4/26/02 6:48 AM Friday

Another dream another time.

March of 1994 I took a class, 3 nights (10 hours) to become a competent person. There are those who say I failed, but I have the card in my wallet to prove it. It was an official Occupational and Safety Hazard Administration course and my competency was merely an issue of safety in the workplace.

The class, sponsored by the Mechanical Contractor's Association of America, Steamfitters Local 449 and The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 5 was held at the Sheet Metal Workers Hall Local 12 in Harmarville. Whadyu just say! A series of OSHA classes on 29CFR 1926 sponsored by the MCAA and IBEW for Local 449 & 5 & 12 at the SMWA Hall. How millennial, yet 19th Century!

Route 28, my most logical route for exit towards home in the Greenfield section of Pittsburgh was closed at the Highland Park Bridge. I had little choice, after a meal of some very green meat loaf with a bright red interior (oh, yes they fed us well) and three or four hours of very dull pointed regulations and procedures that I was responsible to know, but to take the Hulton Bridge and travel down the other side of the river on Allegheny River Boulevard.

When I was a child, Harmarville had been a place of grand recreation for my family. There was the Driving Range, the Pitch and Putt Golf course, the Drive-in Theatre. As a high schooler there was a perfectly disreputable pool hall with a cigar smoked back room poker game casted by some very tough coal miners shuffling cards and spitting. I hadn't any occasion to travel this direction for probably fifteen maybe even twenty years.

It was no real surprise when I picked up a ghost as I passed the only remnant left of my early days after the new 28 construction obliterated my world, an Eat 'n Park Restaurant. My car changed into a Root Beer and White '55 Buick and my old man kicked me into the back seat and took over the wheel.

We glided to the traffic light before the Hulton Bridge waited for the green and turned left. The bridge was at once in its newer solid concrete form and the more archaic clanking metal decked riveted steel plate frightening structure that my brother and I had proclaimed with little imagination but a great glop of fear the Clickety Clack Bridge. We knew with dead certainty that someday we would plummet mid-bridge into the pacifically flowing Allegheny. Our bodies, a statistic, washed up at the Point. I sighed relieved as we left the bridge surface and looked over at my brother who was asleep. My mother was gazing out the front passenger window and I could tell that my father was contemplating stopping at the Dairy Queen.

He decided against it and we tooled down Allegheny Road on the back side of the tracks in Oakmont. I could smell the fish and see the saw dust floors at Hofstot's. It has long since become a fancy restaurant and even the bottoms of Oakmont for all its light industry has become a desirable place to live. Friday's, my father, would drive down over the tracks and place an order with the bartender while he tossed down a beer and gossiped. I sat there high on a stool with a coke in front of me. Fish sandwiches with fish dwarfing the loaf of bread that was the bun. Four in a couple bags with an extra bag for the cocktail and tartar sauce, salt, pepper, plastic forks and knifes. My old man knew every bar and every bartender and every serving maid in Greater Pittsburgh. If I were stumble this day into almost any liquor selling establishment over the age of ten. Mention my name. I would be gladly greeted. Most likely served a coke in a cold old fashioned glass.

Verona! I couldn't resist driving down the back street where Billy Kay's Bar looking newer than ever was doing a landmark business. Fake ID (even when the picture was of a black one eyed toothless man) would bring you a quart of beer in a bag. My father scowled at me as we drove by an innocent looking store front that had served as a pool hall. He forbad me to go there and knew instinctively when I had hitched and visited the small pool room run by a black transvestite, who was tolerated for some reason by the densiens of that deep. I rubbed the mist of condensation from my breath off the rear window to see the first Pizza Shop, after a Junior High School dance, that had every served me commercial Pizza. Here was a place that even my mother’s great cuisine could not compete.

I knew my father was firmly in charge when the wheel turned strongly to the left on to Verona Road. I should have traveled straight down the river road.

William Penn School, the log cabin house that is the oldest structure in Penn Hills, Bobby and Jimmy Alcorn' house, the Fire Hall and playground, sadly Dr Ferguson and Joseph's Barber Shop with different business ensconced looked lonely and deserted A quick turn to the right would lead down to Green Oaks Country Club and Third Street.

We continued straight on. Della Salla’s Pizza (Strangest cheese in the world. My brother feasts when he comes up from Houston), the bus stop that I stood shivering winter days waiting for a ride to school, Strunk’s Superette that ran many a Super Market out of business across the street because Mr. Strunk ran a tab for the neighborhood families. "Joey, said my mother,” go up and get a pound of pressed ham, six pork chops and some ketchup. Yes, you can get yourself a Three Musketeers." She paid at the end of the week.

The Service Station next to the alley and finally at the top of Maple Avenue hill Sam Arno's Barber Shop. His wife Annette’s Drug Store and the Beauty Parlor, The Harmony Short Line Bus Stop, where my uncle picked up renegade business people and drove them to town, the newspaper box that had no lock (piece of paper stuffed in the chamber to keep the coins) and was a bank where we got funds for a Coke and a Candy Bar.

My volition gone, somewhere grumping, unable to resist, we turned right. Maple Avenue. Going Home.

Cimino's House, then Stewart's my father/my foot on the brakes. I pulled into the familiar parking place on the street in front of 1533 Maple Ave and it was all that I could do:
not to set the emergency brake,
not to turn off the engine,
not to reach for the keys in the ignition,
not to open the door
not to run up to the front door, insert the key
and be home.

The ghosts fled. I drove down the hill turned on to Third Street and drove to Greenfield.