The Hood

We took a walk today after our trip to the bank. It was stupendous. Cold air, warm sunshine and everything crisp and clean after the rains. The hood is changing. For one, this guy got out of his car and greeted us before going into his house. He was good-looking too. Not hard on the eyes at all and friendly, so I thought. But the hood itself is changing, new people are moving in and at one house they have leveled the ground, even the foundation was dug out and carted off. Usually, they leave some of it for the expense of putting in new but not this one.

I remember when I grew up here starting at age ten. It was one of the worse years of my life that year in 1956.  We moved into a seven year old swatch of a vast housing tract. The San Fernando Valley was filling up with vets  from WWII. Not far from here, across from Birmingham High, the houses all had slanted walkways for entry. An entire tract of homes for disabled vets. The high school was a VA hospital built to care for them. When the hospital was no longer needed, it became a high school but still some disabled vets had lived in the hood.

My dad, a month after we moved in, was in an accident that changed every dimension of my family. Life, in the blink of an eye, was forever altered after that. A steel beam broke at a lift slab structure he was working on and took out part of the left hemisphere of his brain. He had speech problems, motion problems and was considered 100% disabled. He didn't know what happened and neither did we, the survivors to his accident. Strange how someone in the family can have a life altering change and it effects all, not just that one person of the accident, all of our lives changed, my mother,  myself and my sister. But it wasn't just that that changed, friends too and how we grew up and what life was for us---all changed in the blink of an eye.

These were starting homes for vets after WWII. A place for new families to launch from, only here, at this particular house, we broke at the launching pad and are still here, still waiting to launch. The one guy that I knew from childhood died a few years ago, his nephew is fixing up the place. Now, it's just me here in a hood that has changed completely--twice that I know of. It is really weird, like being stuck in a time warp.  To witness it all as if I wasn't really alive but a ghost that hasn't moved on.