Walking The Manor: Goodbye Lunch Bucket Paradise!

(This is the eighth and final excerpt from "Lunch Bucket Paradise," East Bay author Fred Setterberg's fictionalized account of growing up in San Leandro's Washington Manor -- Jefferson Manor in the novel. If you enjoyed the series please leave a comment below. If you missed any of the prior installments see the links at the bottom of the story.)

One night in the beginning of spring, I found myself striding down the oil-stained blacktop long after the rest of our neighborhood had gone to bed.  With time running out, I forced myself to inspect what had always been there and what I’d only sometimes noticed…

Leaning towers of backyard citrus festooned with grapefruit and tangelos. Metal storage shacks turned by rain and time to shades of fur brown and madder.  Stone bunnies guarding brick-and-slab planter boxes, shoulder-to-shoulder with plaster angels – and on one front porch, a four-foot stump of redwood chainsawed into the shape of a grizzly cub.

I spotted at least a half-dozen American flags hoisted above their porches. A Marine Corps banner flapping against a two-story pole alongside the garage. This is what I’d remember someday.

Years before, they had built our neighborhood out of nothing but the possibility that the country was ready for someplace, many places, exactly like ours. Our own frontier. Down the street, around the block, in every direction, convoys of trucks had greased their way across the newly paved fields, dropping off carpenters, masons, electricians, plumbers.  The crews picked up their tools and waved into existence a park, a swimming pool, stores and churches – and soon after, an elementary school, a junior high and high school, some bars and restaurants, a library.

They slapped up the power lines above, the sewer lines below, and our life began to take shape.

I arrived at Billy Sweets’ old house – new people lived there now – and I remembered how in sixth grade a drunk lady had ploughed through his living room picture window and the next morning, Billy bragged at school that he’d slept through everything. The ambulance, police, even a fire engine.

I crossed into the park.  At the far end of the baseball diamond, I listened to the roar of the Admiral Chester W. Nimitz Freeway dividing our neighborhood from the one next door. A stranger might look at the two places and fail to see the difference.  Neon-lit exit signs the size of a two-car garage door peeked above the rooftops to announce the distant goals of Fresno, Merced, San Jose.

I would miss Indian summer most when I left home:  when I discovered what came next. Indian summer, Dad had told me, was the time of year in the colonial days when hostile tribes might launch a final attack before the snow fell.  In Jefferson Manor, Indian summer was a week or two of warm evenings when folks listened to the ball game on their transistor radio while raking the leaves and maybe risked one last backyard barbecue before the rain.

I broke into a run.  I ran until my heart beat like crazy, the wind smacking my face. After a few minutes, I found myself padding across the last acre of landfill at the far end of town, the ground yielding a soppy squish with each footfall. Sea gulls circled above the cyclone fence, flecks of white burnished in starlight. I followed the dirt path to the water’s edge.

For almost a half-hour, I sat on a large smooth rock shaped like a varnished burl, but cold, very cold. I caught a whiff off the bay, the scent of salt and garbage.

I tipped back my head to gaze at the moon, its radiance brutally illuminating all the little orphans of Earth. The water drew a ruffled line across the horizon – nearly invisible in the dark, though I could hear it shushing, the waves pulling closer and drawing back.

That’s China out there somewhere, I told myself.

Out there somewhere, something, someday.

I felt very afraid.

I rose, turned back towards the lights, the empty streets and the similar houses. Here people made themselves righteous and peculiar in all the ways that people must, uncertain if their lives might shine like beacons. Here people were ordinary – which is to say, they were beautiful.  As slowly as possible – one foot after the other, my stride along the sidewalk so deliberate that I thought I might totter and fall – I walked back home.

On Manor Boulevard, something fluttered past my nostrils and then vanished just as quickly – a trace of jasmine, early for the season.  I filled my lungs until they ached, greedy for what I could capture in this moment. For what I hoped to hold inside myself forever. I caught a remnant of that fleeting scent, a hint of what would swell and spread over the next few weeks and flood the air – and I thought I knew what my parents must have felt in their pioneer years with the perfume of a thousand gardens coursing across the unblemished streets and sidewalks and the sky so full of promise it could make you weep.

I kept walking.

Also on Patch: If this is your first exposure to "Lunch Bucket Paradise," check out these prior excerpts.

• Meet the author's young alter ego.
• The post-World War II prosperity enjoyed by working families.
• The drudgery of work.
• The products and peril of consumerism. 
• A carefree tramp recalls the Great Depression.
• All hail suburbia!
• Warehouse daze

(Publisher Heyday Books in Berkeley has offered San Leandro Patch readers a 30 percent discount off the $15.95 cover price of "Lunch Bucket Paradise." To order call 510-549-3564 (extension 304) or email orders@heydaybooks.com. Be sure to mention "PATCH" to get the discount.)

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