October 1957

I was four and a half years old in the month of October, 1957. My family lived in Barrington, Illinois, a small town of 4000 an hour's ride on the Chicago Northwestern train line from Chicago. Every morning hundreds of men and a few women would gather at the train station in the middle of town and catch the train to their jobs in the city and every evening they would make the return trip. Our house was six blocks from the center of town and so my father would walk to the station every morning, wearing his hat and carrying his briefcase, and every evening he would walk home, whistling the same four note call as he entered our house.

Our house was old even then having been built in the 1890's. It had been a farmhouse and was two stories tall with a large attic and even larger stone basement with dark corners and cobwebs. Behind the house was a barn that served as our garage with a secret door that led to the stairs and the loft above. Next to the barn was a brick chicken coop we called the brick cabin. My brother turned the brick cabin into a museum, "Jack's Museum", filled with shells and fossils and arrowheads and bones and other oddities labeled and displayed with all the skill a seven year old museum keeper could muster.

There are several events that I remember clearly from that October. One was watching an eclipse with my family from a hill up the street along with many of our neighbors. The eclipse was just before sunset. After it was over we walked back to our house and I spotted a large bird in the hedge. It was a pheasant that had fallen upon hard times, half its feathers were missing and it was very thin. We had no idea how it had wandered into the middle of a residential neighborhood, but my older brother and I managed to catch it. The next day my father bought some chicken wire and erected a small run behind the brick cabin. The pheasant was placed in its pen, it could enter the brick cabin through one of the small hatchways once used by chickens. I fed the pheasant corn we bought at the feed store in town that was next door to the blacksmith's.

We had the pheasant for only a couple of weeks. It disappeared one night, we never knew if it had managed to escape the pen or if someone or something had taken it. The chicken wire pen stayed in place for years and many years later while cleaning out some debris from a corner of the brick cabin I found the remains of the sack of corn.

A new family moved into our neighborhood that fall, the Hrobskis. Art and Sissy Hrobsiki were younger than my parents and were stereotypical intellectuals of the nineteen-fifties. One October evening they came to our house to watch a television program, not having a television set of their own. Were they alive today, Art and Sissy would be the couple you know who eschew compact discs in favor of vinyl records.

The television program they had come to watch was a live broadcast of Shakespeare's MacBeth, produced, directed by and staring Orson Welles. I remember lying on the floor of the TV room watching the program, the adults in chairs and on the couch behind me. My mother would have been smoking her Kents, she quit in the early sixties when the Surgeon General released his report. I always enjoyed playing with the smoke as it lingered in the air.

I have two distinct memories of that production of MacBeth, the witches ("When shall we three meet again, in thunder, lightning, or in rain?") and Great Birnam Woods marching on Dunsinane ("Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him.") I stayed up late that night, later than I ever had before, until the very end of the play and the Hrobskis had left.

My final memory of that October is going out in the field behind our house late one evening long after dark with my parents and brothers and sisters. The neighbors were out there as well, the children playing in the grass and enjoying the strange break in the normal routine of bedtime. Our parents and the other adults were somber, not sharing our childish enthusiasm and that came to affect us and we settled down as well. One of the neighbors pointed to the sky and told everyone "there it is, see, that little blinking light." We all looked, but all I saw was a tiny star that blinked slowly. The grownups talked in low worried voices. It wasn't until many years later that I realized that the tiny blinking star was the Russian satellite, Sputnik, the first man-made object to be thrown into space, joining the planets in their courses, and heralding the dawn of a new era.

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