THE DAD ZONE: Of memories, e-mail and tree-shaded streets

— A trip down Memory Lane took me back to Mulberry Street. But the journey was shaped in the here-and-now during a brisk predawn walk with our dog.

It was a crisp, cool Arkansas fall morning. A handful of yard lights, a few scattered street lamps and a host of stars lit our path through the shadowy streets of our neighborhood, and the quiet gave a fella time to take notice of things he sometimes takes for granted.

The trees, for instance. Our neighborhood has them in spades, if not groves. These aren't saplings, planted like so many houses in a cleared-out field. These trees, like the homes around them, are mature, many far older than the homes around them.

They provide shade for the houses and yards, and often for the streets, as well. It makes the neighborhood feel : not old, but lived in.

It's not the neighborhood of my youth, but it's not as different as I sometimes think.

The neighborhood of my youth? That was Mulberry Street. And Pearl Street. And Cherry Street, or, as we called it, Cherry Hill.

You can find these streets in afar-away place called Marianna, the big "city" in Lee County, where cotton, soybeans, rice and salt-of-the-earth character are planted and cultivated in a thousand fields.

An e-mail sent me back to Marianna. It came from a man whose grandparents lived at the end of Mulberry Street, a few houses down from my family. He visited often during his growing-up years, he told me, sometimes for a month or more during summers. I didn't know him, but I knew the older boys he hung out with when he was in town.

They were the Batman Club, as he tells it. Their crosstown rivals were the Mad Scientists. In the summer, they'd square off, sometimes shooting bottle rockets or Roman candles at each other. My friends and I did that, too, right up until the day one friend took a bottle rocket in the eye (sorry about that, Bill).

Like the Batman Club and the Mad Scientists, we also rode our bikes all over town and across much of the county. On summer evenings, we rode through the fog that poured from the back of a truck, the city's losing effort at controlling the mosquito population.

Folks often left their doorsunlocked back then, and many spent summer evenings sharing stories, maybe a drink, on front porches.

My new e-pal remembered the downtown movie theater, now closed: "Going to the picture show was big and we would see the latest Elvis movie and hear about the time he played the high school in Marianna and about my aunt : dancing with the king. My mother had photos of the event until a few years ago when she sold them on eBay."

And he remembered the trees: "I always used to like the way Mulberry Street at night in the summer was so very dark from the shadows of the large trees, and it would be so still and quiet."

It can be like that here, too, miles away from the Delta in a neighborhood on the eastern slope of one of Fayetteville's famed seven hills. There are neighborhoods that don't have the kind of trees that give rootto a million memories. That doesn't make them bad neighborhoods. But for those who live in the ones that do, now might be a fine time to pause and say thanks.

Stephen Caldwell is the city editor of the Northwest Arkansas edition. He and his wife live in Fayetteville and have four children and one dog. Email him at:

scaldwell@arkansasonline.com

Family, Pages 33, 35 on 10/31/2007

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