"When Autumn comes then the most wonderful thing of all is the smell of wood smoke from our neighbor's stove. The smoke arrives like the postman knocking. Like when he leaves a box and then turns and is heading back to his vehicle even as you’re looking out the window to see who knocked. And as he hurries away you hurry to see what’s arrived. The smell of wood smoke is always a surprise, it’s always just arriving. It’s like a car full of guests who come piling in. All you can do is stand back, out of the way, and wave them in. They greet you and keep right on going."


raven    We moved to 21st and Porter Streets when I was four and a half years old. We were only a mile east and a half mile south of my Grandmom’s house on Jackson Street, but we had big trees in our neighborhood. It was called Girard Estate because a wealthy man from the Revolutionary War days named Stephen Girard had his country estate there and had lived in the house which was now right in the middle of our park. Stephen Girard was a gun runner who helped arm the American Colonials when they defeated the British. Our houses were big brick twins with concrete front porches. Our street was twice as wide as Jackson Street, and our trees were fifty year old sycamores. We had trees up and down the block. We had small front yards with hedges, and backyards with black wrought iron fences, and every other backyard had its own tree. Our backyard had a great sycamore tree. When it dropped its seeds in the springtime we gathered them up and threw them at one another. We called these seed pods “itchy balls.” They didn't really hurt when they hit you. Just made you a little itchy.

My Dad was a lawyer and my Mom was a schoolteacher. Many of the first generation sons and daughters of South Philly’s Italian immigrants, those who had gone to college and become professionals, had moved to Girard Estate. They sent their children to private schools. Their children were also destined for college and professional careers. The Schuylkill River, which is Philadelphia’s western river, wasn’t too far from us, and beyond that to the west were the train tracks and the Expressway and then the oil refineries, and not far south of us the neighborhoods stopped, and even farther south that’s where the Schuylkill River at last ended its life and flowed into the mighty Delaware River. In those swampy lowlands they had built the Philadelphia Naval Base, and later they built the International Airport down there as well, and the great East Coast highway Interstate 95 was rebuilt by the Eisenhower Administration in the 50’s and it ran past the Airport and the Navy Yard as it traveled both north and south from Maine to Florida.  Our Girard Estate neighborhood was at the end of the old South Philly neighborhoods. If you wanted to move up from that on the social scale, you had to go to the suburbs. My Mom always wanted to move to the suburbs.

Saturday mornings were a great time for us when we were kids. True for all kids, I know, but on our Saturdays my brother and I would run out our door and down the steps of our porch and go right down the block banging on our friends’ screen doors, rousing them out for a day’s play. The day we saw the great black bird none of our friends were up and out doors. It was only my best friend Ricky from around the corner, and my little brother Peter, and me. I think I was about eight years old, and Peter was six. Ricky was my age. It was Spring so we were still in school during the week, but this was our Saturday play day. It was very early. I remember the early morning light, how it came through the trees with their new green leaves. Only Saturday mornings have that kind of light, at least when you’re a kid. I don’t know why we were up so early, and why Ricky had come around the corner so early, but that’s what he did, and he found us on our porch. We were standing on the porch when we saw the great black bird fly past. I found out later it was a raven. We had never seen such a bird. It flew past us and we saw it stop in our Park, high up in the trees. We ran to the corner and crossed first Porter Street and then we crossed 21st Street, and we found the tree where the bird was perched. The bird was high up, and it turned its head sharply and quickly, and then stared off into the distance before again turning its head and searching in another direction. It almost seemed mechanical, the way its head turned so sharply and then was so still, as though it might have made a clicking sound if you were close enough to hear it. Ravens don’t belong in South Philly. We didn’t know it then, but this must have been a very lost raven.

I had the idea of running home and getting a drawing pad and pencil and binoculars, and then sketching the bird. I told Ricky and Peter to stand guard by the tree and watch the bird, and I’d be right back. I ran into our house and grabbed the things I wanted, telling my mother in the kitchen what I was doing as I ran past her, and then ran back as fast as I could to the Park, but Ricky and Peter told me that the bird had flown away. “It flew down towards Oregon Avenue,” Ricky told me, “and it just kept on going.” “How could you let it fly away?,” I said to them, knowing that what I said made no sense. We left the Park and walked to Oregon Avenue. Our neighborhood had now ended. The houses stopped at Shunk Street, and then there was a block of garages and then there was Oregon Avenue, which had a drug store and a shoe store and a five and ten store and a supermarket, and cars and buses and trucks, and on the other side of Oregon Avenue, which we weren’t allowed to cross by ourselves, was a big industrial complex called the Quartermasters where many of the area’s working class Moms went to make clothes for the military. Our great black bird was long gone. We went back home. When our friends finally came outside, Donny and Bobby and Crazy Joe, we told them the story but none of them seemed to care about the bird. My Mom asked if I had drawn the bird and I told her the bird had flown away before I could draw it. I could see she felt sorry for me. Later she took me to the library and we got a bunch of good books with pictures of birds. That’s where I found the picture of my raven.