The Good Old Days

Do you know that weird sensation of connection to your roots that you often feel when you see an old family member, friend, lover, teammate, or co-worker for the first time in years, maybe even decades?

Depending on the circumstances of your meet, it sometimes doesn't hit you until later. But almost always we go through that exercise in mental nostalgia which carries us back to those younger days and the experiences that we shared with this individual.

The innocent memories of childhood. The fun times of high school or college. The struggles and amusement involved in our early work years. The thrills of victory and the agonies of defeat on sporting fields.

The life, death, and love of family. Sometimes that person is linked to another person, or a group of others, and our memories will branch off towards those folks.

Well these types of memories and feelings have been happening to me more and more lately thanks to the social networking website called Facebook. I have stumbled across more family members and old friends on the internet thanks to this popular behemoth than I could ever have imagined.

People who I worked with years ago. Those who I hung out with on the corners of South Philly as a youth. Some who I played ball with as an adult. And being a police officer for the past 19 years there are cops, both old and new acquaintances. Lots of cops. The site allows you to mentally catch-up with these people.

We share small biographies of what we've been up to, photos of our family members and friends, videos of some of our life experiences, music and other media that we enjoy, and conversations with one another and each other.

These meetings of late have also driven home another point to me as well. My own memories of what is classically referred to as 'the good old days' are truly long gone.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel

I was born and raised in the Two Street section of South Philadelphia, and during the late 1960's and into the mid-1970's my parents sent my brother and I to school at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a Catholic elementary school.

The home parish church for that school was located directly across from our little South Philly rowhouse. It was a matter of feet from our front door to the side entrance of the church itself.

OLMC provided me with a tremendous education, and my experiences there were some of the most memorable and valuable of my life. I'll get to some of them in a future post.

But one thing that I can say for sure is that never during the entire eight years that I spent at what was known to us simply as 'Mount Carmel' do I recall being told just who or what was our namesake.

So it's well past time to take a little trip to the web libraries and find out just what and whom the namesake of my original and still thriving parish is all about.

Per Wikipedia, Mount Carmel is a coastal mountain range in northern Israel and the West Bank, stretching from the Mediterranean Sea towards the southeast. It is characterized by a 'richly fertile hillside', thus its name which means 'plantation of high quality trees' and its tradition of being known as 'the vineyards of God.' Israel's 3rd largest city of Haifa is located in its northern slopes.

What is regarded as 'one of the most important human fossils every found' was located in one of Mount Carmel's caves during excavations there in the early part of the 20th century, in the form of the skeleton of a female neanderthal now named Tabun I.

These excavations were able to trace human developments passage from hunter-gatherer groups to more complex agrigultural societies over what has been estimated as a span of roughly one million years of human evolution.

A Third Story on American Street?

I grew up in a traditional, small South Philly rowhouse in the 2300 block of south American Street. Our block was one of the few in our working-class rowhouse neighborhood that had houses on only one side of the street.

Our houses were situated on the east side of the block, between Wolf and Ritner Streets. On the west side was Our Lady of Mount Carmel church and school.

The neighborhood eventually became known to some as 'Whitman' and it led into the next neighborhood north known as 'Pennsport', but nobody from down there used those names. To us, and to those in the other South Philly neighborhoods, we were 'Second Streeters' (some call us "Two Street") the name owing to 2nd Street which ran through the neighborhood and was home to many of the Mummer's Parade clubs who maintained their headquarters facilities along the street.

For those neanderthals not familiar, the Mummers are the thousands who parade each year on New Year's Day through the streets of Philadelphia in what is a cultural phenomenon of our town. But that topic for another day.

Down on 2nd Street, the families were mostly white. Many were of Irish ancestry, with some Germans and Polish mixed in as well. South Philly is largely known for it's Italian community, but they were further west from us. There weren't too many Italians down on 2nd Street.

So back to the topic of this blog post: A third story on American Street. Our block was, and still is for the most part, a long block of two-story homes with peaked roofs in front. It is a kind of signature to the block and a couple of others around that area.

But some one has committed a travesty, and they have done it right in my old house! They put a third story on American Street (see picture), and man does it look out of place.