My family moved to Irvine when I was seven or eight years old, probably 1979. We were the first to live in the house my parents still live in, I remember walking through it with my mother and younger brother before it was finished, no carpeting or railings, just bare concrete where the piano would one day sit. It was sometime around Easter, we ate chocolate bunnies.
With two kids, my parents were sort of the old timers among the young parents moving into Peppermill Run. On one side our neighbors were newly married and in my memory younger than I probably realized. He still had a lot of the high school jock in him, drove a 280Z sports car with personalized plates and could throw a football farther than I’d ever seen one thrown. With a perfect spiral. After a few years they had a daughter and a son. I remember when each one came home for the first time.
Across the street a field was graded out for houses which would be built a few years later. This was a natural gathering place for neighborhood kids. The gradings which would one day define property lines and backyard fences made perfect jumps for boys on dirt bikes. Sometimes we’d fly kites. Mostly the kids would torture one another, pick fights and generally make each other’s lives miserable. Though I can readily call up the humiliation, pain and anger, those days still seem like magic.
When the houses finally went in across the street, more people with kids moved in. Or, more specifically, people moved in and had kids. My youngest brother was born around then, and there was quite a handful of young children who would all play together. Directly across the street, a couple moved in who seemed to have a ton of money. He had art on the walls, real art, not prints or art-fair paintings. Two huge drawings of skyscrapers in his stairwall were by Richard Bunkall, whom I studied painting with at Art Center. A few years ago Richard died of complications from ALS.
Their next door neighbors had a boy and a girl. Their father, a young and apparently heathly man in his 40s died of a heart attack. I never knew what to say to them. Shortly after, the well-off art collector didn’t come home. His wife and two kids moved a few years later. The year was somewhere around 1985.
The people two doors down are the reason I started writing this. Similar to our other neighbors, they were young and newly married. As either a side business or a hobby or both, he used to die-cast tiny model-train people at a workbench in their garage. They had two sons.
This past weekend, Al, their youngest son, died. He was 18. Al and his father were camping in the desert on an exceptionally hot day and had car trouble. On the way to find help he collapsed from the heat. His father found his body.
In my mind those kids are still kids. Almost a decade and a half has passed, the trees are taller, the plants filled in and most of the children have left home. I’ve never seen them as adults and can barely remember some of their names. I only knew them as babies.
