A Bump in my Childhood
by Glenn Anderson

The summer of my Bar-Mitzvah (the ceremony that marks the transition of childhood into adulthood in the Jewish culture) was the last summer I would spend in my old house. On June 14, 1997 , I returned to my home for the first time, as a man, in some form or another, and though I am not particularly religious, I feel that it's not coincidence that my old house was sold less than a week after that. Just as I was departing from childhood, I was leaving the house in which it happened.

When I was about twelve, my mom told me that she and my dad had decided to sell our house. It was a simple one, but that's all my four-person family had needed up to that point. It was a red brick ranch (without a basement and only one floor) on the corner of Central Park Avenue and Greenwood Lane , in Skokie , Illinois . It was long, but not very high, and the front door was so thick and solid, it made the whole house shake when someone slammed it. From the outside, it looked reserved, but cozy, and since it was on the corner, I had three times as much yard to play in as most kids. Maple trees in the front yard lined our street, and our house was surrounded by evergreen shrubbery, with taller bushes growing up between the windows.

We needed more space. My sister is two years older and had already begun to have friends who could drive, so naturally, she had started to come home late enough to occasionally wake up my parents. It wouldn't be long before they had two children with such habits to worry about. It was obvious that we were growing up and in turn, our lives were getting bigger, but moving didn't really seem like a logical next step to me. I couldn't make the connection that since my body was getting bigger, I would need more space to call my own.

Until this point, I had lived in the same house my entire life. Many of my close friends had already gone through the moving process, but the thought of moving myself had never occurred to me. In fact, all but one of my closest friends from childhood had long since moved out of an El's ride from Evanston, the place I'll always consider my town. In a way, my house was one of the few constants in my early life..

As my house was within a few blocks of anything fun a kid could want, I usually had little trouble convincing my friends to come play at my house. Several other friends' houses, a video rental place, a convenience store, many restaurants, including Herm's Palace, and New York Bagel and Bialy, the best bagel place on earth, were all less than five minutes walk from my front door. But from a kid's perspective, even with all that around, the best part about my house was the bump in the sidewalk out front.

The bump had always been there. The sidewalk had been laid too close to the big elm tree in my front yard. As a result, the tree's roots pushed up the concrete into a ramp about a foot in height with about a 30-degree incline. The 100-to 120-foot straight-away before the bump made the sidewalk in front of my house the best place in the neighborhood for jumping bikes, roller blades, or skateboards. No matter which it was, you'd get some air on the bump. Everybody used the bump, so I was in a position of unshakable notoriety at school. Naturally, that made living in the house a privilege, one that I didn't want to give up.

By the time we actually moved, I was thirteen. I needed to pack up everything I owned and in doing this, I came across things I hadn't seen for years. Things that had been stashed into dresser drawers and closet corners were burning with stories I had all but forgotten . I'd pick up a picture, a rock, an item of clothing, and memories would appear in my mind, as though they'd been there for years. They would usually be things I hadn't previously remembered happening, but as I went through my room, I relived my life.

As I sat in my room, retracing the footsteps of my past, I knew that that part of my life was over. I knew I no longer had much use for that bump out front, and in only three years, I'd be able to drive to all the nearby places, just as easily as I could walk. I only hoped that some other kid would have the kind of luck that I had and move into my house.

Unfortunately, not long after my family and I moved out, I came to learn that the house had been bought by an old couple looking for a house in which to end their days. For a while, that upset me. I felt I had been cheated. I had been cheated out of knowing that some kid might have had my kind of life growing up. After driving past the house several times since moving, I've observed some changes they've made to the exterior of the house. They took out the fir saplings I helped my mom plant in my toddler years. They butchered the deformed pine tree on the east end of our yard in failed attempts to make it look nice. The new lawn gnomes, and the empty parts of yard that used to hold a swing set and a basketball hoop made me sad. Why did they have to vandalize all the tangible links to my past that existed on that property? But all these things aren't important when compared to the fresh, white piece of flat sidewalk that now sits next to that elm tree.

I've now been living in my new house for over six years, not two miles from my old one, and I've long since grown proud of calling it my home. I now know that this house is just as appropriate for the present part of my life as the other was for the past. It is for this reason that I don't miss my old house. That is to say, I don't miss the walls, bricks and other things that make up a house, because my new house has all those things, too. I miss the things that happened in and around the place. I miss it as I miss my first thirteen years, because to me, the two are synonymous. The stout pile of red bricks and mortar was more than my house. It was my childhood.

Up until this point, I've had nothing but moderate situational loathing for the new owners of the house. Maybe I was mad at them for buying it instead of some young family or for giving my front yard a make over. But now I realize that maybe it's for the best. That house raised me. I spent my first thirteen years in it. It seems fitting for someone else to spend their last years in it. I don't really want another kid to have lived there. I couldn't bear to see him enjoy all the things I was now too old to do. Perhaps I should be thankful that they smoothed out the bump, on some level. I don't think I'd want anyone to have it like I did. That kid who never moved into my house deserves his own childhood. And I wouldn't want anyone else to have mine.

Glenn Anderson is a rising junior at Pitzer College, where he is majoring in Creative Writing and a member of the Pomona-Pitzer water polo team. This piece was written for a course, The Writing Process, taught by Professor Gregory Orfalea. A native of Chicago , Illinois , he is a fan of the blues and plays blues guitar.