Bedell Place

Bedell Place, according to Google Maps, is now called Bedell Street. When I grew up there, if years one through eight can be considered "growing up", it didn't have the clout to be called a street. My great grandparent's tiny single story summer cottage sat between two houses; one dilapidated, the other was big, brand new, and contemporary. That new, beautiful home had no business on Bedell place, but I was thankful for the people who lived there. I'll talk about them some other time. Behind our home were woods and then Jason's house - the neighborhood smelly kid whose dad was named Beedoo (I still have no idea how to spell that, but it was his name). Next to the big, new house were a bunch of horse stables, and then more woods. Across the narrow, unlined street sat 100 acres of sod and 50 acres of seasonal fruit and vegetables.

Outside, Bedell Place was a playground with unending possibilities. When the sod came up it left 100 acres of dirt, which a six year old boy finds no end to fun in. Our street ended abruptly, like my relationship with it, turning into a narrow dirt road which in turn ended at the Montessori nursery school I attended. Occasionally, my mom would walk me to school, down the dirt road, and leave me there. I hated school.

Inside my home I remember Reverend Price shouting about hell, damnation, and redemption on TV. My mother, a beautiful woman by any standard, on a ladder painting the soffit above the kitchen window, and my father swinging between a drunk, raging lunatic, and the man I wanted so badly to play tag with in the back yard. I remember the stairs to nowhere in the pantry, the ones my mom kept covered in paper towels, toilet paper, canned goods, and cleaning supplies. It ended with a mysterious severity, in darkness, with the last step only eight inches from the ceiling. It was as if our house at one time had its own loftier aspirations, but had settled and, in the end, decided to stay small. I remember turning the corner near the back door to the stairs that led to the half-finished basement, our play room and where the TV sat across from an old black leather couch that had no place in our home. I remember walking that path, the lights in the basement were off, and in the darkness seeing the glow of my father's Merit cigarette, confused at that moment because I was unsure, if I went down, which dad would meet me: the one that would say "hey buddy!" lift me onto his knee, and rustle my hair, or the one that would scream at me for some transgression of mine, like being born, call me stupid, and maybe hit me with his belt.

When a dog is beaten as a puppy, it forever loses trust in people. Regardless how many gentle hands come in contact with it, any hand brings the fear of a strike. The moral is that you cannot unlearn abuse. Bedell place was secluded, magical, and terrifying, and can’t be forgotten or remembered in its entirety, thank god.

I started keeping a journal of all the things my father did that I felt were egregious. I had no frame of reference, mind you. As far as I was concerned nearly all men went into rages now and then. But my next door neighbor, Joe, was always nice to me and he never yelled. So Joe became my point of reference. In reality, my journal probably had two or three entries.

"Daddy pushed me down"

"Daddy said I'm stupid."

"Daddy hit me with the belt"

"Daddy threw me on the sand pile."

When I was eight my brother and I went to spend the night with my aunt and uncle. The next morning Uncle Joe took us out on his little motor boat. That night we slept at my grandma's house. We never went back to Bedell Place.