The rise and fall of progress


Everyone had left and the house was now quiet, except for the silent shifting of time. Downstairs in a far corner of the living room toward the back of the house, the grandfather clock sits ominously. It is set to go off periodically but has a malfunction in its works to where it will occasionally ring thirteen times. Thirteen. . . Ever watchful is the scowl of the moon locked in current phase, preventing the sun from ever shining. All things break down in time, even grandfather clocks.

I listened to the gentle sound of birds waking as they communicated to one another in a form of song. How soothing, is the voice of nature that floods the ears and encaptivates one's spirit in its tranquility! Where we lived there were only two houses on one side of the street, and four on
the other, surrounded entirely by a vast expanse of woods. That was
until progress came years later and turned our refuge into a virtual united nations. Houses began to spread like wildfire, till there was nothing left
of our woodlands. It was a desperate attempt to fit as many houses as humanly feasible on a few small acres of land, and during those days it
felt as though we were living on three mile island, waiting for the reactor to blow. Our peaceful little community had been taken over and transformed into a bustling city block, almost overnight. The endless traffic and overpopulation it produced made us sorry we bought the house in the first place. Between the noise and confusion of people coming and going at all hours of the night, and the screaming and yelling from parents and children at all hours of the day, made the block seem threatening. Just walking up the block to your own house after nine or ten in the evening was like passing through a back alley in the heart of gang territory. Money was being funneled into various channels to appease man's greed, while stirring a cesspool of filth, which were the breeding grounds of our new inhabitants. The peaceful serenity as generated by a slow moving brook through a bed of stone was now gone, and the wonderful trails which led to an enormous weeping willow tree would become nothing more than a fond memory. It couldn't have been worse had they built a skyscraper. Our lavish community which once flourished was now dead and there was no getting around it. A host of unsavory characters took hold of it and burned it to the ground.

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Through the cracks, they took root and would grow. The late night whisperings of bitter gossip was a hush-hush out and a tiptoe back inside.  Draw the shades and lock the doors, the wayfarers were coming. We turned toward these people with open arms and were met with sneers and slamming doors, for they had their own agenda. As they marched in, our little community took a turn for the worse. It first started, you could say, when two of the neighborhood dogs were found dead, and everyone moved on but us.

It's not like we didn't know what was happening. I think we were just living in complete denial. The rise of progress gave birth to a host of insipid
and immoral creatures, while the foreigners couldn't be bothered
communicating with anyone who wasn't of their own race and creed.
We weren't about to go running up and down the street introducing ourselves to these people; neither would we be defeated by them in
our leaving. Eventually, we became friendly with two families in separate dwellings. They would come over to share small talk and stay for hot dinner on a cold winter's eve, or a barbecue in the breast of summer.
All was good with them for they were quaint and charming, and together we would discover what the ground had unearthed.

Within the first year, our street was littered with garbage. Plastic bags blew around and ended up in trees making it appear that you were now entering a white trash neighborhood, while candy wrappers and old newspapers turned up in our driveway on a daily basis. All along the side of the road were flattened out White Castle boxes, used condoms, tissues and emptied out cigarette car ashtrays, among other debris. This went on
for years and became a part of the scenery.

Two months after this all started, my mother read in the Sunday paper that a bust had been made a few miles down the road. It appeared that a certain shoe salesman named Zoran, who bought the house directly across the street, had been polishing more than shoes down at the shoe mart. It seems that this Yugoslavian fellow had taken quite a shine to little boys, and so for the next twelve years, he'll be thinking about them in and
out of lockdown. Before the ink had even finished drying from Zoran's caption, a man who moved into one of the end houses, lost control of
his Dodge pick-up, apparently in a drunken rage over a layoff, and
plowed into a family of four crossing the street in the late evening hours. The parents were both pronounced dead at the scene, along with their oldest daughter. Only the youngest child survived.

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The following year, police are called to one of the new houses from a concerned neighbor. They arrive on the doorstep, but are not permitted in. All seemed to be calm and so the police go about their way. A week later, cops arrive at the house for the second time. They gain entrance into the home and everything appears to be fine. Since there are no signs pointing toward any physical abuse, and if you take into account that everyone was cooperated with the officers, there is no reason for them to push the issue. The third time, however, a woman is taken from the house in a hospital gurney and brought into the awaiting ambulance. Only then, did she have the courage to press charges against her abusive boyfriend who pummeled her so badly, she would need to undergo surgery to mend her wounds. He was later caught trying to reenter the home through a broken window and was immediately apprehended. From there he was put in handcuffs and taken away. As he was being escorted from the premises in handcuffs, he shouted "I'm coming back for you, bitch!" Tests showed she had suffered a broken jaw, a fractured pelvis and a ruptured spleen in the attack, not to mention abrasions to her face and neck and a series of defensive wounds to both arms and one of her breasts. A month later she testified against him in court and he from there, upon sentencing, he spent the next four years in the slammer.

This is but a sample of the misery that came down our street like a great flood and washed away any hope we had left. We went from a quiet lovers' lane to a crowded Brooklyn street in less than a year. Our paradise was soon to become a ghetto because people simply do not care about themselves or anyone around them. They all want to live on top of one another like rats, with ill regard to the problem it causes. It doesn't even bother them that they paid top dollar for less than half a house. Let's see, their front yard is a street, the walls are so thin, you can hear your neighbor bad mouthing you from his kitchen, and the garage is so inverted, if they should ever try pulling a car into it, they would immediately have to call a tow truck. All they possess is a slice of the American dream that they will abuse until it is gone. Every year the list would metastasize like cancer with people growing more and more unfriendly by the hour, till finally, the birds would sing no more.

But let us cast aside these woes, for they are merely things to come. Instead, let us contemplate a few acres of woodland, which is home to serenity and that of a new morning. It was June the 11th, 1982 and the day was just beginning.

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