Two fifteen Rodeo Road. That address had a resonance that I never expected to be a reality. But I had a chance to see it again and it was a revelation, and at the same time, nothing at all.  

The house in Salinas, California we lived in more than 60 years ago, from 1943 to 1945, is still there, and looks almost exactly the same. The neighborhood has changed and filled out. The Rodeo Road of old passed by the rodeo corral, through bare countryside to the two blocks of houses surrounding our house at 215, then continued through the lettuce fields and disappeared into the distance. Every other lot had a house on it in the old days, the houses far apart, new, neat, and simple.

Today, amazingly, the houses are the same, tiny four room frame houses, but every lot is built on. The twin to our four room house a couple of doors down that didn't have a front walk still doesn't have a front walk.  None of the houses have even been expanded. Since Salinas has grown so large, I hadn't really expected that the neighborhood would still exist, much less exist in the same configuration. But there it was, two blocks long, the same as it used to be, houses still tiny. Other changes were evident, garages had been added, fences erected, instead of its old neat and simple appearance, the neighborhood was cluttered, colorful, lots of droopy winter flowers and bushes, cars and trucks everywhere, and many more houses had been constructed for miles around.

Gone was the old farmhouse that had a large lot, maybe a quarter of an acre that I used to walk to. There was a wood pile there that I had been forbidden to play near, as much of the wood had old nails and posts and wire on them, but it was irresistible - there were feral kittens hiding in the crevasses and I didn't mind getting a scratch or two on my hands and arms chasing them around and trying to capture them so I could pet one. Then I'd have to cover up my arms and hide my hands so my mother didn't know that I'd disobeyed. 

Gone too was the general store I walked a few blocks to so I could pick up a few groceries for my mother. I repeated the list over and over on the walk there so I would remember what I had come for - and the old men who sat out front spat tobacco and ignored me except for a chuckle or two that embarrassed me but I did remember the bread, milk, and whatever else we had enough ration stamps to buy. Mother was home with my baby sister and it was too hot for her to take the buggy out. Or she was too busy cooking to go to the store when I was right there and it was only a couple of blocks away. 

The neighborhood is primarily Mexican, which would never have been allowed in the old days. Migrant workers didn't live in houses then, but in wagons and tents following the crops. Certainly this neighborhood did not have Mexicans, or Filipinos, or Chinese, who made up the majority of the nonwhite population then as now.

I expected to have a lot of feelings of sadness, or memories of deep affect, but I had neither. Just a little wonder that these houses remained pretty much as I had remembered them and that Salinas, although changed, was also pretty much as I had remembered it. The school I attended, Lincoln School, had been enlarged but it was a long bus ride away from Rodeo Road, which had been more of a countrified exurb and now is part of the south side of the city.

The most interesting thing I found is that the distances to the places I had visited outside the city were much smaller than I had remembered, the mission at San Juan Bautista only about 30 miles east of Salinas, and the mountains of Monterey and the beautiful small town of Carmel about the same distance southwest.  It was most amazing thing that Salinas is ringed by mountains and I never remembered that there were mountains at all, certainly not so close to that house on Rodeo Road.

It was no longer a road that led anywhere at all but only those two short blocks that were the world of my young childhood.