The Colors of 2019: January - The Salad Days (Green)

I gave myself a writing task for the year 2019. I cut up twelve squares and on each wrote the name of a color. During each month of this year, I’ll randomly choose a square and see what thoughts each inspires. Which memories does it conjure? Which associations does it hold? Which paths does it want to lure me down? As we evolve, our cultures, our technologies compel us to be visual creatures. More and more we experience the world through our eyes—staring at screens, checking phones, watching TV, watching the road. No longer following our nose, we seek information from what we can see. So, with eyes wide open, here we go.

January 2019 – The Salad Days (Green)

My mother’s favorite color was green. We lived in a pine green house on Lois Drive in Williamstown, New Jersey, where I grew up. Mom’s name was Myrtle, like the low-growing leafy green ground cover that now fills my front yard and blossoms in the spring with small purple and white flowers. Her middle name was Rita. Myrtle Rita Boyle Pfaff. She never liked her name. If I’m honest, I didn’t care for it either (although I like it more it now that I’ve seen the flowers blooming). You don’t run into many Myrtles these days. Some names from her era have returned—Ruth, June, Helen, Iris—but no Myrtles. Not that anyone ever called her that. “Myrt!” was what Dad used. “Myrt, can you make me a sandwich?” Myrt or Sweetie or some other Dadly euphemism. Of course, we always just called her Mom. My nieces and nephews all called her Mom-Mom. I heard her first name so infrequently that it caused me to pause when a relative would visit or someone would call and ask for Myrtle. Who?

Our house on Lois Drive was in one of the first subdivisions built in Williamstown after World War II. I’m guessing that my parents used Dad’s GI benefits to get a home loan and move to South Jersey from the suburbs of Philly where they’d grown up. Back then, South Jersey was all pine barrens, vegetable farms, and fruit orchards. Basically, the sticks! I’m sure people from Philly still feel that way. I know the New Yorkers do. What’s that old joke? Why are New Yorkers always so cranky? Because the light at the end of the tunnel is New Jersey.

The lot where we lived had been a cabbage field until we moved in. Dad used to tell stories about how the developer hadn’t gotten the landscaping right when they graded the property. For the first few years, every time it rained, all the water from the neighboring houses would flow right into our cesspool. No wonder our grass was so green. By the time I came along (the eighth of nine children), that backyard grass had well-worn sandy base paths from countless games of kickball, baseball, stickball, wiffle ball… Do kids still play wiffle ball?

Our front yard had maple trees where Mom and our neighbor would sit in the shade. The backyard was for playing; the front yard was for sitting. It was like that inside the house too. The rec room was for lounging; the living room was for company. Our neighbor worked in the office at St. Mary’s where we went to school. Her son was in my class. After school, she’d kick off her shoes and sit in the green grass in her stocking feet and have a cigarette while he and I helped her search for four-leaf clovers.

We moved to Boca Raton at the end of my first year at St. Mary’s. In Florida, the green was less pine green and more aqua marine—the green of the ocean in the shallows, the green of my beloved Miami Dolphins, the green of patio furniture and beach umbrellas, the green of our built-in pool where I learned to swim (woohoo). For two years, we lived in a house with a screened-in, figure eight-shaped built-in swimming pool. It was like we died and went to Florida. You could swim about six or seven months of the year. We lived in that pool in the summer. We’d play a game we called “butt bumpers,” where one person would sit in the middle of a black inner tube in the deep end, and the others would jump from the sides and try to dislodge him. My mom hated that game. She forbad us from playing it. We played it all the time. Until she pulled out the “your father” card. “When your father gets home…” Of course, when Dad got home, it was everybody out anyway, so he could enjoy a leisurely post-work dip, usually with a Kent cigarette dangling from his lips and a cup of coffee within reach along the edge. Dad drank coffee the way people today strive to keep themselves hydrated with those big water bottles. I don’t know how he ever slept.

Alas, Boca was just a brief stopover for the Pfaff clan. Two years later, we were back in South Jersey, back to the pine and maple and oak and birch green of Forest Hills, another new development in Billsville. This time our house was white, so Mom chose green carpeting in the living room. It was the kind of carpeting that was a single color, but it had a patterned texture that made it seem more complicated. When you fell asleep on it, you woke up with part of the pattern inscribed on your face. And of course, we had another big green lawn. In Boca I learned to swim. In Forest Hills, I learned to push a lawn mower. I liked Boca better.

Forest Hills was filled with boys our age. Here, we continued the never-ending cycle of kickball, stickball, football, basketball, baseball, hockey… except now we played mostly in the street. That big green lawn had too many big green trees. Down the street, we had a park where I began my long love affair with basketball. During the Golden Age of Forest Hills basketball, some of the best players in town came to play there. If you lost you sat, so people played hard. I was too young to really be competitive, but I would bug my older brothers until they let me play (usually when they needed an extra body). The courts were atop a hill that sloped down to a small pond. If you threw a bad pass and the ball rolled down the hill, guess who was fishing it out?

I think of those early years as the “salad days,” before Watergate, the gas crisis, the recession, and worst of all, puberty. Those were the green days of growing up. Before everyone started getting married and moving out. Growing up with so many siblings, it was a pretty lively place. At Sunday dinner, we had the big table for the grown-ups and the pig’s table for the not-yet-grown-ups. Mom would make a roast with mash potatoes, peas and carrots, and green beans, green beans, green beans. And for dessert? She’d make lemon meringue pie, and if you were around when she was making it she’d let you spoon out the extra lemon filling still warm in the pot. Those were some good licks. Way to go Myrt!