The Big Fat Tree and the Wisdom of Children

There have always been, in my life, those people who found it necessary to tell me repeatedly of the joys children can bring. The wisdom and great strength they possess, in many ways incomparable to all the mature, experienced adults they have encountered. These know-it-alls obviously never grew up in Lakewood, Ohio.

As a child, summer in Lakewood was as fleeting and lackluster as a Ben Affleck film. Before I was old enough to get a seasonal pool pass for Lakewood Municipal - a small, oval shaped piece of metal with numbers on it that you would pin to your bathing suit, whose status in childhood resembled an American Express Gold Card, I was confined to Wyandotte Ave. Well, half of Wyandotte, from my house to the Big Fat Tree.

The Big Fat Tree was at the top of a tiny incline about 15 houses away from mine that my sister Grace and I dubbed a mountain. We'd ride up to the Tree on our bikes, ride down (no handed, of course), and do it over again. For hours. Within weeks of discovering the Tree, I had christened the name. Other Wyandottians would claim the tree was always Big and Fat, long before the Kmieciks moved there, but I've always disputed their assumptions. That name was mine, and I was damn proud of it, for it came to mean so much more as our summers wore on.

The Big Fat Tree was home base for tag or hide and seek. It was the fashion boutique where we bought the pretend clothes with the pretend paper money we earned at our pretend jobs. It was where we rested, gossiped, and hid secret toys. Most of all, it was the border between the more hillbilly portion of the street and our humble, yet far-from-refined, section.

Next to the Tree was a dilapidated, light blue house. Although the house was filled with furniture, knickknacks, and pictures, it didn't seem that anyone actually lived there. There was no garage, nor a car to go in one. There were also no people. Since we were only eight years old, it didn't take us long to come to the conclusion that the house was haunted. We developed elaborate stories, revealing to listeners how the last family was forced to leave in Amityville Horror-style. After all, our street was Wyandotte; therefore we must be living above an ancient Indian burial ground. The funny part was we truly believed it. We needed the story to make our street and suburb and city a little less dull and a little more like the movies. We devised séances at sleepovers after watching Are You Afraid of the Dark on Nickelodeon, beckoning the house's spirits to reveal themselves. We tried and tried and got bored and did Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board and got more bored and fell asleep. Little did I know the house's mystery would soon try to reveal itself to me.

See, Grace and I became friends with a few kids on the block as soon as we moved there. There was Jen, the smallest non-midget you would ever see. Her mom had refused to stop chain smoking and drinking when she was pregnant, leaving Jen with the unfortunate honor of forever shopping in the petite section. Oh, and she gave her a cleft lip. Over ten different surgeries have helped to almost fix the lip; her size, however, reigns eternal.

Jen's family was Italian, and their house always smelled of a mixture of cigarettes, dirty laundry, and rotten meatballs. Her mother apparently worked, but we never would have guessed it. We'd be playing house on Jen's porch when every two hours, on schedule, Mrs. Wiedt would walk to the corner store for Marlboro Reds and a 6-pack of Zima. The only time we had ever heard her talk was when she yelled at us for dancing in the street to the Spice Girls debut album.

What was odd about Jen, aside from the deformities, was her voice. What she lacked in body mass she made up for in pitch. Every so often, Jen would get into uncontrollable vocal fits, and the whole neighborhood was forced to take note. Her screams never usually transpired as a reaction to anything other than boredom. She would just sit in her living room window, facing the street, screaming derogatory slurs at each and every passerby.

One ill-fated day she saw me out the window and felt it was my time to feel her wrath. "Sara, you _______ Catholic! You think you're so cool because you go to Catholic school and you're Catholic. Catholics are all _________ losers!" The fact that Jen was also Catholic didn't seem to faze her. I sat there confused and shocked for the half hour that the taunting ensued until my mom came storming out of the house to yell at Mrs. Mother-of-the-Year.

Sarah O'Neil was another neighbor who frequented our house/school/work/Barbie games more than Jen. Sarah was relatively normal. Her house, although always being renovated, was typical, middle class, suburban. She had one older brother. David. His obese body and bad influence on my friend never ceased to scare me.

I'll never forget the one day when I saw Sarah bike riding with her brother. Even though the two weren't close, this wouldn't have been that odd… except they were both riding through the breeze with their shirts off. When she later came over, still bare-chested, I asked her in kid terms why she had suddenly decided to become an exhibitionist. "It's more comfortable. And my brother doesn't have to wear a shirt, so why should I?" she responded. I guess that her parents weren't as impressed with her stint of feminism as I was, for she was always fully clothed after that day.

One of the main reasons we hung out with Sarah as much as we did was her boat. She had a small motorboat that her dad would occasionally take out on Lake Erie named The Mis-Bee-Haven. Sarah was always allowed to choose which friends she wanted to take on the boat. When a nice "boat day" came along, all of the neighbors would vie for Sarah's attention. This flattery would quickly turn our friend into our enemy. She would invite you then uninvite you then invite you again. All depending on her mood. You never knew until a half hour before if you had definitely made the cut. This facetious attitude must be another of those reasons adults look to children for the true meaning of life.

Now, Jen and Sarah I could handle, but the worst of my neighborhood friends was Kimberly. Kimberly lived up by the Big Fat Tree in a house that was once white but now had so much chipped paint it looked like bare wood. The front porch looked like a flea market; it was constantly covered with trash, toys, and tools. One day her and her sister were pretending to chop up a Buddy doll with a power saw. When we climbed on her porch we felt like characters in a 90's sitcom that had to go digging in a dumpster in the middle of the night to find missing concert tickets or the midterm exam with all the answers on it. Kimberly's parents never seemed to care that their house looked like the nearest trash dump, but we did, so we made her come play down at our houses.

Kimberly had dirty blonde, greasy hair. It always reeked and looked as though it hadn't been washed in days. Kimberly was a nice girl but I never wanted to play with her often. This was because she wore an eye patch. I'm not talking pirate patch here, just a large beige Band-Aid taped over her left eye. She had some sort of infection that required her to wear this bandage for the duration of her childhood. I limit myself to childhood because I would venture to guess she doesn't still wear the patch. But who knows, there might still be a patch-wearing, trash-mongrel out there somewhere.

One fateful August afternoon, Kimberly and I were circling our bikes around the Big Fat Tree. It was one of those late summer days when children are so bored with their usual activities that their minds begin to wander and they forcefully develop new ways to waste the hours. Some of the best games I've ever played were invented on these last few days of freedom.

In the midst of our figure eights, our attention kept drifting to the haunted house. After quick deliberation, we decided we would do it. We would find out the mystery of the house the only way we could. Yes, I mean by breaking in.

We weren't at all secretive about it; we sauntered up the stairs and walked across the porch until we reached the front door. I grabbed the doorknob, and slowly and as dramatically as an eight year old could be, turned it to the right. The door opened suddenly. We glanced at each other, shocked. I tried desperately to avoid the eye patch. It had to be haunted; the last residents had vanished so quickly they had forgotten to lock the door. Or worse, they were unable to.

We knew this was it. This was serious. Entering that house was our fate. We were scared, but the foreground of our thoughts centered on how advanced our popularity would become once we told everyone what we had done.

Cautiously, and in step with each other, Kimberly and I crossed the threshold. Not a second after we did that, we heard a loud scream. At first we assumed it was the spirits awakening and reveling in the fact they had new inhabitants to haunt. It took us about thirty seconds to realize the sound was coming from behind us.

"KIMBERLY! WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING IN THERE? THAT'S CALLED TRESPASSING GOD-DAMMIT! GET YOUR SKINNY ASS OVER HERE!"

We turned around to see an old man in nothing but a pair of wrinkled, worn boxers. He picked up a cane that was in between a box of hammers and a miniature Christmas tree in the garbage heap and started pointing it at us. The man was Kimberly's grandfather. We ran over to him and tried to explain the story. When we could tell he wasn't buying our ghost story, Kimberly said what she thought was necessary: "It was all Sara's idea! I didn't want to do it, she made me!"

My parents were furious when they had to endure the shouts of a dirty, half naked old man at their front door. I wasn't allowed up by the Big Fat Tree for a week. Even if I had been, Kimberly's grandfather was sitting on the porch everyday watching that house for about a month after. With the same pair of old boxers on.

I've still never seen anyone live in that house by the Big Fat Tree. Maybe it truly is haunted. Maybe I haven't lost that childhood ability to believe.

What I did lose during my summers on Wyandotte was my faith in children. Maybe they do have an unspoken wisdom that goes beyond the intelligence of adults. After all, I am still a __________ Catholic who uses people and gets blamed for other's misfortunes. Maybe they were right all along.