Some Random Memories Of My Childhood In Cary, North
Carolina
by
H. Kent Craig
Below are some random, stream-of-consciousness memories of
bits and pieces of various parts and stages of my
childhood, as I grew up in Cary and western Raleigh, NC, in
no particular chronological, memory weight, or associated
order.
Today I noticed that the last 10 acres of my parents' old
homeplace at the corner of Trinity Road and East Chatham
Street in Cary being cleared for something labeled "Trinity
Commons: An Office Condominium Complex", and my sense of
seri-tragic nostalgic was flamozzled once more into a wave
of crescending nostalgic cryinginmybeer foamy salty
tsunami. Just a couple of months before, my maternal
grandparents' old place just across the street from our old
corner (my grandparents' place actually belonging to a Mr.
Jimmy Yost, Raleigh's original wealthy eccentric and first
hippie, who was always more of an uncle to me than many of
my actual uncles) had been bulldozed and its remnants
burned in a sacrificial funeral pyre to the gods of
progress, much as my/my parents' old original homeplace had
been years before at their old Trinity Road corner
property, before the new set of ugly miniwarehouses finally
phoenixed atop it last year sometime. I had always
fantasized about becoming wealthy enough by now in my early
middle-age to buy my parents old 19-acre corner property at
Trinity and Chatham, put my new house squarely in middle of
the heavily pined green fortress, and thumb my nose at the
progress of time and tide that's enveloping and developing
all around it. But with the scorched earth that is now the
last remaining ten acres of the basis of my childhood
awaiting its fate, even if Bill Gates adopted me as his son
tomorrow, I couldn't a' bit turn back the hands of time
than I could by smashing my wall clock into a million
pieces against the bulldozer now on the property whose
fault it is not.
My maternal adoptive grandparents, Walter E. and Betty
King, living on the property across the street from the
corner property at Trinity Road and Chatham Street since
the 1920's, is how and why I truthfully claim
3rd-Generation Caryite "status". My father, Harold H. Craig
of Wilkes County NC, marrying my mother, Mildred A. King of
Jonhston County NC before moving to Cary as a young girl,
and buying and moving to the Trinity Road corner in the
40's before moving to their present corner property at
Bashford Road and Hillsboro St. in Raleigh (where Hillsboro
St. in Raleigh and E. Chatham St. in Cary used to meet
precisely, that corner having two distinct zip codes, one
27511 (Cary), the other 27606 (Raleigh), seemingly more
like a King Ranch acreage of 400,000 acres than its actual
size of 4 acres and a postal code accident), is why my
roots go deep into the soil of Asbury.
Asbury...Asbury...originally a church near or at the
corner of what is now Trinity Road and E. Chatham Street in
what is now Cary, North Carolina...sometimes spelled
"Asberry" and sometimes "Asbury" on old maps, it was and is
a community between the neighborhoods once in deep rural
Wake County outside Raleigh of Westover (near the N.C.
State Fairgrounds) and Cary (now Cary), a train stop
without a station, in a day when the trains on the
pre-Civil War tracks would stop and pick up a lone
passenger or two and shuttle them to downtown Raleigh to
the east or back the other way to Cary or Morrisville to
the west in the days before NC became the "Good Roads
State" and most people weren't affluent enough to own their
own cars yet...Asbury...giving it's name to it's namesake
"Asbury Park Church Of God" at the fork in the road between
Buck Jones and Jones-Franklin Roads where I grew up not as
a PK (Preacher's Kid) but as an EK (Elder's Kid, a COG
Elder being an ordained lay minister in the Church that
could marry you, bury you, teach Sunday School, etc.),
Asbury Park Church Of God actually being in Westover not
Asbury...Asbury...the ruins of Asbury Church being at the
source of Richland Creek on my parents' old corner
property, Richland Creek feeding Crabtree Creek which feeds
into the Neuse River and ultimately helps succor the
Atlantic Ocean...Asbury...seven miles from the State
Capitol building and seven million light years away from
the harsh reality of burgeoning urbanization in my youth.
The air hanging with tears of pine trees being cremated
today created an infinite loop to the memories of a spring
morning in 1959 when I saw a flock of wild turkeys in my
backyard at Trinity, a senior gobbler, a young jake, and a
bunch of hens, fifteen or so in all, pecking away at the
recently mown grass that defined the perimeter between my
curiosity and the woods that went all the way back sans the
break of Highway 54 to the deepwoods of Umstead State Park,
where the turkeys had obviously come from, following the
Richland Creek bottom from its confluence with Crabtree
Creek to its source on our corner. That same year, the
summer, I would be bit by an unidentified collie dog, and
as a precaution have to take a series of rabies injections,
the memory of which stays with me even now and will follow
me to my grave, the needles of the rabies vaccine looking
like sharpened pencils, the rabies antibodies themselves
feeling like gasoline mixed with toothpaste set afire and
squirted into my stomach muscles. And I would have memories
set of the old storage shack that once was used by a
cobbler decades before on the corner before my father
bought it, his cobbler's tree and cobbler's box and
assorted supplies being left there like so much unwanted
and unneeded guilty sin...why did he leave the tools of his
trade behind so nonchalantly?...did he find a new life
where he didn't have to repair shoes for his and the
children of others, did he become affluent enough where
this ex-cobbler's children had new shoes?
Next door at my grandparents' place, I would make "froggie
houses" from the fine damp sand in their driveway as my
grandmother Betty watched me as my mother worked as the
head teller at the Fidelity Bank in downtown Cary and my
father pursued his dream of building his infant plumbing
contracting business into a self-sufficient enterprise
where he could eventually employ my mother as his Office
Manager, which eventually he did...I'd ride my bike the
whole 250 feet up our driveway from the middle of our
nineteen acres, out to Trinity, then make a right then head
straight into the driveway of my grandparents' corner, then
find a world of adventure on their property...my
grandfather's old tool shed, where he'd turn the
hand-powered grinding wheel and sharpen his grass sickle to
weed his garden with, and where I'd find buckets of
now-useless keys and locks and spend hours trying to get
one to work with the other...the old garbage pit in the
back of their property which I thought was a cave entrance
collapsed but which was actually a dug hole in the
pre-private-garbageman-route days of that time, being a
common practice in rural areas...the old cemetery sans
headstones mostly only shallow depressions marking with
field rocks as foot and headstones usually which held a
family that wasn't ours, one of two on the property, not
being associated with Asbury Church I don't think, lost in
the brief time between 1958 and 1998, the property owners
who bought it to tear the old Yost/King homeplace and put
their typical strip center atop seeking out my father but
not me to ask where the old cemetery was so they could do
the right thing, he not remembering but I yes, he being
asked but me being unaware of the question, the buildings
being lain atop eternal resting places of those lost long
ago to history and time, new bricks and mortar and tinted
glass becoming their unsigned headstones for the next
version of eternity...of the old one-armed African-American
gentleman who lived in a shack behind my grandparents'
house and who would always greet me with a sincere smile
and a genuine laugh and tell me funny stories and for a
moment at least connect with me on a level that only
children and those who genuinely like them can...of the old
logcabin next to my grandparents' house where above the
fieldstone fireplace and mantle hung the Civil War cavalry
officer's sword of Mr. Jimmy's grandfather, it's tarnished
blade belying the untarnished record of bravery in battle
that his grandfather earned, the sword of his family's
manhood being promised to me for decades, being stolen from
by lack of written record of will in Mr. Jimmy's will...of
the old "sheep farm" across Chatham Street which wasn't a
farm at all but supposedly an "agricultural research
station" for NC State University in Raleigh, where I saw my
first electron microscope, and where they did contract
biological research for the Armed Forces so secret that
even today as noises are being made about the big acreage
being turned into a soccer field complex for Cary's kids
that most elected officials are unaware of the
Frankensteinian corpses that are buried in de' clay around
the innocent-looking buildings, the guilt of the buried
residue of the Cold War being so great as to ultimately
prevent even accidental exposure of today's generations to
the horrors of past failed and successful experiments where
science whored itself to the fear of the Russians for a
generation, where even today in the thickest part of the
woods on the property one can stumble across a 100'x100'
ten-foot-high chainlink fence enclosure triple-rolled with
razor and concertina wire with large signs shouting
"Danger! Do Not Enter! Danger!", making one wonder what is
really under the vinyl-topped sarcophagus just barely
visible from outside the fence, the only visible one of
multiple burial sights of monsters now long-forgotten...and
of my father's pack of beagles, dogs not terribly
intelligent but more than making up for lack of brains with
a plethora of loyalty and love for their master, their love
of the hunt for rabbits being equal to his own, their
loyalty and friendship to him and myself being equaled
only by my father's brotherly love and intensley loyal
friendship with his rabbit hunting buddy Luther Franks,
sharing of four decades plus of respect and love for each
other and of and for the hunt, not really caring if any
rabbits were gotten or not, the hearing of the call of the
beagles as they eloquently spoke of a more ancient time and
more ancient place when the hunt defined manhood as the
hearth defined womanhood and the dogs sought prey not to
kill it but to please their master who then would please
them and his mate by the ritual sharing of the kill, my
integration into the bond of manhood being as intensley
felt as the blood of from rabbit carcass that stained my
hands as my father showed me how to extract its sweetmeat
from its furtube to be made into pressure-cooked rabbit
barbecue later and smelt up my hands with an odor than can
only be described as Shiva, the God Of Regeneration, who by
acknowledging that life must feed on itself to survive, the
smell and the stain and the immediate presence of the
sacrificed life of the cottontail rabbit completing the
circle of my life as we honored it later that night at the
dinner table.
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