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 1 Place Lore of Norwood I am a town boy. I am of the old confederacy of towns. I came of age in midcontinent at midcentury, during the final throes of a true town ethos in America—a dissolution foreordained half a century earlier, when cement highways began to pave over the frontier. I grew up at the end of an era, a fact of which I was clam-happily unaware. The Town, for me as a boy, was what I believed eternity must look like. —Ron Powers, Far from Home MybrotherandIwalkedthedowntownstreetsofNorwood,Massachusetts, with our mother on Friday evenings all the year round in the early 1950s. We had moved from Winslow Avenue up to Walpole Street in the summer of 1951 when I was eight and Geoffrey was six. Our sister Patti had been born into the new house in September of that same year. As part of the old Post Road between Boston and Providence, Walpole Street had been a major artery since colonial times. It was less than a mile to the intersection of Walpole with Washington Street, “the main drag,” as my father called it, of our town. He never made this Friday trip, because somebody had to stay home with Patti. Also, he hated shopping. In the earliest years of this weekly ritual, when our legs were still too short for the longer haul on foot, Geoffrey and I would wait with Mum across the street from our house for the bus. This was the week’s height of adventure, and now I’m thinking of one such night that can stand for all of them. Here is a late fall evening, near enough to my November birthday and Thanksgiving and Christmas to make even the most ordinary trip exciting . It’s cold and windy with spatters of rain, and fallen leaves skidding and then sticking on the wet, black asphalt of Walpole Street. The three of us are huddled on the corner, waiting. It’s full dark at 6:15, and suddenly the bus is here, ablaze with light and the promise of warmth that hits us with the hiss of the opening door, though the metal rail is cold on which my brother and I pull ourselves up and inside. The sign proclaims the route: “Walpole / Norwood Center.” Less than a mile back, this bus has  Place Lore of Norwood stopped at the corner of the street on which my mother was born and raised, so she greets several of the dozen or so people who look up as we skitter down the aisle, off balance as the gears engage and we head for downtown. Some nights, depending on whether or not the driver knows Mum, we kids don’t have to pay the nickel fare. Tonight we ride for free, which makes us feel important. The ride down Walpole Street takes us past several buildings that figure in my mother’s town geography. Some are the large houses of old-line Yankee inheritors—Tucker, Chickering, Shattuck, Briggs. We also pass the First Congregational Church, the origins of which go all the way back to the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the seventeenth century. At the crest of the next hill I wave at my home away from home, the town’s public library, then I sit back as the bus rumbles down onto Washington Street. We climb out at the first stop on the main drag—in front of the Guild Theater. The fun begins right here. It’s much the smaller of downtown Norwood’s two movie houses, a nonthreatening place that shows one film at a time and costs twelve cents. On each side of the double doors is a poster for The Desert Fox: The Story of Rommel, starring James Mason as Hitler’s brilliant military tactician. Immediately, I start pestering Mum to let me see this show tomorrow afternoon. She remains noncommittal, employing the standard phrase that drives my brother and me crazy: “We’ll see.” Still a bright memory, my first movie had been Treasure Island, the previous year. Exploring our new backyard, large and overgrown, I am often Jim Hawkins, innocent yet clever, expecting to find crazy old Ben Gunn or the essential pirate, Long John Silver himself, definitive in his mixture of sinister threat and oily allure, around every turn of the path we have beaten down. In these years before television, the Guild and the imposing Norwood Theater several blocks ahead on...

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