My Life as a Furry Red Monster - Kevin Clash [2]
Money, however, was. Officially, my hometown is called Turner Station, but we always referred to it as Turner’s Station—just tradition among the locals, I guess. It’s fitting that the name confusion exists, because there really are two towns in my mind—the Turner’s Station of my youth and memory and the Turner Station of a harsher reality. My father worked hard as a flash welder operator at Raymond Metals to put a roof over our heads, and Mom’s daycare work supplemented his income. But that said, I never, ever felt poor in that house, though there were days when all we had for dinner were mayonnaise sandwiches.
Our small brick ranch house on New Pittsburgh Avenue was an unremarkable structure, not much different (at least on the outside) from most others in the neighborhood. It had a side entry and a two-step cement stoop where the neighborhood men often sat smoking and chatting in the quiet of a summer’s evening. A chain-link fence kept the constant flow of bicycle, tricycle, wagon, hopscotch, and jump-rope traffic off our small patch of lawn and out of the few geraniums, petunias, and four-o’clocks my mother tried to keep thriving in her front-yard garden.
If our property was remarkable in any way, it was because we had two sheds in the backyard instead of the usual one. My father was, and is, an inveterate pack rat. His excuse was that in addition to his day job, he brought in money by being a neighborhood handyman. So any scrap he could salvage from a demolition or remodeling job went into the bursting-at-the-seams shed.
“You can’t believe what someone threw away today,” he’d announce at dinner, recounting his latest find. Before long, like my dad, I started saving and salvaging my own scraps—old buttons, fabric, a worn-out fuzzy slipper, odd bits of plastic or Styrofoam, boxes—any materials that I could turn into the simple puppets I began building and fiddling with as a child.
Now, lest you start picturing a Sanford and Son type of junk lot—even though Dad was often told that he looked like Redd Foxx—you need to know that our house sat just a few hundred yards from the Chesapeake Bay. We had a huge backyard dominated by a willow tree, and beyond our lawn a field of tall fescue grass waved in the warm breezes off the water. Depending on the wind direction and tide, the air was filled with the sweet scent of the salty water or the fertile smell of the tacky mudflats we delighted stomping through in search of seashells. On the worst days, the chemical odors from the nearby Bethlehem Steel mill at Sparrows Point overpowered all.
We lived within a half hour ride of vibrant downtown Baltimore, yet our neighborhood was a bucolic mix of homes and vacant fields where we roamed and aired our young imaginations. Necessity remained the true mother of invention, however, and we kids weren’t the only creative ones. I still remember one field where enterprising Mr. Shelton parked a school bus he had converted into a general store. Mom would send me to this mobile pit stop for a few necessities, saving her a trip to Miss Hill’s grocery farther away on Wade Street.
My mom was the ultimate “working mother,” before that phrase came into vogue. Not only was she busy raising my siblings and me, she had a house full of neighborhood kids in the daycare center she ran. As a result, growing up, my home was filled with the controlled (and sometimes uncontrolled) chaos that children bring. With the four of us there, plus the half dozen or so kids from the neighborhood Mom watched, all that energy exerted a magnetic pull on other toddlers and preteens in the neighborhood.
Our house was a place where many kids took their first staggering steps, where the smell of baby powder and dirty diapers dueled for dominance, and where each evening my mother leaned her hip wearily against the counter as she prepared dinner,