Anderson Park

A memory came back to me this evening. When I was a kid living in Montclair in the 70s I used to collect bottle caps. There's this brook that runs through Montclair along the railroad tracks. It's pretty cool, actually. I used to go to Anderson Park and go down by brook because that's where all the older kids hung out at night and got drunk. Then during the day I'd go there and cap collect. I'd grab dozens of them and also play with the empty bottles and my hands would end up smelling like stale day-old beer.

I loved that smell. I also loved the idea of hanging in the park and drinking. I never got a chance to do that as we moved out of Jersey before I hit high school. But there was something about those empties by the brook in between the park and the tracks that just enticed me. Of course, if I went back to Anderson Park it would turn out they weren't really woods, just shrubbery. But in my mind, they were woods.

Every few years some kid would get run over by a train. Usually they got caught on the trestle bridge and got stuck and, well you can figure out the rest. I used to joke that every few years some kid had to be sacrificed to the train gods.

I still sometimes wish I could see how my life would've been different if we hadn't left Montclair for D.C. Maybe nothing would've been different, maybe everything. I do know that if I'd stayed I would have ended up in those woods chugging beers on school nights and man that would've been fun. It sure would've beaten being at home.