DW's Blog

Can Jimmy Play?

by DW Green — September 30, 2026

“The Doorbell, the Cast, and the Friendship We Couldn’t Carry Forward. The Block, Wheat Ridge, Colorado, 1959”

THE DOORBELL

Every Wheat Ridge childhood afternoon began the same way.

A kid walked to a corner house, climbed the front steps, rang the doorbell, and asked the woman who opened the door a single question: “Can Jimmy play?”

That was the password. That was the entire social technology of an entire era. No phone call ahead. No text. No coordinated playdate engineered by parents with shared calendars. You walked. You rang. You asked. The mother at the door consulted whatever invisible domestic situation was unfolding behind her and answered. Sometimes yes. Sometimes no, he’s having dinner. Sometimes no, he’s grounded for what he did at school today, which would prompt the immediate curiosity of exactly what he had done at school today. And sometimes the mother delivered a piece of news that nobody could have prepared you for.

“Oh no — Jimmy has a hot dog stuck in his throat.”

That was Mrs. O’Neil at the screen door, somewhere around 1958. And then Jimmy himself — very much alive, sprinting from the kitchen to the front of the house, regurgitating small evidentiary pieces of the diagnosis in real time. Mrs. O’Neil, finishing the consultation with the unhurried mastery of a woman who had clearly handled this exact emergency before, added:

“You know Jimmy has a narrow throat and this often happens when he eats too fast.”

You know. As if I, the eight-year-old at the screen door, were already a member of the medical consultation. Narrow throat. The diagnosis. Often happens. The recurring schedule. When he eats too fast. The behavioral moral. Etiology, prognosis, and parental theory of the case, all delivered in one sentence at a screen door, with the calm authority of a woman running a tight medical practice out of her own kitchen.

That was the block. That was the world. And that was the friendship I would never quite have access to again, in quite that form, for the rest of my life.

• • •

The Cast

Jimmy O’Neil we have already met, hot dog and all — so let this stand as his portrait: patron saint of the unflappable childhood, the boy who could lose a hot dog in real time and still come out twenty minutes later, ready to play, with nothing at all on his face about it.

Don Klutch was the fastest kid in the fifth grade, and he knew it. He had a pencil mustache before any of us had a reason to shave, a pair of engineer boots he sprinted everywhere in, and the unmistakable air of a boy who had reached his peak early and fully intended to enjoy it. Some of us grew into ourselves slowly, in pieces, over years. Don arrived in fifth grade fully assembled — the mustache, the boots, the swagger — and locked it in, and while he ran he looked for all the world like he owned the block. Patron saint of the kid who peaks at exactly the right moment to enjoy the view.

Denny Hildago wore a mohawk to school in Wheat Ridge in 1959, which was roughly the equivalent of arriving by flying saucer. He was suspended for it. He wore it anyway, and he walked into school with his head high. The mohawk martyr — patron saint of the kid who learns early that self-expression comes with a price, and decides the price is worth paying. Whatever it cost him, and it did cost him, he had already understood something the rest of us wouldn’t reach for decades: that the haircut was his to choose.

Tom Phillips was tall, thin, and blond, with glasses and a basement he ran as a laboratory. He was forever cooking something up down there, and forever screwing it up — but that isn’t a flaw, that’s the scientific method. Edison failed a thousand times before the light bulb. Tom was running his own trials, blowing things up on a smaller scale than Edison but with exactly the same relentless curiosity, and half the kids on the block knew to take a step back when Tom said watch this. Patron saint of the kid whose failures were only experiments the rest of us didn’t have the nerve to run.

Doug Tewell delivered, in the middle of sixth-grade science, the entire evolutionary epic in three sentences: Java man see Java woman. Java man gets boner. The science teacher pretended not to hear. The back row lost its mind. The girls rolled their eyes. And Doug held a perfectly straight face through all of it, with the timing of a born comedian — a boy who had just located the punchline at the bottom of human history and understood, instinctively, that you never step on your own laugh. That kid had a future in show business whether he knew it or not.

Perry Krone was told he was going on a field trip to Ridge Home, and asked, in complete earnest: Is the dog retarded too? I have never gotten over the innocence of that question. It is the five-second leap of logic of a child who assumed that everything inside the building — the staff, the furniture, the resident dog — must share the single fact he had been given about the place. There is no malice in it. There is only a boy trying to make the world consistent. And the adults, I imagine, didn’t quite know whether to correct him, laugh, or cry. Change one word and the question becomes a koan: Is the dog enlightened too?

• • •

Two Girls, Forty Years Late

Gail Mantelli and I had the pure, unselfconscious friendship of first through third grade — the kind that doesn’t yet know to call itself anything. Then came seventh grade, and Gail scoping me out from across the junior high room, and me unable to return it, because shyness had arrived somewhere in between and quietly stolen my feet.

A thought that only arrives now, sixty-five years later: I wonder if Gail remembered the suit. The last day of third grade, when I showed up dressed like a small businessman on a day nobody dresses up for, and learned that some bets don’t pay off. Third grade was the last year Gail and I had that easy friendship. Did that image stay with her? Is that what she was looking at, four years later, when she scoped me out across the room — the boy who once wore a suit on the last day of third grade? I’ll never know. But it is a good thing to wonder: that the suit that embarrassed me might have been the very thing she remembered me by.

Perry Elliot I didn’t understand until the fifty-year reunion, when she reminded me that I used to follow her home, and that one Valentine’s Day I had given her a special box of chocolates. I have no memory of the chocolates at all. Which is the strange and tender heart of the thing: at seven I did the loving thing without knowing why, and by the time I was old enough to know why, I had grown too self-conscious to do it again.

Here is where it lands: In childhood you do the right thing without knowing why. In adolescence you suddenly know why — and can’t bring yourself to do it.

And so, to both of them, directly: I saw you. I noticed. I just couldn’t move my feet by seventh grade. Forgive the boy I had become. Hold on to the boy I had been.

• • •

The Kids Carrying Something

Not every kid on that block was running flat-out in engineer boots or telling Java Man jokes in the back of science class. Some were carrying weight the rest of us were too young to fully see.

Paul Shaffer lived next door to my grandparents. Paul had polio. He walked with heavy leg braces and metal crutches, and he wore glasses. His brother Gary — curly hair, glasses too — was the more easygoing of the pair, but Paul was the one I sat with for hours, playing marbles on the back porch and talking about what it was like to be a boy with polio in 1958. We were maybe nine years old. Paul didn’t complain. He didn’t self-pity. He just told me what his life was like, in the same tone another kid might have used to describe his paper route, and I asked questions and he answered them. That was the conversation. That was the friendship. He gave me an education that no school in Wheat Ridge could have offered, and he gave it to me at the going rate of one bag of marbles.

Jimmy Mondello had a cleft lip — what your generation called a “hair lip” — and a trampoline, and he used the second to answer the first. Not just bouncing. Planting his face into the mat and coming back up. That one stops me. Whatever the world had done to Jimmy’s face, the trampoline had no opinion about it; the high-strength mat accepted him exactly as he was and simply gave him bounce. And he kept jumping. That is a heartbreaker and a hero shot in the same sentence. I’d bet there are people in his life today who could tell us he stayed exactly that brave.

Roy Lenard was an eighth-grader at sixteen or seventeen, which is its own kind of weight. He wore a dark blue leather bomber jacket, the kind I used to imagine his father had brought back from the Pacific. Roy had a light black mustache, oily hair, and a hunchback that gave him a slanted, forward-leaning walk. He was a big kid, and a homely one, and the bully class of the school went after him without mercy.

I watched, once, as Roy reached the end of what he could absorb. He took the kid who had been tormenting him and started pounding the top of his head with a closed fist — hard, methodically, the way you might drive a fence post into the ground — until it looked, from where I stood, like he had driven the kid’s legs three feet into the dirt. Maybe my memory is exaggerating. Maybe it isn’t. Either way, the bullying stopped that day.

Later, in shop class, Roy plugged a power tool into an outlet it should not have been plugged into. The result was a small fire. I never knew, and don’t know now, whether the misconnection was accidental or accidental on purpose. Roy had reasons for both. He carried more than a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old should have had to carry, and the school carried him back at the end of every day to the same world that had been cruel to him every morning. The patron saint of the kid who finally hits back, and of the kid who has to be forgiven for it.

• • •

And Then There Was Sylvia

The Ferdale house looked condemned. There was a washing machine out in the yard, and a bathtub, and every summer evening Mrs. Ferdale would come out onto the porch and call for her daughter — Sylvvviaaaa — the name stretched long across the block until the streetlights came on.

And here is the recognition that took me sixty-five years to arrive at: I never saw Sylvia come home for dinner. I never, in fact, saw Sylvia at all.

Who was she? Was she real? Was Mrs. Ferdale calling for a daughter who had gone, or for one who had never quite been? The essay won’t decide. Some part of every block is a daughter being called for who never comes. That part of the block is mine to carry now.

• • •

The Recognition

The block didn’t have filters. You got all of them — the funny ones, the fast ones, the brave ones, the ones carrying something, and the one who may never have existed at all. You got the whole human range delivered to a single afternoon, without anyone telling you what you were supposed to think about it.

And then the doorbell closed. By seventh grade. By high school. By college. The friendships that came after were good — but they were never again as easy as a kid walking to a corner house on a Saturday afternoon and asking, without irony or strategy or fear, whether his friend could come out and play.

• • •

The Closing

I can still hear Mrs. O’Neil at the screen door. I can still hear Don’s boots on the asphalt. I can still see Paul setting up his marbles on the back porch, his crutches leaning against the railing. I can still see Roy in his bomber jacket, walking forward at his odd, forward-leaning angle, trying to make it to the next class without being hit. I can still see Denny Hildago walking into school with his mohawk and his head high.

They’re all seventy-five now, or gone. The Attic is where they get to live again — with their hair lips and their mohawks and their hot dogs and their engineer boots and their metal crutches, exactly as they were.

Hee Hee — with the doorbell ringing one more time, sixty-five years late, on a corner house that is still, in this writing, exactly where it was.