It was a different world back then

"It was a different world back then," my son said when I asked him what he thinks of the stories I tell at his prompting. "Tell me a story of your growing up. There should be crime and ideally gunfire," he would ask on the mile walk to school.

It was a different world.

My neighbor passed away.

When I was 10 and Jay was 12, I had my first-ever eye-opening time away from my parents.

We cut and dipped cat-o-nines in turpentine. We lit them and ran through the dark across a golf course.

Every night we seemed to be up to some devilry.

It was my first time outside of my community of faith, neighborhood, and family.

Everything was different. His cousin’s parents were divorced, my first encounter with that phenomenon as a 1970s Catholic.

His mom swore.

There were black velvet paintings.

One painting was of a topless woman in the living room. I can’t count up how long I looked at that while we were watching TV.

Jay’s dad had a pale green ‘57 Chevy with tail fins for unforgettable road trips without seat belts.

Mr. Devine called him JJ. It was a junior honorific. I. Can still hear his voice calling, "JJ!" Do this! Do that, in a nasal whine high like the Chevy motor.

Even as he always seemed to be yelling or correcting, "JJ!" was the holler of parental love. The 1970s were another country. I am glad to have known them.

We took a wagon or two around the neighborhood. We rang doorbells and told people we'd take the old 16-oz Pepsi bottles they wanted to get rid of. The glass bottles were worth 2 cents each when returned. Or they had just been upped to 5 cents and we thought we'd turn a profit.

We did this and made some money from people ready to get rid of junk. Remember, these residents had grown up with the call of the rag man, and the "watermelleeeey!" calls of summer farm hucksters.

One day, somebody berated us for being like beggars trying to take other people's money. It shook me up. Jay was our persuasive salesman.

Back then, every person knew every other, it seemed. One or the other of neighborhood networks drew us together. We played on the streets every summer night. We ran bases between sewer lids and slid on the asphalt, ruining our trousers. Everybody walked everywhere. We even walked home for lunch in the era before school lunches.

We weren’t close, though.

Every August, we gave Mr. Devine a double-paper grocery bag of ripe plums from our front yard plum trees, planted by the Schwarz family who owned the house for a half century before us [Immigrants to the Hill District who built their business up to found the Pittsburgh Produce Terminal, now under a renovation that will transform the Strip District neighborhood.]

Jay didn’t like school. He was sent away from Immaculate Conception. He dropped out of Peabody High in tenth grade. “School wasn’t for me. I smoked pot every morning on Beatty Street,” he told me decades later.

At 16, Jay joined his dad’s landscaping company full time and as much as I hear, was a landscaper for the next four decades.

We stayed in touch with the Devines even as our lives went different directions. As Mr. Devine passed away, as the ‘57 Chevy moldered in the garage and then the yard, and as JJ grew ill.

Jay believed in friendship. “My friend Jimmy Smales, he died working on that house across the street. He was my best friend. There is no justice. That broke my heart and is about the day I stopped living,” he told me almost twenty years ago.

Other friends - Task brothers, who my dad paid twenty bucks to wrestle an old fridge out of the third floor - have also passed away.

Jay struggled with a number of health conditions. I always calculate, well, if I am approaching 54, Jay must have been 56.

Jay left his estate to St. Jude hospital.

Rest In Peace my friend Jay “JJ” Devine.