MY VIEW
Michael D. Langan: Grapes take me back to my boyhood gang
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Fall is the time of year that Concord grapes are gathered in Western New York, growing as they do on the hillsides of Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Finger Lakes, farther to the east. The grapes are a deep ecclesiastical purple and are my favorite fruit.
My wife and I set out some for breakfast the other day. While plucking the grapes from their reticent, lacy network of vine, I remembered something completely forgotten for perhaps 65 years.
I don’t know what scientists call it when a taste, or scent, or other physical sign triggers long-forgotten recollections, but as I popped a big purple grape in my mouth, I thought of my boyhood gang, the Apple Street Worms.
We all lived on Apple Street in Lackawanna. I don’t think we thought of ourselves being called that in any derogatory way. It seemed apt in 1945.
Stealing Concord grapes was an activity of my gang when I was a boy. I was the ringleader, the big night crawler himself. The grapes were one of our nocturnal prizes, as we jumped from garage rooftop to garage rooftop and over back fences on our midnight surveys in the early fall darkness.
My sense of what was right and wrong is very clear on the grapes’ caper. It was wrong, but with mitigating circumstances. I am not too regretful, as it involved 8-year-olds eating fruit in what seemed like the Garden of Eden at the time.
At the time I don’t think it ever occurred to me that what we were doing was wrong or that it hurt anyone. It was a thrill to get home from Franklin Elementary School, change clothes, do homework, chores, have dinner and then go outside. Kids didn’t get kidnapped in those days. Mother or dad would call me in by 8:30 or 9 p. m. But sometimes, especially on Friday or Saturday, I’d stay out later.
I remember one Friday night that our gang met together in the middle of a big field on Electric Avenue. We brought some potatoes along from home along with whittled sticks, some clay and matches. We started a good fire, wrapped our potatoes in the clay, so that they wouldn’t burn up on us, and crouched down around the fire in the darkness, probably the way cave men did, eons earlier.
We would squat there, smoking our pretend-cigarettes of matted field grass, with potatoes bobbing up and down, cooking over the fire as the night sky lit up with stars and the sparks we were making.
It is a glorious memory. What more could a boy want? It was fun to be a member of a gang, because it guaranteed having friends. “Gang” had a different meaning then than it does now. It meant a warm, companionable group of kids who enjoyed being together. Mickey Carter, Jackie Delaney, Paul Cavanaugh and me. We would shove each other around, crack jokes and enjoy our simple fare of burnt field grass and scorched potatoes.
It was from this small encampment that we would plan a sortie, going from garage rooftop to garage rooftop and yard to yard. When we got to the right garden, we’d spy our delectable grapes; swoop down like hawks on the prey, handling the forbidden fruit with dirty fingers and voracious mouths.
As I think about this episode now, as one who owns property, I’d go after those darned kids and kick their butts for their stealing. Thus does time revise our priorities.
Now, if I want some Concord grapes or a baked potato, I order them at a restaurant and complain about the price. Not only that, but I’m not sure that they taste as good as the ones out in the field, all those years ago.
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