gat

has also ruined its share of victims, I know. The difference may reside in whether it arises from
legitimate human grievances or from the bloodless discipline of a bureaucracy. It’s a question
nobody should regard as closed.
Separations
For the first three years of my life I lived in Monongahela. Then we moved to a tiny brick house in
Swissvale, an urban village despite its bucolic name, a gritty part of industrial Pittsburgh. We lived
near Union Switch and Signal Corporation, a favorite goal of exploratory probes among the street
urchins on Calumet to which I quickly pledged my loyalty.
On rainy days I would stand on the porch watching raindrops. It was a next best to my lost river, I
suppose. Sometimes on the porch of the next house, two enchanting little girls, Marilyn and
Beverly, played. Because our porch was somewhat higher than theirs I could watch them
unobserved (at least they pretended not to see me). Thus it was that I fell in love.
Marilyn was a year older than me, already in first grade. Even in 1939 that placed her impossibly
beyond me in every regard. Still, as my next door neighbor, she spoke to me from time to time in
that friendly but distant fashion grand ladies adopt with gardeners and chauffeurs. You would
have to see how humble both our homes were to realize the peculiarity of my analogy.
Beverly, her sister, was a year younger. By the invisible code of the young in well-schooled areas
she might well not have existed. Her presence on the social periphery merited the same attention
you might give a barking puppy, but at the age of four I found myself helplessly in love with her
older sister in the pure fashion the spiritual side of nature reserves as a sign, I think, that
materiality isn’t the whole or even the most important part.
The next year, when I matriculated at McKelvy elementary, first graders and second were kept
rigidly separated from each other even on the playground. The first heartbreak of my life, and the
most profound, was the blinding epiphany I experienced as I hung on the heavy wire fence
separating the first grade compound from the combined second-/third-grade play area. From the
metal mesh that I peered through astigmatically, I could see Marilyn laughing and playing with
strange older boys, oblivious to my yearning. Each sound she made tore at my insides. The sobs I
choked back were as deep at age five as ever again I felt in grief, their traces etched in my mind
six decades later.
So this was what being a year younger had to mean? My sister was two years older and she hardly
ever spoke to me. Why should Marilyn? I slunk around to avoid being near her ever again after
that horrible sight seared my little soul. I mention this epiphany of age-grading because of the
striking contradiction to it Monongahela posed in presenting a universe where all ages
co-mingled, cross-fertilizing each other in a dynamic fashion that I suddenly recognized one day
was very like the colonial world described by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography.
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