hoping to shorten the experience for us all. It was cowardly to sit as close to the front of the bus as possible, despite the instinct to distance ourselves from the viper pit further down the aisle. A seat somewhere amidships drew less attention from the venomous nest, and the tough guys were too enmeshed in the battle for supremacy within their ranks to pay much attention to the rest of us. Whatever corrupting force awaited them at home may have promised beatings half to death if reports of misbehavior followed them at day’s end. Exiting the bus at school was an enormous relief. We scattered to our respective lockers and homerooms.
The return trip after school was by comparison a dream, a relaxing ride by a different route devoid of the criminally insane. By mid-December, the chill in the air and occasional snowflakes sticking to our gloves and sleeves pointed the way to one of the best times of the year. Christmas break, two weeks during which we retreated to the warmth and coddled safety of our origin story, like a visit to see Santa at the local department store.
I vividly recall one walk home from the bus, about three blocks, on a late Friday afternoon that deposited me like a playground slide at ground level before a pre-holiday weekend. It was cold and overcast. The clouds felt like a cozy gray fleece over the entirety of Park Ridge. I walked slowly, not at all in the usual rush to get home and start the weekend. This break was fourteen days long with the best day of the year in its center, itself like a present waiting to be opened.
The anticipation began to mount. I relished every step of that walk home, examining familiar houses on both sides of the street, each beginning to show signs of Christmas. Strings of colored lights on metal gutters, trees showcased in bay windows, and tall red plastic candles on front walkways that said “Noel” beneath an unwavering yellow flame.
I’d seen the houses a thousand times, but the large red and blue and green colored bulbs on bushes and trees out front lent them an added dimensionality, like a Marshall Field window diorama. They were big glass bulbs, half the length of your hand. I was happy to the point of bliss, the morning ride on the bus completely forgotten.
And then the snowflakes began to increase in number. The sky darkened a bit with thickening clouds as darkness approached, still an hour away. As the solstice arrived, the sun put up only a feeble struggle, vanishing so early for several weeks that my father came home from work in the dark during winter’s depth.
And then there was a surprise. On the final approach to my house, I spotted a hint of activity through our living room window. Dad was home! And not only home, but crouching down near the bare green trunk of our new artificial Christmas tree. He took his time, knowing that I’d be home soon, wondering what was taking me so long. I sped up the driveway, tossed my hat and coat aside, and joined him, sorting color-coded branches for methodical insertion from bottom to top, eventually crowning the uppermost end of the wooden pole with a genuinely fake-looking sprig of green plastic and twisted black wire.
But it was a fine tree, with a better shape than previous real trees that messed up the carpeting in a torrent of dry needles or tipped over during the night as branches shifted, staining the carpet with rusty water from the tree stand. Lights, garlands, and ornaments masked the many gaps between branches. There were even glow-in-the-dark plastic icicles. It was beautiful.
Rudolph the Nosed Reindeer was on television later that evening, the yearly telecast that we dared not miss for fear of having to wait a year to see it again. It debuted as an instant favorite two years before on our black-and-white TV. But our minds filled in the missing colors, and the hour-long show’s music provided the evening’s soundtrack with songs destined to be classics.
We didn’t know at the time that Dad would be gone in three years, or how important it was that he came home early to lengthen a pre-Christmas weekend that year. It was so unlike him, a man as regular as clockwork, almost as if he felt the press of time slipping away, relentless and ever-faster, each moment more precious than the last.
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