(Part 1)
Morning at 2 Halyday Street, Oil City, Pennsylvania. A small girl is being gently juggled awake by the trembling earth, as the train rumbles through the nearby tunnel. Morning then meant greeting a huge moose head mounted above the headboard of the bed. Then it meant pushing her way past the hairy sentry, and stepping over piles of dirty laundry on the bathroom floor, as she randomly chose some unmatched articles of clothing. Those days in the 'Third Ward' did not seem bad; they were all I knew; they were real.
Life always had a way of waking me to its realities, not harshly but gently, like the rumbling of the seven a.m. north-bound freight.
The Third Ward's most exciting element was the old gray railroad station by the tunnel which long since had been turned into a feed store, then stacked from floor to ceiling with aromatic sacks of seed. Across the street of brick were several brown and gray brick buildings, all short, all weathered, all smelling of liquor and tobacco, much the same as the old men who used the buildings and sat in Cupola Park next door, there at the old rail depot.
None of the men had any pride nor vanity, in fact no one in the neighborhood did. We were all alike; somewhat dirty, somewhat dull and very poor. But in the Third Ward, poverty had no meaning for there was no contrast to it. Contrast was a few years away in the tiny village of Reno where we would move, and unfortunately, take our part of the Third Ward with us.
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