Here’s an autobiographic segment about Patrick’s childhood neighborhood in Florida interspersed with flashbacks to less distant times. There are some moments of graphic language.
Listening to di Stefano doing selections from Puccini’s operas, some with Maria Callas, I was suddenly in tears, uncontrollable sobs heaving in my chest. In one of those strange leaps the mind makes, taking your heart with it, I had fled from the table where I sat with Stephanie having pasta and red wine, fled all the way back to 1953 when I was home from college for the summer.
Stanley street was only one block long, starting at Fairway and ending at the elementary school. We had six neighbors on this street which ran along the border between Winter Park and Orlando. On our left was the assistant principal of a school where eventually I would teach advanced English, and where I would resign under pressure halfway through the school year. In the house beyond his lived Joyce Trailor and her divorced mother. On the right was a buxom woman in her thirties whom I used to watch through Venetian blinds as she hung up the laundry in her short shorts and top, and whose husband I once saw through their front door as he stood over her in the bathtub, masturbating. Across the street from us was a man who always had a couple of cars being overhauled in the carport, and from whom I would later buy an Olds 88, when my marriage broke up and I went on the road. Next to him, on the right was a counselor in the Unitarian church called Uncle Ralph and his wife Anita. Uncle Ralph kept his book collection in the attic, and used to climb up there to select a classic for me to read, notably, in retrospect, Don Quixote.
And next to Uncle Ralph was Joe Cooley and his perfidious wife.
Joe Cooley, I realized as di Stefano continued his impassioned song, was the immediate cause of my sudden crying jag. Joe was an extremely short man, a tenor, no taller than Mom, who was five-foot-two (with eyes of brown, not blue). He was some sort of civil servant and suffered terribly from his wife’s indiscretions with now a plumber, now a garage mechanic.
When I returned for the summer from Florida State, I was trying to learn the piano, a required second instrument after my major, the tuba. Joe appeared one afternoon with scores of operatic arias, and I did my best to accompany him as he sang his little heart out. He had a sweet voice, but I could see where he might appear to a lusty woman to be effeminate and unsatisfactory as a mate.
In one of the rare letters I was to receive from my mother years later, she mentioned that Joe had died, perhaps a suicide. Tonight, listening to di Stefano, this seemed so sad that I went into another paroxysm of weeping, and Stephanie came to comfort me where I sat at the head of the table.
Uncle Ralph and Anita turned up at the university while I was there, where he was working on a Master’s Degree, and invited me and Donna, my steady, to dinner at their house in the married housing on campus. Uncle Ralph smoked a pipe in those days, and as he opened the fridge to take out the cokes, noticed a particle on the door of the fridge, staring at it with a frown of consternation over his fuming pipe. It was a corn flake stuck there since breakfast, and Donna was cracked up by the look on his face.
A few months later, when Donna was pregnant and we decided to cross the border into Georgia to get married, Uncle Ralph and Anita agreed to come along as witnesses. Halfway there, they changed their minds, afraid the assistantship might be canceled, as it was forbidden for undergraduates to get married without official recognition by parents.
Donna and I went on, having already paid for a motel room, and the Justice of the Peace and his wife met us, expecting a party of guests for a possible post ceremony dinner. They felt sorry for us, the wife stood in as a witness, and refused in the end to take payment for the wedding.
Later on, Donna and I thought of having an abortion, but did not. Ironically, Uncle Ralph and Anita, who loved children, had a car accident in which her pelvis was crushed and they could not have kids.
This thought brought on a new flood of tears, and I had to step out onto the terrace, farther from the sound of Madame Butterfly with Maria Callas and di Stefano.
Maria Callas sent my memory off on another track. Lois used to go with the rat pack of the music school of FSU to Atlanta for the opera season. Lois I knew in college, but I was involved with Donna, and Lois was involved with Jim Stafford, one of the bright stars of the Dohnányi-Kilenyi clique.
Source: StanleyStreet.wpd dated 24 Nov 2010, in the Florida Stories folder. The earliest references I found were from 14 June 2000 but were in an unrecognized format I couldn’t open. In Scattered Notes.odt he mentions that he lived on Stanley Street for three years and attended Winter Park High School. He doesn’t say it explicitly, but it looks like he moved there during the tenth grade.
Patrick Meadows 1934 – 2017.