Thursday, January 15, 2015
Dear Ruth and family,
I'll claim friendship with Jim that, for what it's worth, goes back longer, than surely any Jim had before he died.
We grew up on the same hill.
We went to the same schools, shared the same classrooms, played on the same fields, and fought with the same friends. For twelve years, we walked home together from Nativity Grade School, from the Scranton Preparatory high school. Daily we waved goodbye to blue-robed IHM nuns or to blacked-robed Jesuit scholastics.
Physically, Jim and I were pretty much alike—tall, thin, with big heads, lean noses— each slightly introverted but
greatly influenced by our Irish-Catholic, hillside neighborhood.
Yet Jim's home was special, perhaps one could say, notorious. How many can say that they grew up on a spot that Harry Chapin made famous. I wonder if Jim ever did.
Leaving Scranton heading uphill and going east, Moosic Street Hill looks pretty shallow and harmless. At the highway's intersection with Irving Avenue, where Jimmy lived, it levels off slightly. But not for long.
In those days, sweeping up towards East Mountain, it passed plants and pubs, gas stations and greasy spoons before passage through granite rock and under a pair of railroad tracks, now an interstate highway. From here the road curved mile to the top with a view of Lake Scranton on the right, the Electric City on the left.
It's really not a steep hill. But is a long way back down, to the bottom, all the way to the Spruce Street Bridge, the seamy river, and the railroad tracks.
Where the Moosic St. highway and the old steel truss bridge meet, there was a tailor shop. Like the bridge, it was all alone but resting on skinny stilts, perhaps one hundred feet from the right angle intersection the rusty span demanded for highway passage.
And the day when an out of control tractor trailer, with burned out brakes, careened all the way down that same Moosic Street hill, failing to make the turn on the bridge, Jimmy's life decidedly changed as the tailor shop with his father inside was thrust into the gorge, the truck topping the twisted pile.
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Back then there were four of us, Nativity school graduates, that daily traveled from the hill downtown to high school at Prep. For four years, we crossed the gorge by walking over the quarter mile span. Eventually, years later after high school graduation, like the tailor shop, the bridge was demolished.
I went away to college and I did not speak to Jim in any serious way after high school graduation. But I have often wondered traveling back for a visit to my folks living on the same hill: did it give Jim any tragic satisfaction to see the roadside warning signage, the highway replaced with interstate, the bridge removed?
And when he heard the cynical lyrics to the Chapin song, one that cited a separate Moosic Street truck tragedy, but which again did not spare Jim's home, covering it with deadly irony. Did Jim get angry? Did he get sad? Did he cry?
As children we are not very philosophical, but as adults, the experiences of childhood allow us to become so. For Jim it could not help but be so, and it made the man he was.
