6 degrees to your Happy Place

I remember it like it was yesterday

All the good parts anyway – hot summers with what seemed like a permanent smell of BBQ in the air. My swing-set in the backyard with the cheap, slippery plastic seats (which I would later fling off backwards into the wooden fence behind it while trying to show off with “no hands”). The neighborhood kids and I laying on Joni and Joe’s *hill trying to determine what animals or objects the clouds seemed to take form. Micro Machines on NES in Kelly’s basement. Playing oldies records on her record player. Endless hours of playing at Dumper’s Park, before the parkway was built and ruined its charm. How much charm can a park named Dumper’s have? Sleepovers with Sarah (two nights in a row were a bonus!) and being completely flabbergasted by the fact her parents let her draw (the batman symbol?) on the walls in her room. My dad’s ‘daisy dukes’. My mom’s half mullet. Omi’s (grandma’s) thick German accent echoing throughout her house, 2 doors down, while she was either a. calling me her little shit or b. Am Telefon mit ihrer Schwester im Deutschland (on the phone with her sister in Germany.) Sometimes we’d all congregate there, get the fried chicken, fries and cole slaw from Gold Rush (still the best fried chicken around if you ask me. Or Uncle Mike) and play Yahtzee while watching music videos on MTV. You hear that MTV? MUSIC VIDEOS. If we were lucky, Omi would pipe in with her rendition of the Beavis and Butthead laugh, or fall asleep while shaking the dice. Either or.

Our neighborhood in the 80s was all about block parties. One street was all single family homes and the next, closest to the park, was mostly duplexes. To this day my memory of that street just includes ‘the twins’. Two large women, with black hair, who lived upstairs in one of the duplexes and would enjoy the block parties from the comfort of their balcony. I remember thinking how odd it was that two grown women could look exactly the same. Like, the ‘twins syndrome’ only affected kids? Perhaps it was because we had 3 sets in our class at St. Paul’s. We’d watch the South Shore Water Frolic fireworks from our porches (or Walgreens parking lot) – and if we were feeling unruly, throw a softball onto the middle of KK, wait for a car tire to make contact with it and watch it ricochet off the curb. Hey we didn’t have xbox live or guitar hero in the 80s! We had to get creative. On days I stayed at Omi’s house I would sit in her big picture window and guess which color the next car that passed on KK was going to be. Looking back I’m sure she made this game up to get me away from watching my aunt and uncle’s **wedding video all day so she could watch Matlock or Perry Mason.

I could literally go on for hours, but in the interest of my poor reader(s), I won’t.

So, why the clusterf*ck of childhood memories?

Corey Haim died.

I know. I’m hearing a collective, “Seriously?!”

Though I don’t own ALL of his movies, or have even SEEN all of his movies - one holds a special place in my heart. The Lost Boys. This has long been a cozy favorite of mine. Cozy? Isn’t it about vampires? Yes, yes it is. But I will forever associate with my childhood in Bay View. Two of my friends on our block were named Kelly – so making it as simple as possible for our young minds, they were identified as Big Kelly and Little Kelly – which, in retrospect is sort of awful for young girls. However one was tall and one wasn’t so that was that. Big Kelly LOVED The Lost Boys and would force us to watch it whenever possible. Probably as punishment for turning on all the lights at 1am, waking her up and telling her it was morning so she should get dressed. And she did. Ooooh brutal. While I don’t have many memories of Big Kelly – The Lost Boys is still a very current connection to what I view as the best era of my life thus far.

So, RIP Corey – I hope wherever you are, you finally find the peace and happiness your little movie from 1987 brings me.




*this hill I speak of was essentially a clump of grass at a 40 degree angle off the side of their house in an alley. Ahhh, city life.

**Apparently, I was completely obsessed with the wedding video of my aunt and uncle, which I was the miniature bride in. And I liked to watch it multiple times a day while naming the entire wedding party as they walked down the aisle. I was 3.