As dusk settles over a Pittsburgh neighborhood, three young boys twitch and dance on a street corner. On Oakmont Street, the three can hear the clanging of the bell as a streetcar grumbles down its rails, rocking towards them. They tense as the 82 Lincoln approaches the corner and grinds around the curve and onto Tioga Street. The lights inside the car show the incurious riders; the three boys gather young legs beneath them and burst into motion. The one-half block to the next street is all that the boys will run, a gleeful and desperate race against the streetcar.
When I was a grade-school child, my two friends and I would share the adventures of the small bit of world then known to us. We were Willie, Clifford and Jon (me) and we lived within a short walking distance of each other. I do not remember how we came to be friends — perhaps we met in the grade school that we trudged to each weekday — but after meeting, we soon began to spend many of our waking moments in each other’s company. Willie’s last name was the same as mine — Woods — though he was not a relative, and Clifford’s last name, I would learn as an adult, was German, though he would not be identified as such in the African-American neighborhood of our early days. We were “young and wild and free,” gamboling like colts on the sidewalks and in the backyards of the places where we lived. I had a toy submachine gun that I had named “Burpie,” after the “burp guns” of the soldiers in my comic books; my friends had toy guns, too. But of all the games that we three played, we relished the joy of racing the streetcar.
I don’t remember when we three first challenged the speed of the great iron beast that swung onto Tioga Street and accelerated to the next corner. I’m sure that our first race was a half-hearted one, a short burst of speed that ended in some distraction. Clifford lived on Tioga Street and I lived a half-block away, on Tacoma Street. I do not remember the street that Willie lived on, but the three of us would often be at Clifford’s house when the streetcar squealed around the curve. We were competitive kids, and perhaps one of us challenged the others: “Bet you can’t outrun the streetcar!”
Racing the streetcar was a hazardous enterprise: the sidewalks were pocked with holes, and not wide enough for three panting kids. One of us was always in the lead, though we could never agree on which of us was the fastest. (For the record: I was. To the writer goes the history spoils.) But to everything, there is a season, and soon there came a season for me to leave my friends: my family was moving to another place. Once I understood and accepted that I was not going to live near Clifford and Willie anymore, I said goodbye to my friends. On the last day that I lived on Tacoma Street, I walked into Clifford’s back yard, placed my beloved “Burpie” on his back doorstep, and turned for home.
Once in our new home, my mother gave me instructions on what buses and streetcars would take me back to see my friends. They had phones, we had a phone — who knows how the “play dates” were arranged, but I went back to see my buddies, and when the sky grew dark, I was the face in the window, on my way back home, watching as my two best friends flashed along the pavement, racing the streetcar back to our past.