I made a left turn despite the clear instruction from my GPS guy to continue straight. And, as usually happens when I disobey his directions, his GPS lady sidekick announced in her saccharine sweet but slightly critical voice that I had left the planned route.
She asked if I needed directions to get back to the route; told me to answer yes or no; and advised she was waiting for my reply. I said no, even though the question was a lot more complicated than that.
I never hear or think of Waco, Texas, that I don’t also think of the corner of 25th Street and Parrott. That’s the address of the house the five-member Cooksey family moved into in 1957, and the home we moved away from in the fall of 1960. I was 8 years old and in the third grade then.
I’m 60 and a grandmother now and I can count on one hand the times I’ve been to Waco since. That means the memories have had more than a half century to languish – perhaps even improve with age.
On the Sunday afternoon of the renegade left turn, my 12-year-old granddaughter and I had left the Heart of Texas Soccer Fields not three miles behind. Her championship trophy was in the backseat. Kristena, already asleep, was my front seat passenger.
At a stop sign on 34th Street, I noticed Parrott Avenue was the crossroad and I made the instantaneous decision to see if I could find the old home place.
By the time I got to 31st Street, I was already uneasy at how close together the houses were. I persevered.
I stopped at 25th Street and looked around. No, I thought. This isn’t it. It’s nothing like… First of all, Parrott Avenue was about half as wide as I remembered, and never, not ever, were cars parked fender to fender like that along both curbs. The wide avenue I remembered was a sort of extension to our yards. We chased baseballs onto the pavement without fear of being hit by a car, or the baseball smashing a windshield. On a summer evening, we rode our bikes in wide figure 8s right in the middle of the street. We would sail down the incline of our front yard, which, by the way, was not nearly as steep as I remembered.
The house itself was shrunken from what it had been. The porch had been a substantial playhouse for my sister, me and our dolls. Now it hardly looked bigger than a dollhouse.
The sidewalk that ran parallel to the busy 25th Street was long gone. But I vividly remembered it. Once I’d tried to capture a blue jay fledgling on that sidewalk. The baby jay’s parents took turns dive-bombing my head. My dad, coming home from work, saw what danger I was in, ran and scooped me up. The big jays tried to attack him too, but he managed to wave them off with his hat. For the rest of his life, he made it a standard warning of what we learned the hard way. Don’t mess with blue jays.
At the side of the house, I could see the alcove where the breakfast nook had been and was at once reminded of some more favorite things – the smell and sound of bacon frying, Dad reading the morning paper at the table, the comforting sound of Paul Harvey’s voice on the radio.
The pleasant parade of memories marched on by. Christmas mornings, birthday parties in the backyard, Easter outfits and the old iron swing set that allowed us to practically fly even with the sky.
My mom and I planted flowers by the kitchen door, but they never grew. I couldn’t resist hauling the water hose to our garden spot several times a day. I assumed extra watering would help the flowers grow and I really liked the muddy mess that coincidentally occurred.
We walked three blocks to school unafraid and perfectly safe. If the weather was nice, we deviated from our planned route and made an almost twice as long “shortcut” through Cameron Park. On Saturdays we went three blocks in the other direction and 25 cents and two milk bottle tops paid our admission into the 25th Street Theater for the “Kids Matinee.”
How special it all was, I thought as I rounded the block one more time. No, GPS lady, I did not need directions back to the planned route. All I did was make a detour down memory lane.
This column originally appeared in the San Angelo Standard-Times, May 16, 2013. Former Brownwood Bulletin staff writer and columnist Candace Cooksey Fulton is a freelance writer and columnist, living in San Angelo.
