Cove Street
When I was born my parents lived in a little shack of a house near the A&P (Now Harry’s Supermarket) on Elm Street in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. It was called Cove Street, yeah, Cove Street… got a problem with it!?! The “house” was built mostly out of pallet wood from the nearby General Electric plant and was sided in lovely grey asphalt shingle and black tar paper.
Needless to say I skipped learning to walk and went straight to running… I had made up my mind and I was getting my little diapered ass out of there.
As you may know, the Housatonic River flows sweetly nearby… so after multiple instances where mother would run to the landlord’s house wailing that I was missing and that she feared I had drowned in the river. She decided to take action. She tied me to an apple tree in the yard. Yes you heard me right… tied me… with clothesline… to a tree. I had just enough slack so that I could play and run like a demented terrier. She would untie me before my father got home from work, on one day though, he came home early. Upon returning home he saw his first born son tethered in the front yard to a tree. Let me just say he was not happy with this sight. About the possible mental damage this must be doing to him and also what the hell the neighbors must think. My parents were young… my mother thought it a perfectly logical way to solve the problem of how to get chores done and still know I was safe and sound… my father disagreed and within days they had decided to purchase a plot of land in the wilds of Becket, Massachusetts. (Just how wild was Becket in the 1970’s?… stay tuned for stories and photos…)
I do not have a single memory of being tied up… before the age of thirty… but that is not the point. The point is the only memories I do have of our Cove Street house are of a big river snake curled around the dog’s water bowl, the landlady’s black fluffy cat Skippy, and singing the song “How Much is That Doggy in the Window”. So life on Cove Street couldn’t have been half bad. Right?
