A LAWN MEMORY

It feels like it's going to rain. The wind (sorry Chamber of Commerce - it is not a breeze - it's a wind) has picked up - against me, of course - as I ride my bike home coming from the Gulf Beaches Library. It was sunny going there - even also against the wind - (YES, it turns around whenever I head in the opposite direction, not just here, also in Salt Lake, there a hot & dusty wind). But, as usual, I take a long time at the library - books to sample, just the smell of a library is great - and I'm out just in time to hit an afternoon thunderstorm coming in.

Riding my bike is, and always has been, a 'fantasy' experience. It seems I've been riding a bike every day of my life. As a kid on a tricycle, I played 'bus' - pulling small leaves from hedges - used as money. Escaping my school-yard friends by getting on my bike in my pre and teen years, also as a bus going to the Fresh Meadow Terminal, or the Field Terminal heading home, or being a 'motorcycle' on the dirt frontage road of Horace Harding Blvd or in Kissena Park.

And even delivering groceries on the strange-looking bike with the big basket over the small front wheel - a basket I also rode my little sister Kathy in - after lunch, and before heading back to Harding Food Center for another delivery to 'ElecChester', the Electrical Union's Housing

Co-Op of about 10 buildings, each 6 stories tall with 6 apts - hundreds of apartments, or to the other big housing project - Pomonok (it's an Indian - 'Native-American' - word, a tribe that I guess centuries ago lived there), a NYC Housing project for low- and low-middle-income families, also probably over 400 apartments in the city 'housing project' as it was called.

Both of these housing developments were built on what was previously the Pomonok Gulf Course - a great place for sleigh riding, playing 'soldier' and 'making out' with Mary Lou Simione (that's another story). The west side of the golf course was Kissena Blvd, where Queens College was, and a number of un-occupied huge old 'haunted' mansions ideal for playing all kinds of games (even some without Mary Lou!!). The mansions area later became part of an expanded Queens College campus, where my Dad in 1956 wanted me to go, but I wasn't smart enough - you needed above a 96% cumulative high school grade to get in - it was free. So I got a music scholarship to Brigham Young University. Which brings me back to my bike ride.

As I'm riding home, thinking I'm a teen-ager (ignoring, obviously, that reflection in the windows of cars I pass), I smell one of life's most enjoyable scents along with ocean and mountain pines:

the smell of fresh-cut grass - a newly mowed lawn, and I'm down memory lane to when I was a teenager, 14 years old, and I mowed the lawn of the new - still being-built - Queens Ward - the summer of 1953. I rode my bike from home in Flushing out to Little Neck, east out Long Island, singing 'No Other Love', 'Doggie In The Window', 'P.S. I Love You', 'Don't Let The Stars Get In Your Eyes', Istanbul', 'Rags To Riches', among so many others, all of which I still remember all the words to, (and so probably do my kids).


In those days, the members of a ward (parish/local congrgation) paid for and essentially built with alot of their own labor, their own buildings. (And, that building still stands today, 57 years later). I cut the lawn, dug ditches, trenches, and so did my Dad. (For some reason I don't remember my brother Bob there) (this was also where Dad was the care-taker of the ward-house 1956-1957 to earn the money to keep Bob on his Windsor Canada LDS mission).



So the lawn scent brings these memories, and then since church and violin are interwined, reminded me of playing my violin for President George Albert Smith at October Stake Conference at the Manhattan Ward/Stake house in 1950, for which I got a thankyou note from the stake president George H Mortimer, for the violin and a talk my mother made me give ("If everybody said 'No' like you would if I, your Mom, let you, what kind of meeting would it be??") SHORT!!

Then the rain hit, my memory lane trip ended, and I pushed against the wind to get home.

(You know, you'd think with all that church activity, HE would have turned the wind to help me, and brought the sun out... wait.. melanoma... the rain was better...).

........