Nancy and I live in Pendleton Heights, one of Kansas City’s oldest neighborhoods. We bought a house there in 2019, as part of our retirement plan. It sits right across the street from a Vietnamese Buddhist temple and was once home to one of Kansas City’s mayors.
It’s not a typical suburban setting and that’s one of the things we love about it. We’re not typical, suburban Americans. We prefer inner city grit to suburban neatness.
A little over a week ago a young man was gunned down in the street, about a half a block from where Nancy and I live. It was cold blooded. A young man was gunned down in the street by another young man who was driving by. Two shots to the head and off the murdering thug went on his merry way. No motive has been established, although I can’t imagine any motive making sense.
In the week or so since we’ve had friends tell us we need to leave this neighborhood. “It’s dangerous.” “You could get shot.”
I get it. There’s the neighborhood to contend with and there’s this big old house to maintain. Neither one of us is a spring chicken. Plus, we have my Parkinson’s to deal with every day. I simply cannot do the things I was able to do a year ago.
Aren’t the suburbs or assisted living valid options, then? No.
While appreciate the concern our friends have for us and their suggestions to abandon our gritty city life, we simply cannot, nor will we. This city life is who we are. It’s embedded in our souls.
I grew up in inner city Boston back in the late fifties. My formative years there were quite full, and quite interesting.
I have fond memories of one of my first jobs as an usher in the Metropolitan Theatre on Tremont Street in downtown Boston. It was a huge venue (over, 3,000 seating capacity). It was host to not only films, but also an annual visit from the Metropolitan Opera Company. I once took a week off from school to spend my days there, selling librettos in the lobby or waking around the balcony selling small bottles of orange drink during the intermissions. I can still hear myself shouting, “Hey, get ‘yer ice-cold orange here” As I roamed from aisle to aisle.
My everyday duties at the “Met” weren’t nearly as cultured, but they were quite interesting. My managers would often send me down to Scollay Square to take their bets to their “bookies. Sometimes after work they’d take me down to the Old Howard to watch a bit of burlesque and striptease. They knew I was underage, and I knew I was underage, but the “education” I got seemed at the time to be worth the risk of running afoul of the law. I remember my eyes almost popping out of my head the first time I saw “Sally T” perform. Oh, my what she would do with her tassels. Most people wouldn’t believe that a woman could get one tassel to turn in a clockwise direction and the other to turn counterclockwise simultaneously. But she really did. I saw it happen, and my eyes popped.
I can still visualize mornings leaving the subway near the Boston Common and gazing at the Massachusetts State House. I went inside a few times and the one memory I retain above all the sights I saw inside was a plaque with a codfish mounted or nailed on it. Folks in Boston cal it the “sacred cod.” I’ve only seen it a few times and seeing it always make me chuckle. “Can you believe it? People in highly sophisticated, highly educated Boston actually worship a codfish.”
Sometimes on my way home I’d stop and join the bargain hunters at Filene’s basement, which was home to a unique sales/inventory management system. Sale items were placed strategically. If an item didn’t sell on day one, the price was marked down on day two If it didn’t sell on day two, it was marked down for day three. And so, it went for thirty days. If it didn’t sell by then it was given to charity. My wardrobe in those days wasn’t very pretty. It wasn’t the stuff you’d find at Neiman-Marcus or Bloomingdale’s. But everything I bought fit, and it didn’t cost an arm and a leg.
There were even a few times I got adventurous enough to walk from the Boston Common subway stop to the infamous “Combat Zone” along Boylston and Washington Streets. Each foray had its thrills and chills. I was once told that even the cops wouldn’t go there. Yet, somehow, I survived these little journeys.
I lived in Cambridge, which was just across the river from downtown Boston. It was a bit like living the life of a vagabond. Not long after Nancy and I got married we took a trip to Cambridge and Boston. I took more than a bit of peevish pleasure proudly proclaiming “We lived there for a while” as we drove around the streets of Cambridge. My mother was an immigrant who feared any mail that came from the “immigration folks.” She’d get the dreaded and the next thing you know we’d be moving to another tenement. It was her way of staying one step ahead of the feds.
We’d live in one place long enough for me to develop my stickball skills and in time I laid claim to being the “stickball champion of Chatham Street.”
During my high school years, I’d occasionally spend Saturday nights at Tulla”s Cofee Grinder listening to the beat prose and poetry of Allen Ginsburg or Jack Kerouac. Occasionally, someone would play a Woody Guthrie tune. I’d watch and listen, enraptured. When people back then asked me what I wanted to be in life I’d always respond, “I want to be a hobo and ride the rails with Woody, Jack, and Allen.”
That was my life then. While my surroundings right now are different, the memories of that long ago time still fill me with what I’m sure some will think is more than a bit unorthodox. And they may be right. But I can’t help it. I am who I am and there is no room inside me for the quiet suburbs.
I’ll close with the following, which includes a poem that I hope describes the way I feel inside.
I have an on and off relationship with poetry. There are times I love working in it and times when I don’t. There are those times, those rare times, when the words just seem to flow. Most often, though, I agonize over them.
I wrote the poem some time ago. It’s one of those I agonized over for days. Many who read my blog assume that I’m a Midwesterner, but it’s not really the Midwest that has shaped me. I grew up the tenements and housing projects of inner-city Boston. The sights and sounds of those early years of my life are always with me.
I hope that in reading this short piece you, the reader, will get a glimpse into the places I call my roots:
The Romantic’s Ghetto
By
Phil Dillon
“Some say their roots are in the land
In the strength and dignity of furrowed country rows
Mine are in the blaze of neon
Giving light and breath to the tenements lining ghetto streets.
Some say their faith was honed on cathedral glass
And sharpened by regal priestly robes
Mine was cut on jagged ghetto glass
And purified by the clatter of subway steel.
Some say they have an eye for distant landscapes
Or the refined beauty of a mountain stream.
Mine is tuned to a ragged ghetto face
Or the cloistered ghetto masses forgotten by the rush of time.
Where’s the dignity of life to be found?
In the land? In a stream?
For some it is for sure…..Where is it then for me?
It’s the romance of the Ghetto that will always fill my soul”