Saucer in the Dunes

1 Big City

I never thought much about growing up in the city. I was told Atlanta was not really even a big city compared with other much larger cities up north, but it was the biggest city I had ever lived in. And, at eleven years old, going on twelve, it was the biggest city I had ever been to. I liked my neighborhood. My parents showed me the apartments where we lived when I was born, but I didn't remember anything about that, nothing at all. My house was the only place I remembered living.

My neighborhood's streets were narrow, the sidewalks were wide, and the school was just down the road from my house. My friends and I could walk to the Plaza Fountain nearby and get ice cream at the drug store whenever we felt like it or go to the movies if we had money.

On Saturday, they would start showing cartoons at ten in the morning. Then cowboy, monster movies, and other cool things would go on all day until six or so when the theater would fill up with teenagers holding hands and grown-ups. All the guys played baseball in the sunken park at the end of our block. We called it the sunken park because the street and the houses were so much higher than the park. My dad said the park was an old rock quarry from before the Civil War. One day he showed me the marks made by men using hand tools. Makes sense because the walls are rock all around, but trees have grown up along the edges, so you don't see the rock much.

The houses were all sort of the same, boxy and brick with big windows in front and a small front porch, enough room for a couple of chairs. Most houses had a single driveway with a garage on the side or in the back. Our house was no different, it was white, and dad had installed a new gas lantern near the front walk for mom, who was always talking about how nice Mrs. Bandrowsky's looked at the end of the street.

I'm glad it was the first house I remember. The apartment was nice; I have seen all the pictures, but nowhere near as nice as the house and definitely not my room. My room was at the end of the house. It was once a back porch, but my dad had enclosed it not long after we moved in. Last year I was allowed to make that my bedroom. I had these tall roll-out windows all around two walls, and the fireplace in the den backed up to my room, giving me one red brick wall on the inside. There was also this little window above my bed. It used to look outside before my bedroom was built. I could look through it if I stood on the bed and could spy on mom and dad watching TV or on Cindy, my babysitter, when she had her boyfriend over.

Heath was a real jerk. I never told on her, though, because Cindy was always nice to me. She smelled good and almost always let me stay up past my bedtime even if Heath and his fat high-school head were over. Cindy was awesome!

During the spring, the roses would start climbing the trellis covering the deck my dad built, and they would eventually shade my room from the morning sun. I had to crank on the metal knobs to get the windows open, but if I did, you could smell the pink and white roses and could hear the bees swarming all around, too busy to bother me or anyone else walking on the deck underneath them.

Yep, it was a great place to live. I didn't even really know what having it made was then, but I knew I had it made. Dad always told me so. I never once thought about moving. I guess no kid does until they are told it will happen. Then, it's too late. You can cry and argue all you want; things aren't going to change, believe me. All you can do is brace yourself and dread.

My parents had waited until just before school let out for summer to give me the bad news. Dad had been put in charge of some sort of irrigation plan to help the farmers in the southern part of the state keep their crops from dying in the summer heat. Mom said it was a big promotion and more money for Dad, and I should be proud of him. It was something he really wanted to do and that he had gone to school for. The only drawback was moving. We wouldn't be just moving out of the neighborhood; we would be moving out of the city entirely and all the way to the middle of nowhere South Georgia. I was always proud of my dad. He was my dad, my best friend, but I sure didn't want to move.

Sure enough, dad was excited. He could barely eat supper; he was talking so much. Mom smiled and listened. I just tried to eat as fast as possible and go back outside to see my friends. I told the guys as soon as I found out. Every now and then during the school year, a kid would move, and another would move out. I was just going to be one of those kids. I would have to start over with no friends, a new school, no Cindy, and probably a plain old bedroom.

Dad grew up in a small town. Mom and I didn't, and we secretly admitted to each other that night when she tucked me in that we were both scared. I guess I was too old to cry about things like that but looking at her while she combed my hair back with her fingers and telling me how much dad loved us both and how moving was going to be better for all of us; boy I wanted to.Mrs. Paulson, my best friend Johnny's mom, threw us all a going away party. Everyone from our block came. Seeing all my buddies would have been fun if I had not been leaving. That night was really the first night it sunk in that I would no longer be there with my friends. A few days before, all I could think about was how Johnny and I would spend the summer using the metal detector he got from his Uncle to find money and jewelry and maybe even Civil War treasure. We had our walkie-talkies, too, that I had just gotten for my birthday in May. As we all sat together trying to have fun, eating cake and ice cream, I think we all realized that now none of it was going to happen.