Good Times

While in Kansas City, my mother took me to Askew Avenue, where she lived as a little girl in one of the rooms of this house with her daddy and mama. She recounted many happy memories here. This little house was shared by three families, and my mother lived in the middle part of the house accessed by a private entrance, now made into a bay window.

The boarded-up house, now condemned, sits on a corner lot.

Mom walked one block and through a passageway under Monroe Street to reach her elementary school, also now boarded up.

Crossing Askew Avenue was 27th Street, the main street through the neighborhood, lined with mom and pop shops. My mother went on errands for her mama to the little grocery store a few doors down behind their house.

The neighborhood of painted houses and trimmed yards was once shaded in safety by leafy canopies atop gigantic trees. Today, the sad homes and forgotten school await their fate in an almost treeless ghost town of boarded stores. There is an eerie, uneasy feeling in the neighborhood now. There is no sign of life until a small car slows in curiousity and then speeds past us.

It's sad how pleasant things change. Mom's daddy died and she and her mother moved away from her home and her school and her relatives. She can never really go back to this happy place on Askew Avenue for it has gone the way of many old city neighborhoods and no longer exists. But the memories of a happier, simpler, safer time are pleasant.