Brightside of the Moon, it wasn't. More like darkspot on Earth.

They had names like Frankie, Johnny, Billie, and Tom. Karen, Kathy, and Melinda. The babies of Cottage 6. These brick-constructed homes devoid of any of the things we normally associate with cottages, were thusly named, I know not why. In 2013, they look as they did in 1984, the year George Orwell chose for the novel he wrote in 1949, looking ahead 35 years into a dystopian state which we now call Orwellian. I came by 29 years later to view a memory hole of my youth. I shook my head not once as I drove around, but often and it hung lower each time I did. Such bittersweet memories, no not really sweet. Bitter is better, but still doesn't capture. I just don't have the right word-yet.

This place wasn't new when I got here. By 1984 it had been in existence for 103 years. Farmland before Mother Mary (can you believe that one) and the Sisters of Providence took up residence up on the big hill (see the gold dome behind the tree on the right, that's the big house). The original mission of the Sisters was to minister to the hundreds of poor immigrants and mill workers living in Holyoke, and that they set about doing.

Next door to the big house on the hill was the Wilkerson Farm, which was nicknamed "Brightside" because of the blessing of the morning sun. Honestly, I worked the morning shift, which began at 6a.m. and I can not remember nary a morning sun. I think I learned early on to never enjoy the gifts of nature or humankind while I was a Brightside, because I really was at a darkspot on Earth.

 In 1892, Bishop Beaven acquired this farm, and that is how Brightside was born. A labor of illuminated love mediated by God in which orphans and families were going to be cared for in the kingdom of Christianity. By 1915 the hillside had in residence about 165 of those hapless souls called orphans, having lost their parental people mostly due to poverty and the scourges this condition brings (like tb, typhoid fever, or other health epidemics that swept the impoverished, overcrowded, close-quarters places these people tended to live in).

The building below was the original infants asylum, also called Bethlehem House, which burned in 1907. Plans were then made to rebuild a building to house 130 boys. The orphanage, originally hoping to only house children for short periods of time, also added a school, in which origianlly the Sisters taught at.

How'd you like to have her for your teacher?

By the 1950's a devoted Bishop raised 1.5 mil. for Brightside and the cottages in view now came into being. The orphanage came under governmental aid in the 1960's with the beginnings of the State Division of Child Guardianship. In 1968, the Brightside for Families and Children branch was incorporated as a private, non-profit corp., from which I was employed. Above and below is Cottage 6, where I was employed. The children in residencehowever, were not necessarily orphans, but children experiencing emotional, mental health, and/or behavioral problems- whatever all that meant. In essence they were kids kicked out of foster homes, or returned from adoption for being "damaged goods," or an even more awful term= deemed, "the throwaways." Their histories were horrid, their short lives scarred beyond recognition as "childhood," and their conscription was for a bid on the hill called "Brightside." The furnishings in the cottages were institutional, the bathrooms were like those found in schools or office building, the beds and bunks hard wood and metal springs w/ cheap mattresses (due to the excessively large numbers of bed-wetting incidents). There were hallways in the cottages like in a hospital, not a home. We, the staff carried clip-boards, and doled out "points" or "demerits," and our hapless charges lived their lives based on our tallies. It was awful then, it is awful now only back then I didn't realize how so.

Some indications came early. The education was hard and fast. I went on a home visit with the Social Worker once (she knew I was applying to Grad School + wanted to give me a dose of REAL reality) to terminate the foster care placement. We arrived at the equivalent of an old mill neighborhood on the wrong side of the tracks in Worcester, MA and stepped into a gross and dirty apartment with a morbidly obese woman at a small kitichenette table smoking cigarettes. The Social Worker did all the talking, I sat hugging my charge, and continued to do so through the entire ride back in the back seat while this young woman sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. It was so hard to understand. Tears for that gross disgusting place? Unless you knew her other history, which I don't feel compelled to share here. I don't care that the Sisters ran it, and they were indeed caring and devine and all, but BULLSHIT on the God part, just BULLSHIT! The things I saw, the things I learned- THERE WAS NO GOD HERE. This was no Brightside, it was a Darkspot on Earth.

The grounds today, look almost the same as they did in 1984. A few metal playsets may have been sprinkled here and there, and that was it. It wasn't meant to be inviting, they didn't want you to stay. Only some kids did. For too long. Like I said before some kids even left and came back.

That was almost the hardest. Almost I say, for the other were the additional, internal abuses that went on. Like older kids abusing the younger in some of the most awful ways, deep in the night, in the dark corners of the creepy institutional settings. For some, it was the only way they knew to have physical contact with another human being (that or act out enough to get into a physical hold by staff and then begin to rub themselves all over you). Or evil staff doing the same. I was a whistle-blower for one particular situation in which the person got fired (instead of patrolling at night when awful things did happen, she was drinking beer, and fucking the man she had snuck in. I found them together passed out on the hall couch, beer bottles, empty pizza boxes and all). I lived in fear of repercussions for a while, but was pretty sure the person was way too dumb to figure out how to find me on a large college campus 45 minutes away.

I burned with fire of the madness of the inequalities in life. I burned with indignation for all that those babies were going through. I ached to be a change-agent, only I knew not how.

Instead I made up fun games to play every day, like backwards day. Or all green clothes day. I taught them every childhood game I knew, every camp song I remembered and I brought them little treats. 

I loved them all up as only I could in the so so short time I stayed.

 I extended my time there to include a semester in the classroom as well. Then I said goodbye. I walked away just like the rest. And a bit of my soul died in the process, a bit of my youth as well. Hard stuff like that that settles in the arteries lodged in my soul-heart. I'm sure an ecogram wouldn't detect it, no mind though, because I felt it. And I can still feel it today. I was so so sorry then, and I am still so so sorry now. I can only hope that someday I will see them all on the Brightside of the Moon.

 This dated add is from the Springfield Republican. Sadly, one of my "jobs" while at Brightside was to chase and catch "runners." If the call went out, off I'd go, usually running up to (can anyone out there imagine ME running up to anything???) the newly built Holyoke Mall. Ah the legs of an athlete I had then!

By Tom Shea, Suzanne Strempek Shea, and Michele P. Barker

Click here for purchasing information.

140 Years of Providential Caring was a collaborative effort with Pulitzer-nominated journalist and columnist Tom Shea of theSpringfield Republican and Abu DhabiNational newspapers and New England Book Award-winning author Suzanne Strempek Shea. Somewhere in this book I'm sure it says a few words about the orphanage. I didn't buy it, nor will I read it. I have no need to, I know my own truth.

Finally, here are a few links to the current (relative term I guess) state of affairs:http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2010/02/133_employees_will_lose_jobs_w.html

see the playset beside Cottage 6?

From babies to seniors- I suppose the needs may be similar and being a capitalist society, even Sisters and Bishops have to chase the almighty dollar, so the Baby Boomers can now hopefully go gently into the night... 

http://www.masslive.com/news/index.ssf/2012/05/sisters_of_providence_redevelo.html

Another Springfield to add to the list

Little did we know that we were going to be driving through a Springfield when we were in Western PA, but then we came upon a little sign. Also ignorant were we to the fact that indeed, there are townships, boroughs, and villages sometimes all with the same name in the same state. For example Spfld. wasn't really city, town, or village of, but merely a township, of which there are 9 separate Spfld. townships in PA. Sounds like a lot until you start counting the big name ones like Washington (22), Franklin (19), Jackson (18- as an aside, I personally loathe that man + am disheartened that PA saw fit to name that many townships after him), Union (18), Penn (13). Spfld. shares a # position w/ Jefferson and Perry (whoever that was).

I know little of where the other townships were, only that ours was in Fayette County, far down South in the West of PA. Heck we were a spit away from W. VA, and man did it ever feel like it. Do you remember William Penn + his state as the "Holy Experiment"? The place where religious wierdos- cast outs from their countries, were to come to be pietists, pacifists, and create communities based on their interpretations of the New Testament. Where they were to purify themselves and get ready for the 2nd coming of Christ? Well, I think they were still doing that in W.PA over 300+ yrs. later. I think the Quakers left the area, leaving people of simple lives trying to live in pure faith. So here is what we saw:

August Wilson has left the house.

1727 Bedford Ave. Hill District, formerly Bella's Market on the ground floor + the 2 room, cold-water flat of the 7 member Kittel (later Bedford) family in which August Wilson was the 4th of 6 children.

So today I am ruminating on the meaning of family. Of the most ridiculous of contrived holiday bullshit that the United States has made up (and they've done a bit of it too). I'd riff here also about Kwaanza + Hanukkah, but they're not really my axe to grind. Everybody wanted in on the action after the Thanksgiving + Xmas thing, I guess.

I'm just talking turkey about Family. I grew up in this mixed up, messed up brew that I didn't think- I knew was Strange Brew. Then I started listening to others. Looking + listening deeply. Yeah, I was from Strange Fruit, but I was a part, a mere piece of the Fruit Cocktail. And yes that former word probably had a lot to do with the Salad.

I posted up the pictures from August Wilson's birthplace to illustrate what I call the FU Family. I had long awaited this journey to the Hill. Not because of Hill St. Blues (for even though it was set up there in those yonder Hills, it was written by an elite Anglo dude from NYC who happened to go to Carnegie in the 60's), but because like me and Franco Harris (yes, I once loved Franco AND the Steelers), August was a mixed-race baby. Yeah, yeah, yeah Barack was thrown into the mix, but he came on the scene so much later and never was a "poor black chil'." I had seen my first Wilson play in the 80's, and quickly ditched Lillian Hellman as my favorite playwright. I wanted to touch something of August's just as his plays had touched something in me.

Sorrow- it grabbed me in the plays, all of the ones I had seen, and it grabbed me on the Hill. A deep, deep visceral sorrow for the plight of the tribe from which I hail, but not for which I stayed. Staying was uncertain death, and I rathered the certain kind that comes with an ageing process and a life lived well. I had a life not lived well for a very short time and it SO sucked, I wanted it no more. So I packed my heart, and soul and went North. August left too. And as I stood at 1727 Bedford Ave I wondered if he ever came back. Or ever really left? I mean 9 out of 10 plays set in on this Hill! 

Did he ever come back here and get mad? Get mad at Fredrick Kittel? Wonder at what were Fred + Daisy thinking back in the 40's on that hill. We know what they were doing because there was spawn as proof. Not one, not two, but SIX. How long did the German baker stick around? Was it too tough to stay together? Because of societal pressures, or internal, or both? Will we ever know, or is the story now "whitewashed" (hee,hee,hee)? They stayed married into August's teen yrs. despite not necessarily being together. So many questions about that Hill. Now it is only 6% white and the rest black, but I imagine a time when the reverse was true. The Great Migration and White Flight, right. I know the history, I just can't pinpoint the intersections. How and When? Always- how and when? 

Was it hard for August, the white looking black, up there on the Hill? How did he prove himself? Prowess? At what? Was writing in his blood, his soul, festering in the despair of an impoverished hill? Did he have role models and why did he marry a Black Muslim? He converted to Islam for the marriage? What's up with that? Was there a movement afoot up there? 

But he divorced and left. August the autodidact, went West. Hung with that other crowd (whispered to be white) and even married white. Perhaps it was the cafe society of St. Paul that drew him. The need for a literary crowd. Perhaps he just couldn't get that on the Hill. So for 9 yrs. he was married to a white woman in St. Paul, and hung with a theater company, and wrote plays. Then, his time with the company and wife must have run their course, because he just up and continued West. He really was heeding the call to "Go West Young Man."

He found another theater company and wife, both of which once again had that white thing going on. I wonder if he, like me, because of the lightness of our skin, just found it easier to hang with folks who knew the roots, saw the soul, and disregarded all the rest. Problem being, when you go that route, it really is hard going back home. He produced a black child there in 1970. He produced a white child 27 years later. I so wonder what they think of each other. Do they even converse? What do they really share besides distant and likely altered dna. Is it possible that life experience can alter the genes? I mean really, is one the same at 20 as they are at 47? If change happens, at what level? Hmmm...

Family. Odd that it is all about the dna. According to who? Oh yeah, the biologists. Those studiers of all things cellular. The make-up, the movement, the creations. Family creations. Not the messes, hurt feelings, pain, anguish, and sometimes just out-and-out misery. No, it's all about the dna. 

So then another mystery pops up. August got the big C diagnosis in June of his 60th yr. on planet Earth. Not a good diagnosis, not much longer to be here. So did he plan in those 4 months he got? What did he think about? Who did he reach out to? In the end, was it all about family? If so, then I ask myself this: How the hell did he end up in Greenwood Cemetery? Now, there are 42 cemeteries in Seattle where he'd lived for the last 15 yrs. of his life with a wife and daughter. Why not there?

Greenwood Cemetery is a cemetery in the Pittsburgh suburb of O'Hara Township, Pennsylvania, United States. The cemetery was opened in 1874 and is located approximately six miles northeast of Downtown Pittsburgh at 321 Kittanning Pike321. What the hell were you thinking August, What? You got memorialized at Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall, one of the oldest historic landmarks in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Why there? You didn't even complete your military service! The funeral service included Wynton Marsalis playing the trumpet, and actors, such as Charles Dutton and Phylicia Rashad, reading monologues from your plays. The clutch of recognition had begun. But you staged this play. You were the playwright, you created the scenes. You even wrote the famous final scene that is in fact now being performed in NYC, How I Learned What I Learned. I guess I'll have to go to New York (again) next for some of those answers I crave.

O'Hara Township is a suburb of about 9,000 humans, of which over 95% is white, and .84% black (that'd be >1 for our visual readers). 

So here he rests, roils, rolls, rocks, does whatever dead bodies do (I think they just decompose.

I thought the marker unremarkable, the quote disingenuis. Even if he wrote it himself, I was disappointed. Was he really right there? Well, okay yes- literally, he probably still was. Especially if he got the super-duper deluxe, hermatically sealed deal, then in 2013, 8 years since his death, then he still probably was there. So I had a little chat with him. 

Why August? Why here? Such a displaced place to call your final home. I just want to tell you, I don't like it. The gorgeous old brick farmhouse and the funky old hearse in its makeshift garage are cool, as was the man who without a moments hesitation agreed to guide us to this hillside to find you. But this is bullshit. Way out here, Pittsburgh'ish I say. A hill, yes, but definitely NOT the Hill District. Maybe you didn't belong there, you inbetweener. Maybe you were always an outsider looking in. Maybe your later choices of an Anglo world forever solidified the chasm that already existed. What were they saying on that other Hill in the ensuing 27 years that you were gone? Were they mad at you for abadoning them, just as your Anglo/German dad abandoned you? Did you know August that everyone is grabbing pieces of you now. Theaters named after you (I just love that NYC gave you one), centers, and even historic markers. But did you see that rundown piece of shit property that everyone swore to rehab and make something out of? It's a downright dirty shame. Word on the street (not the ones around this hill), word up on The Hill is that there is a black woman who has a catering business who has the support to start a cafe at your birthsite. But of course there was all this talk of a museum too. Sometimes people are so full of bullshit August, it's really sickening. They're grabbing onto your genius like it is their own. And it isn't even in your DNA! I'll let you go rest in peace dude. I just wanted you to know that "I feel you." Or perhaps it should be, "I feel like you." Or just- I get it. We don't share DNA, just wavelengths, and in my FU Family schema, that's all we need. I can call you my brother, my family, my home.