I decided not to try and start a conversation, or to tell them that their apartment is in a bad location. The man was spreading mulch most likely because there was no grass in their courtyard, only dirt. There is no grass because I have noticed that every time it rains, water funnels off the roof and pours into that yard in buckets. Any vegetation is drowned out.
I felt some sympathy for them, new parents in a new home, trying to make a go of it in this world. I imagine that it was probably much the same for my own parents when they were getting started with me in a small apartment on Christa Drive in Wilmington, NC.
My first and some of my best memories come from this time- the early 1980s.
One day, I remember playing in the front yard with mom. I heard talking coming from the apartment next to ours. The window was just low enough that I was able to see over the edge, and out of curiosity I walked over and looked in through the window at the people inside. The woman sitting in her living room saw me and said hello.
Mom corrected me, though, and told me it was not polite to look in through windows at other people in their homes.
The woman who lived next to us was named Angela. My favorite TV show at the time was CHiPs, a show about two motorcycle cops for the California Highway Patrol in Los Angeles. Here is a video clip of how it came on each week:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6hzt9RA_VQ
Watching the show come on again with the music, the way the cars and the film look, reminds me that my childhood is truly a different era, now.
Anyway, I had picked up on the name of the city as a boy watching the show, and I identified it with the name of our neighbor. When I saw her, I said, "Hey, Angeles" instead of Angela. I remember her with thick glasses and a blue bandana in her hair.
The first rainbow that I ever saw was in the back yard there in Wilmington, too. I remember looking at it really hard, trying to discern where one color stopped and another one began. As I recall, it was not quite a complete rainbow. I've seen a perfect rainbow only a couple of times in my whole life.
Perhaps I am mixing the two memories, but it seems that the same day that I saw my first rainbow, I was also introduced to my first water gun. It was a small plastic pistol that Dad filled for me. Another one of our neighbors, a man with a dark mustache, was playing with his child in a kiddy pool in the back yard. I ran up to him and squirted him in the chest with the water gun. Dad told me to stop, that what I was doing might be fun for me but that the man probably did not want to play.
The man said it was okay, though...
Now, back to the present, where I sit in my apartment in Miami, typing this blog entry. It is almost midnight.
Earlier this week, I received the news that Mom has been diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease. The diagnosis explains some of the things that I observed last summer with her when we went on a family vacation out west. As I am learning, it remains to be seen how fast her symptoms will progress and how severe they will be. We are watching for how she responds to the medication she started this week.
Her condition has me thinking about a lot of things.
I value my early memories of my parents, and writing this blog serves an important function for me. My parents will not be around year after year. I finally began to grasp some of what that meant when I was a student in law school. The bad news from this week only confirms it.
Mom and Dad both have been pretty brave and cheerful about it, though, and there is hope that she can live with the disease for a long time without a major impact on her lifestyle. I am lucky that they have lived long enough for me to come to this new appreciation of them.
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