52 Narrative 2 – “A Place Like Pelham”
Tdohasan Sunray
A Place Like Pelham
This place was unlike any place on the planet. At first glance, the neighborhood mimicked that of any cookie cutter, middle-class, suburban community; however, there was one street that reversed this lame idea of a neighborhood and abounded in diversity and acceptance: Pelham Circle, a cul-de-sac that bound unity between people of all walks of life. There were whites, Jamaicans, American Indians, Jordanians, Pakistanis. A place like this screams New York City, but it really took root in Oklahoma. Pelham was a place where political ideology succumbed to respect for others. It was what America always wished it could be: a little slice of heaven where Muslims and Christians not only tolerated but rejoiced with one another. When the Ramadan season came around, we provided gifts, and when Christmas rolled around, they catered us with Middle Eastern food. The smell cascaded and enveloped our home in its sweet waft. On the other hand, there was the ever-present, ripe scent of sweaty kids that had just finished playing basketball, and it, too, permeated whatever home they managed to infiltrate. We kids dreamed of magical lands, but what we failed to realize was that we were already in one of our own.
Pelham Circle broke down walls. No, really – our home did not have a fence. Oklahoma’s tornadoes were the main reasons why, but after seeing the fences gone we decided it better to relinquish them altogether. That choice to lose our fence led to competitive games of football and soccer in our backyard, but more importantly it led to sunny memories. Being outside and playing summed up a day in the life of a Pelham kid. News of our fiery games spread throughout, and suddenly kids from other parts of the neighborhood flocked to our fenceless field to get a taste of the action. Every home on our street had an open-door policy that allowed kids to come and go as they pleased, which consequently led to a shortage of our food supplies. We didn’t care. “What’s ours is yours,” my parents would tell the rowdy neighborhood kids. They expressed the Choctaw idea of “Iyikowa” to my siblings and I from an early age. In English, the phrase literally means “broken-foot.” It speaks of how when others are bogged down by the struggles of life, we should be there to revive their spirits. The other definition is “generosity.” Generosity was our family; it was our cul-de-sac.
Even amidst the perpetual activity brought about by the cul-de-sac kids, I found time to myself. I wrote in my journal and tucked myself into the few nooks of our otherwise noisy home. In the summertime, we would bask like lizards in the sun until our scalps turned a little too red; the only thing providing relief was hose water and cantaloupe. Honeysuckles grew on our neighbor’s fence, and for a week or so, their home was what the kids called, “The Spot.” Those minuscule drips of nectar were just as quickly there as they were gone. In another way, so too was our time in Pelham Circle. The stressors of reality never fully reached us kids in Pelham. We were guarded by our creativity and protective community. All we worried about was if our parents would let us have a sleepover or where we were going to camouflage in a game of hide-and-seek. Having fun was our purpose. Then, it all changed. My parents called us into their room and told us to close the door. We knew their news was bad. Their expressions exuded dismay. The inflections in their voices were unsettling. Their words shook my world. “We are moving.”
Pelham Circle was not created by the stars aligning, but it was instead nurtured by my parents’ intentionality. They thought it best to have relationships with those we lived next to, an idea that has disturbingly shrunk over the decades. Pelham was a place that seemed endless to us, but the way we lived and played in Pelham was a dying way of life. Technology has forever altered what play looked like. Back in Pelham Circle I anxiously waited for quiet, but after moving, the absence of noise in our new home made me long for the kids’ exclamations more than ever before.
