Out in Places Like Wyoming

The Neighborhood

My mother died this past July, three months before Stefan and I made our trip to Laramie.  News of our trip likely would have made no impression on her since her mind had pretty much been lost to dementia. But in her younger mind she would have loved a conversation about this trip, in part because, while my father's life and livelihood can be attached easily to tangible things -- the Engineering Building, the house on Custer Street, the view of the Medicine Bow Range where he used to hunt and fish -- my mother is somehow part of the place itself. At least for me, in a thousand little ways and in countless remembered moments, it was my mother who gave this place to us, who made it our first indelible home.


So it was that while Stefan and I wandered about my Laramie neighborhood after visiting the house my father built, it was my mother who was summoned by what we saw.


About a block away is "the park," which was not only our frequent playground but also our route to and from school. In almost any weather we would leave the sidewalks, cross the street and take a direct route through the park, heading in the direction of the white band shell in the corner because directly behind it (across an intersection) was our school.

The band shell is the most distinguishing feature of the park, which still has towering trees, bushes, and grass, a playground area with a new generation of swings and climbing bars, and lots of open space. It is three blocks long and a block deep.  At one end, where as a Little Leaguer playing for Big Buy Burgers, I reached the pinnacle of my baseball career by hitting a home run. The ball, as I remember, bounced through the infield and rolled across the hard dirt beyond the reach of the distracted outfielders. I rounded the bases at a gallop. It provided me with a few moments of unadulterated joy and dreams of future baseball glory that somehow never panned out.

That hard dirt ball field is now open lawn.  Whether it is still used for Little League or not is not evident to the casual observer.

But the band shell, like so many things, seems to me to be alive with my mother's cautions and warnings. I can recall, for example, when Mom asked me why I was late coming home from school, saying that I was playing in the park, a true though evasive answer.  But what I was actually doing in the park was trying to hit the light bulbs along the inside rim of the band shell with rocks.

I was never able to hit the bulbs, by the way, a natural consequence of age, size, and general inaccuracy.  Had I been stronger or more accurate the temptation of the band shell bulbs might have turned my nascent attempts at vandalism to a life of dissipation and crime.  Who knows.

At any rate, in the summer my mother would make us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches so we could eat lunch with our friends in the park.  The sandwiches she would wrap in waxed paper, and then pour Kool Aid into a mason jar, in those innocent days before plastic containers took over.

The schoolyard, too, was dirt in those olden days.  We played tackle football in the dust at the near end of the school, ruining the knees of our school clothes and scuffing school shoes that had to be polished on Saturday night. The line between school clothes and play clothes has disappeared in the sixty years since I changed the minute I got home, as has the ritual of polishing shoes for Sunday.

This serious business of directing her four Wyoming sons fell, naturally, I always supposed, to my mother. When I think back on things I could do or things I had to ask permission for, it is always my mother I asked. It was always my mother who scolded us for the torn, stained school pants and then mended the ripped pocket, patched the holes, reattached the buttons.It was always Mom who washed and bandaged the scraps on elbows and knuckles and knees.  It was, as I have always thought, a golden childhood.  And she would have loved to hear about the memories this quick trip with own son brought back to me.