Groves, Crows and Remembered Haunts

"GROVES, CROWS AND REMEMBERED HAUNTS"

    By Noel Laflin

September 2000



As a child I grew up in a neighborhood surrounded by some of the last orange groves of Anaheim. We played endless games beneath these giants and walked their length to either school or the local market.
                                                                                               
It was in the largest of one of these old stand of trees that a friend of mine found a baby crow one day, which he took home, nourished and raised to adulthood.  They were bulldozing the grove and we were in pain over losing this splendid playground. Within a matter of years, all of our beloved trees burned before our eyes.

                                               

But back to the crow.  Apparently the nest had fallen when the tree was toppled and the mother took flight.  One baby survived, which my friend found and promptly named Poe - Poe the Crow.  Over the years neighbors knew to see Poe's adoptive daddy if some small shiny piece of jewelry or watch was missing.  If left outdoors, Poe was likely to spot it, swoop down and steal it home.  My friend kept a shoebox filled with bright shiny stolen treasures.    Poe was a legendary thief in our neighborhood for years.  I don't remember his passing.  Maybe he is still stealing bright, glittering objects from neighbors' patios, lawn chairs and poolsides.            

There is a strange and sad note regarding this friend.   I had lost track of him after high school.  Then, several years ago I read in the newspaper about a local family tragedy.  Reading about it in the paper brought home many forgotten memories for me as I stared at their family picture now printed in  grainy black and white.  I saw through the lines of age, however, and recalled the face of my boyhood companion, the former tamer of crows.  I wished for happier times, remembering when we ran through the orange groves or whooped it up in our best friend's pool skinny dipping on hot summer nights back in 1963.  I suddenly wished for a time machine, in which to throw my old friend, close the door and set the clock back thirty-some-odd years.  I would have jumped in with him.  I wanted to ease the pain, set a course for escape.  Oh, to find Poe once more.  But to quote the bird's namesake: "Nevermore.”

If it wasn't an orange grove we sought out for refuge, it was the cemetery, the old and beautiful Anaheim Cemetery.  Our street backed up against it.  Many of us had only to scale a neighbor's fence or two and jump into that wondrous spooky realm.  Daytime, twilight or dark of night - it didn't matter to us.  We loved the place.  It was old.  Graves dated back to the 1860's. Many of the founders of the city were buried here with elaborate gravestones or statues and private mausoleums.  In one small corner of the cemetery the ancient stones were all chiseled in Chinese characters.  More than seven hundred Chinese were brought to Anaheim during the last half of the nineteenth century and played a big role in the work force.  They chose not be buried with the white German settlers. I always found their markers the most curious to read or feel and puzzle over. 

We were frequently chased away by gardeners, only to return by another route.  We climbed the ancient trees - some a hundred years old, we figured.  Ticked-off crows, relatives of Poe, no doubt, would register their complaints as we re-enacted Tarzan plots and swung about.  We played hide-and-go-seek, shot arrows into the air, tossed about a football on the last stretch of unpopulated space.  But, it's all full now - our former arena.                                                                                               

Some nights we dared one another to make a run the length of the cemetery grounds beneath a bright full moon.  As we frequently slept out in one another's back yard on warm summer nights listening to the top forty on a borrowed transistor radio we told ghost stories and tried to scare one another.  Eventually we'd sneak through the dark neighborhood, silently scaling neighbors' fences and run wild through this city of the dead.    Barefoot and breathless we found our way back to our sleeping bags, listening for our parents voices quietly talking indoors, catching bits and pieces of a television show, willing our hearts to beat normally once more.  By flashlight we read the same old copies of "Mad Magazine" for the zillionth time.  We told the same corny kid jokes, the same stupid ghost tales - eventually falling off to sleep, one by one, awakening to dewy grass and stiff limbs in the morning.  Having your own private haunt to explorer was the icing on the cake.

I continued to roam Anaheim Cemetery for the rest of my life, sometimes with old friends from my childhood, sometimes with a new love, brought home to meet the folks.  After the heavy Thanksgiving or Easter meal I'd suggest a stroll.  I always led the way.  The open gate would now seem more appealing than the neighbor's fence; age and dignity were getting in the way.   I knew and continue to know most of the graves by heart.  The memories I know by heart too.    One night I scared Ron pretty badly when I, unseen by him, tossed an orange through a large tree. The noise it made was sudden and unexpected in the dark. I swear he set a new short-distance record as he raced past me and nearly sailed over the cemetery fence.  When I fessed up to the crime, he did not speak to me for days.  My other pal, Kris, nearly killed me after I locked him in one of the ancient family mausoleums.  We were eleven or twelve, what did we know?  All I knew at the time and continue to know to this day is that this was sacred ground for both the living boys of Flower Street as well as our founding fathers sleeping soundly below us. 

I made arrangements for a piece of a plot in this old haunt years ago and am already paid up.  There are instructions for my headstone.  Part of me will one day rest in my former playground, close to the Chinese, under a hundred-year-old magnolia tree, where crows keep vigil from above.