THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE LATCHKEY TOWNSHIP

Excerpts from the book LATCHKEY TOWNSHIP.

MY LATCHKEY FIRST MATE

I met my best friend a few months shy of my second birthday. She was a crawling six-month-old baby and had not yet formed syllables, but that didn’t stop us from immediately falling for one another. I could bounce her in her Johnny Jump Up swing as she giggled, curls bouncing. I could follow her around the house as she crawled, showing me how to pick up cat food off the floor and eat it.

The occasion of our first meeting came shortly after her family moved to Dalton, Pennsylvania, in 1973. Her mother, Louise, walked into my grandparents’ corner store, one of the few open enterprises in a town without stoplights, restaurants, or gas stations. Browning’s Store was a hub for town news, and my grandparents were the titular welcome wagon. Louise was funny and disarming, a comical extrovert few people ever forgot. My grandmother Shirley knew my mother loved laughing more than anything else, so she asked for Louise’s address and suggested my mom pay her a visit, knowing these two would get along famously.

My mom showed up unannounced on Louise’s doorstep in October 1973, a jug of wine in one hand and me on her hip, for a blind friendship date that lasted fifty years. Louise was in her bathrobe holding her baby named Amy. They both welcomed us with open arms. We walked into that house and stayed the entire day. Our 30-something moms talked, laughed, drank for hours, laughed more, and when we finally went home, my mom called Louise to talk some more. For decades, they modeled a rare loyalty to friendship, and I took careful notes. Our mothers did everything together, stealing vacuum cleaners from colleges when my mom was poor and needed to clean her house, and finally getting sober together. From my vantage point, they made it seem like the most significant thing in all the world to have a very best friend.

Through the years, Amy and I played side-by-side in kiddie pools, cinder piles, pine forests, cardboard Holly Hobbie houses, back-facing seats of station wagons, and pillow forts as our mothers shared bottles of wine, gossiped about who they knew had driven their car through a store window this week, and performed mock funerals in our living room with an ancient organ my mom bought one night at an auction that not one of us knew how to play. We circled the Viewmont Mall and Lee Factory Outlet together, watched horror movies, and devised elaborate pranks together. At our town carnival, Amy and I stood holding hands outside the fenced-in beer garden and asked some guys our parents knew named Bondo and Coalbin if they could retrieve our mothers so we could have a few more quarters to ride the flying swings.

When all the adults were nowhere to be found, Amy and I conducted seances with Ouija boards or conjured Bloody Mary in the mirrors of every darkened bathroom in both our houses. I feel implausibly fortunate to have had the same best friend since I was two. She has been by my side for driving lessons, tap dancing lessons, first loves, first days of school, and lengthy road trips. Our first job was together at her family’s car dealership. We were nine and eleven, answering phones and filing paperwork according to VIN numbers. She has rescued me from unfortunate circumstances and miserable illness. I am what we call the Fairy God Mother to her two fabulously funny children. We leave video messages for each other several times a week now that we live 3,000 miles apart.

Amy Shinkman Furr was who I spent most of my latchkey days with. You can read about that here. Below is her excerpt from Latchkey Township. It’s a good one.

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THE YARD SALE

by Amy Furr

From about the third grade on, I lived a latchkey childhood. I didn't even know other kids were going home to freshly baked cookies and help with homework or even to houses that had keys to the front doors. Apparently, there were actual kids out there who had a parent at home when they left school, and some of these parents picked them up at school and drove them home. In a car! My days went like this — walk from school to the local pharmacy/general store, buy candy on my parents’ charge account, walk up the hill that felt four miles long, and open the front door that never locked. Then, the day was mine. I could eat penny candy, watch MTV for hours, and call my parents approximately 45 times to ask when they were coming home. I knew the exact location of everything in every drawer in my parents' bedroom. 

If I was super lucky, my best friend Jacinta would come over, and we would look through the phone book to prank call as many neighbors as we could before we were laughing so hard we couldn't breathe. As we got older, our pranks got more sophisticated and usually involved scaring the hell out of my little brother, Scotty. We took him to a cemetery and left him in a custodian shed as it was getting dark; we put on elaborate haunted houses in my damp, moldy basement. He was five years younger than us, and those were his early latchkey days. 

I learned a lot from being a latchkey kid: basic first aid, how to use a microwave, and that the operator will tell you the time even if you call 15 times in a row. But it was my little brother who learned how to make being a latchkey kid pay off for him. We lived in a little town with no stoplights, where every adult knew who your parents were and had no problem yelling at you the same way they yelled at their kids, which made my brother's success that much weirder.

Scotty, my niece Keetin, and Amy

As I got older, my after-school times were taken up by hours on the phone or hanging out with friends. Scotty was often left to fend for himself and figure out ways to fill his days. One day, he managed to convince another eight-year-old boy in the neighborhood to help him have a yard sale. They somehow moved our very large tube TV outside, along with our laser disc player, all the laserdisc movies, my mother's eight-track player that looked like a space helmet, all her eight tracks, and all of my sister's albums. He even put our brand-new VCR out for sale. He sold our TV for $10 to an adult neighbor. He made a total of $30 on all of our stuff, and ALL OF IT WAS BOUGHT BY ADULTS! Who in their right mind says, Yes, I think this yard sale being held by an eight-year-old boy is totally legit? Honey, let's get the VCR for $2 because Dave and Louise absolutely want their child to sell it for about 1% of its value! 

I wish to god I could remember what Scotty wanted the money for, but my guess is candy. The charge account at the pharmacy was long gone by then, and a kid has got to have his Swedish fish.

This Substack post is dedicated in loving memory to Louise Derr (1938-2020) and Scotty Shinkman (1978-2016). I hope there are yard sales, best friends, eight-track players, and Swedish fish in heaven.

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RED OWL COLLECTIVE

Speaking of yard sales, I recently set up a small vending booth as an extension of my online vintage business at Red Owl in Kingston, opened by my friend and latchkey colleague Cindy Hoose. It is a wonderland of useful and beautiful objects, open Thursdays through Mondays, 11 am- 6 pm.

Brocade Telegraph Vintage at Red Owl Collective

If you are a paid subscriber, you can access photos of Amy and me through the ages, plus a stop-motion animation video that Amy and her daughter Maddie made for my 50th birthday to celebrate my love of latch hook rugs and Bruce Springsteen.