Pilgrim in Point Breeze
Growing up in Annie Dillard's neighborhood...
I’ve never met Annie Dillard.
But, if I looked out the back door of my childhood house in Pittsburgh, I could see the house that Annie lived in as child.
So, I’ve always been interested in her writing and teaching career.
In the 1950s, the Doaks -- Annie and her parents and sisters -- lived on Edgerton, just around the corner from the house my family moved to a decade or so later. Our back yards practically touched.
As a kid in the 1970s, I spent lots of time searching for stones and other treasures among the gravel from what, 20 years prior, had been the Doak’s driveway. And it wasn’t uncommon for me to jump the bushes and cut through the Doak’s former side yard on my way to meet up with friends around the block.
In fact, my daily walk to and from school four times a day (we walked home and back for lunch at St. Bede) took me past what had been Annie’s family’s front door.
Little did I know at the time that I was walking past the childhood home of the Pulitzer Prize winning writer of Pilgirm at Tinker Creek.
So, when I first read Dillard’s descriptions of seeing the “black phalanx” of nuns “…in the leafy distance up Edgerton,” and the Catholic schoolchildren “letting out” in bunches from St. Bede in An American Childhood, I realized she was describing a place I knew intimately.
And while Annie and her sisters had lived in my neighborhood some ten or fifteen years prior to my arrival in the mid 1960s, Dillard’s description of at least one of my closest neighbors is spot on.
On Lloyd Street, everyone knew that if your ball went into the Hall’s yard, it was gone forever. First, the yard was a tangled mess of overgrown hedges, shrubs, and what we all called “jagger” bushes – so attempts to retrieve even our most cherished baseballs or footballs were considered futile. Even worse, though, were the rumors of what The Halls might do to a kid if they caught you in their yard.
In American Childhood Dillard recalls that in a house above the dark alley next to her house “…lived a terrible old man and a terrible old woman, brother and sister.”
(That’s them! My next door neighbors!)
“Doc Hall appeared only high against the sky,” Dillard writes, “and yelled unintelligibly, furiously, down at us children.”
