Where Life’s A Holiday

And may you stay, forever Young...

Behold, my love, how green the groves, 
The primrose banks how fair…
- Robert Burns

(Where the Youngs Lived)

They really love their rhetorical questions, back in my home state of Indiana. I grew up being asked stuff like this:

“Well, Bobby, did you ever think Jayne Mansfield would wave at you in a parade?”

“I didn’t think about it that much, Mom.”

“Well, Bobby, did you ever think you’d be eating chop suey?”

“No, not if it looked like this…”

“Well, Bobby, did you ever think you’d be twirling a flaming baton and riding your blue stegosaurus up the steps of City Hall to become the Mayor of French Lick, Indiana?”

You see what I mean?

And, speaking of unlikely and unforeseen events, the house outside my car window looks very familiar, as it should. It is a boxy bungalow in an unremarkable neighborhood, just north of the Indiana State Fair parking lot.

The last time I saw this place I would have been riding a blue 26-inch Schwinn bicycle with a wire basket on the handlebars. No helmet. Today, I’m in an SUV, playing my smart phone through the car’s speakers, using Blue Tooth to listen to something called a podcast. A guy is talking about this very house.

Did I ever think this would be happening? No, I have to say, they really got me this time.

At the end of World War Two, the country was flooded with returning GI’s, most of whom just wanted to get married, have children and forget the horrors they had witnessed. These families needed somewhere to live, which is where new subdivisions like Maple Downs, in Northside Indianapolis, came in.

Tiny houses, each with about 800 square feet of living space, plus an unfinished basement and attic. Every house came with maple saplings in its yards, hence the name of the subdivision.

There was absolutely nothing special about one of these houses, at 44th and Primrose, except that I lived there from birth until I was 16. Nor was there anything special about the house in this photo, just up from ours on Primrose, where my childhood friend lived.

We would forever call this the Old Neighborhood. I think my parents paid $8,000 for our place and looking back on it they may have been overcharged.

We’re talking bare bones housing here. We had a rustic kitchen distinguished by a deep-fryer and a meat-grinder - items that never got put away because my mother used them on a daily basis. There was a single bathroom and two bedrooms. When an inconvenient number of children eventually came along, that’s what the unfinished attic was for.

There was a gray chute just off the driveway, covered by a metal door, which allowed the Coal Man to deliver our periodic requirement of the smelly black rocks that heated our house, except when the furnace fire occasionally went out. In the steamy, sweltering summer, what cooled our place was absolutely nothing.

In 1959, a country singer named Jerry Wallace released a national hit called “Primrose Lane,” and we thought that meant we were famous. Our time had finally come. Petty nitpickers pointed out we lived on Primrose Avenue, not Lane. But that was close enough, we thought. We were on the radio, baby.

Primrose Lane, life's a holiday on Primrose Lane
Just a holiday on Primrose Lane with you….

All of these houses were pretty much identical. I never needed to ask a neighbor, “Where is your bathroom, please?” because it was always in the same place as ours. That was nearly as unnecessary a question as, “What kind of tree is that in your yard?” It’s a maple, you dimwit.

The Young family lived five houses north of us. They had a mother and a father, which we all had, because single mothers and divorce hadn’t been invented yet. Nobody knew how many children they had. I have seen Young family photos showing five offspring, but who knew for sure?

How did they all fit into that house? More to the point, how did seven people live with a single bathroom? The oldest child was Marty, who was my age, and until my family moved out of the ‘hood, we were pretty much inseparable. I don’t remember the first time we met, but I’m guessing he just came by to use our bathroom.

Marty and I did what all kids did back then. We held up Texaco gas stations, went on shooting sprees, set arson fires…  Wait, I think that was John Dillinger’s childhood. I get mixed up because he was from Indianapolis, too. I guess Marty and I just rode our bikes, shot hoops and traded comic books. Nobody had any money, so it wasn’t like we were going downtown for prime rib at St. Elmo’s or anything.  

Come Sunday morning, Maple Downs residents went to one of three places. The East 49th Street Christian Church, Saint Joan of Arc Catholic Church, or, if you were me, you went to the Unitarian Church. This lonely exercise in agnosticism set me apart from every other kid on our street, but I could live with that.

When I was a high school sophomore, we finally managed to move to a marginally better home. Most of our original Maple Downs neighbors had already left way ahead of us, improving their lot in life, as was the postwar American way.

The Youngs were probably the very last of the old gang to leave. I know this because they always drove very, very old cars, and for years if I took a shortcut through the Old Neighborhood on my bike, I would see a semi-classic black car parked in their driveway. It was a comforting link to the past.

Whatever they did to Marty at the East  49th Street Christian Church, it apparently stuck. After high school, I heard he went off to some kind of seminary and became a preacher – a serious one, I gathered. This news surprised me. Every curse word I learned in my early years I learned directly from Marty, even though we didn’t know what most of them meant.

The years passed. Forty of them, maybe more, before Marty and I were reunited by Facebook, which was giving all of us a sneak peek at what happened to our old friends and enemies. Facebook would have told you that my wife and I were both journalists living in Washington, DC, having moved back after eight years in Hong Kong, and that Marty Young was the senior minister at a church in Vernal, Utah, a town mostly known for its dinosaur fossils.

Gradually, in digital conversations aimed at melting away an impossible number of years, I came to learn that Marty had never fully left Maple Downs. It was still in his veins. He told me very candidly that he routinely reached back to people and events from Primrose to make points in his weekly sermons, to such an extent that his parishioners knew everyone in our Old Neighborhood. They knew School 91, Arsenal Park, Tony’s Hardware, The Path, and they could almost taste the cherry Cokes at  Steeg’s Drugstore.

“If you were to walk into my church in Vernal,” Marty said, “and tell people your name, they would recognize it and already know all about you.”

Of course, I had my own memories from the Old Neighborhood, but to draw wisdom and life lessons from them was another thing altogether. Were they good memories? Let’s just say that Marty claims he had a “magical childhood,” and I claim I had a childhood. I ascribe this distinction to not much more than the difference between him being a preacher and me a reporter.

I’m sure you remember your own Old Neighborhood, and I hope the memories bring you joy, but I’m pretty sure what I’m about to relate hasn’t happened to you.

(The Young Kids, Back in the Day)

Awhile back, Pastor Marty Young retired and left his flock in Vernal, and here is what he did next. He began his own podcast, “The Primrose Chronicles,” in which a very folksy Marty – kind of a fireside mash-up of Garrison Keillor and Slim Pickens – tells of a simpler life, back on Primrose, when comic books were a dime and Cokes were a nickel.

His memories of people and events strike a surprisingly resonant chord within me, even if his versions are often a bit rosier than my own would be.

Most of the real characters in Marty’s remembrances are thinly disguised with made-up names, presumably to avoid unwelcome contact with their lawyers.  But with my permission he has left my own identity intact. So far, I seem to come off as a pretty okay guy, but we’ll see how that evolves over time.

Oh, and in every episode, Marty eases into his jovial greeting with an instrumental version of “Primrose Lane,” where, as you may have heard, life was a holiday.

Since I’m back living in Indianapolis now after spending a lifetime away, I chose to listen to the premiere episode of “The Primrose Chronicles” while parked squarely in front of Marty’s old house, just up from my own childhood homestead.  

So, there it is. Me, sitting in a car outside the house on Primrose, listening to my childhood friend wax nostalgic about this place. No, I never saw this one coming.

And it only took me 15 minutes, plus six decades, to get here.