Memories of a sister and our old hometown

I watched a short television film the other day about a man’s return to his old hometown, which was a place of white picket fences, shade trees, carefully tended gardens, open fields and a bandstand in the park.

There was a church with a steeple, a grocery store, a movie theater and a feeling that time had stood still. I can’t tell you the name of the film, but it was made with such style and feeling that you could almost catch the faint aroma of a freshly mowed lawn.

It moved me to visit my old hometown, which is about a 5-square-mile area of East Oakland. More a geographic location than a town, it seemed like its own city to kids growing up there. It was where we went to school, lived in rental houses and suffered our way through the Great Depression.

I can’t remember any white picket fences or church steeples there. The only trees, it seemed, were a few scattered apricot trees left over from when the whole place was an orchard. We had a cherry tree and a loquat tree at one of the houses where we lived. Sometimes their fruit was all we had to eat.

That television short started me thinking about the old hometown, but I came back to East Oakland for a more compelling reason. The sister I wrote about the other day who was suffering from the beginning of Alzheimer’s disease died a few days after the column appeared, and I wanted to revisit some of the streets we walked as kids.

Her name was Dolores Johnson. The cause of death was a multiplicity of attacks on her body, by everything from bleeding ulcers to a heart weakened by diabetes. There may have been a series of strokes too. She died in her sleep on a warm summer evening in Modesto, slipping gracefully into her dreams.

She didn’t have an easy life. I wrote that we were raised by a truly evil stepfather who belittled her in every way he could, because, suffering from crossed eyes and slow in school, she was the most vulnerable of us. Later in life she’d declare “You know me, I’m tough” when faced with adversity. Life had toughened her. She never bent to it.

The old hometown of our youth consists today of ancient wooden houses with bars on the windows and weeds in yards fenced off by 8-foot-high fences. Not all of the homes are ratty, I guess. A few are distinguished by gardens and decent paint jobs, fighting for dignity against the erosions of time.

I had three sisters. Emily, who prays for me, still lives in the neighborhood where we grew up, in a house she bought in 1946, after marrying the only man she ever loved, who lived across the street. Mary is in Reno, surrounded by grown children and grandchildren. Both their husbands are dead. A half-sister, Helen, came along much later.

I used to walk Dolores to and from school when we lived on 94th Avenue, cutting through vacant lots and taking the long way to avoid the bullies who liked to taunt her and goad me into fights I didn’t always win. I protected Dolores as much as I could, but I was no match against guys who were taller and huskier. I began carrying an old wooden mallet to ward off the bullies, but a teacher took it away and said to use my wits instead. I would have preferred the mallet.

School was just too much for Dolores, and she eventually gave up on it. She married a good man who had problems of his own, but they worked them out together and raised two special girls, who now have children of their own. The girls are helping each other get through the new emptiness in their lives, without their mom, who seemed always to be there for them.

There was a kind of pervasive loneliness to Dolores, despite a close family and siblings who cared for her. Toughness was a facade to mask fragility. She tended to hide behind it, a child in many ways, shielding herself from the bullies. Deep friendships were beyond her. Her life was self-contained.

And yet she maintained a spirit of hope that was difficult to deny, and a sense of humor that was wry and aware. It was what got her through the final days. The last time I saw her, about two weeks before her death, she was slipping in and out of the endless nights that would have been her long journey into Alzheimer’s. But she could still say my name. She could still hold my hand. She could still cry when I had to leave.

I thought about that as I walked the rutted streets of yesterday, in our old hometown.

*

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.