Robyn’s Hood
By Robyn McCloskey
The year I turned 12, my family moved from our brick rowhome in Northeast Philadelphia to a single home in a suburb outside the city. We had successfully made the migration from city to suburbs like so many others before us.
Except, unlike so many others before us, I wanted desperately to go back.
Our new house was nice enough; I just really missed our old house, our old neighbors, our old life. Out in the suburbs, people didn’t hang out on their front stoop at night or play pinkie ball during the day.
There were no more fearful bike rides around the eerie Byberry Hospital grounds. No more trips to the Parkwood Theater, where it cost only a dollar to see the latest film. No more impromptu summer-night games of Kick the Can.
No more of any of that. Grocery shopping at the new Shop ’n Save with my dad was not the same as going to the old Acme, where all the blue-haired cashiers not only knew his name but would try to flirt with him, all the while handing me lollipops and stickers.
Out in the suburbs, there was no sense of camaraderie, no sense of belonging. Everyone pretty much kept to themselves. The knowledge that you could step just outside your front door to find somebody, anybody, to play with or fight with or simply hang out with no longer existed. You couldn’t walk a few short blocks to the 7-Eleven for a cherry Slurpee and a pack of Bubblelicious. Out here in the suburbs, your mom had to drive you everywhere.
But life wasn’t all bad. The new house had good things to offer. Among the best features were the built-in pool in the back yard and the stone fireplace in the living room. The pool got a ton of use, the fireplace not so much.
My dad was a busy man, a fellow not prone to relaxing in front of a roaring fire. But he did promise to build one for our first Christmas Eve in the new house. I watched with great anticipation as he gathered the wood and constructed a small inferno in the living room. It took him until the following year to get around to building another fire.
Unfortunately, by that Christmas my dad had discovered Duraflame, the fabricated fireplace log that he could conveniently purchase at the Shop ’n Save while on his way home from work. No more gathering sticks to use as kindling. No more crumpling up newspaper pages to keep the fire going.
On that particular Christmas Eve, he brought home two Duraflame logs and once again we had a fire, albeit not as big as the previous year’s.
The next Christmas my dad decided two logs was a waste of money, so he brought home only one. He then realized, much to my chagrin, that the log could be broken in half, thereby squeezing two Christmas Eves out of it. The man built one fire a year, and he now was down to half a Duraflame.
Later that year we were one of the "firsts" on our block — we had something called "cable television" installed in our home. That was when my dad discovered the "Yule Log."
It was a holiday telecast that filled your TV screen with nothing but the image of a roaring fireplace in someone else’s lovely home for a numbing 24 hours, from Christmas Eve on through to Christmas night.
This was just what my dad had been waiting for! No more fighting the holiday crowds at the Shop ’n Save every other year to buy one Duraflame log! No more hard-earned money being sucked up the chimney!
So that Christmas Eve we gathered around our console TV with the black cable box on top, huddled before the crackling "Yule Log," ate untoasted marshmallows and pretended to be warm.
I learned a lot that Christmas Eve, mostly that you never miss a Duraflame log until you don’t have one . . . even half of one. ••
Robyn McCloskey’s column appears each week in the Northeast Times. She can be reached at crmccloskey@verizon.net