I wonder sometimes how accurate are my memories of the places I lived when I was young. It occurred to me that I might be able to find out through Google maps. I quickly located the house in Brigham City, Utah, where my family lived for seven years. Aside from my current residence, that is the longest I’ve lived at any particular address. The house looks very much as I remember it, only smaller. The mountains are smaller, too. The neighborhood has changed, though. The horse barn down the street at the right is gone, as is the row of magnificently thorny honey locusts to the east.
The first school I did time in, Bunderson Elementary, where there was a teacher named Mrs. Gunderson. One morning a pompous woman visited my second-grade classroom. She angrily asked each student who brought his own lunch why he didn’t eat the wonderful, nutritious meals the cafeteria served, and glared at us while we tried to stammer an answer. Soon after that, my parents sent me to the nearest Catholic school, about thirty miles away. I spent an hour every morning going to school with a busload of sleepy, cranky kids, and another hour every afternoon going home with a busload of hungry, cranky kids. To this day I do not particularly enjoy the company of children or other human beings. (The Catholic school building was old and decrepit and has since been torn down and replaced, so no picture.)
The Catholic church in Brigham City (yes, there are Catholics in Utah). The pastor had been the chaplain at Alcatraz. My parents said that he had been offered much money to write his memoirs, but he refused.
After Utah, we spent a year in San Francisco, living in the top floor of the yellow building. A friendly Chinese family lived below us, who maintained a garden of fuchsias, camellias and pelargoniums in the small back yard. They were particularly fond of my brother, then a toddler. One evening as I lay on the floor reading, I felt the floor sway. My first thought was that someone very fat was jumping up and down nearby, causing the floor to undulate. It was an earthquake, of course.
Baker Beach was an easy five-minute bicycle ride from home, handy when I needed to be alone. I usually had the entire beach to myself.
The third school I was sentenced to.
Our church in San Francisco, where I was an altar boy, long, long ago.
The house I lived in until age 7 is now a field full of weeds behind a chain-link fence. On the other hand, the abandoned gravel pit across the street is now a pretty lake, the blind curve that sent people into the gravel pit has been fixed, and the toxic landfill down the block has been capped!
-j
I have current pictures of my childhood home (ages 4-11, I don’t recall much of anything about the one from 0-4), because the current owner is my parents’ godchild. Small towns, eh?
Google street view’s vans have not made an appearance there yet. The satellite images are enough to show that not much has changed. Though the two-block-long street we lived on now has an actual name, so Amazon can ship there. It was always interesting trying to get things shipped to an address like “Mikeski, the brown house across the street from the watertower, Hometown, ND”…