Once upon a time, long ago now, I spent a lot of of time in the City of Falconer, which I found to be a magical little place.

It was the home of my mother’s sister and her little family of four, and they were ensconced on a tiny little street named Grace, which at the time was inhabited by five or six houses all set on just one side of the street. On the other side lay a vast expanse of nothing, or so it seemed to me, with a highway somewhere far afield. And like all good highways, few kids knew where it went and where it came from. Occasionally my little cousin, who was once a little stinker, would threaten to run away and use that highway to get out of town. He was five.

The houses on Grace Street were modest, but the people who lived there all seemed like big characters to me, as if they danced off the pages of Thorton Wilder’s play “Our Town.”

There were the Josephson’s, who were a wonderful family that lived on one side of my aunt’s house. Mrs. Josephson, who just recently died, would sometimes lock her sons out of the house by mistake, so the boys, who were big-boned kids, would call on my cousins to climb through an open window to unlock the door. My cousins were proud that they came in handy so often.

Being as the Grace Street families all lived on one side of the street, with no neighbors on the opposite side, you can imagine the families were close and would often throw barbecues and celebrate summer holidays together. Neighborhoods like this were the glue that held America together and little Grace Street was as perfect an example of the American way back in the 60’s as any other street.

My uncle was a volunteer firefighter and this fact dominated the house along with our imaginations. His role in the community’s emergency services was given a lot of importance in the household and all day and night a small radio would blare an emergency signal or fire call, complete with intermittent static. My uncle would rush off, ready to save women from burning buildings or to check on the welfare of a neighbor who’d called 911.

The television show “Emergency” was a staple in American homes during this era, and this time is collectively stored in my brain as one big emergency with a capital “E.” My cousin’s house was proof to me there were big things going on in the world, real emergencies, real people in pain or in danger. My uncle seemed like the most important man in the world to me, and my own home in a big city seemed like a boring second to theirs.

In the beginning of summer, all the kids would ride their bikes to the playground and refuse to come home until school started in September. The park in Falconer became something of a day camp, where kids would engage in organized arts and crafts and play all day. We’re talking real American summer days, where kids had flags waving from their handlebars and straws in their bike spokes and streetlights that served as warning bells when it was time to go home.

My cousin often rode her bike to her great grandmother’s house who didn’t live far away from Grace Street. Great Grandma was a big woman and right off the boat from Italy, so she spoke little or no English. But man, she could cook up some serious sauce in her kitchen on Sundays. The whole extended family would show up for Sunday dinner after mass at Our Lady Of Loretto Church and do what families used to do on Sundays.

No kids born before 1970 will forget when McDonalds came to town, and no mother in this timeline will forget the day when Quality Markets opened their doors bringing weekly food shopping right around the corner instead of across town.

Sadly, or happily, my uncle was offered a good job opportunity in DuBois, Pennsylvania and the family moved away sometime in the mid 70’s. They left Grace Street and their tight little neighborhood, left their family and the volunteer fire department. They left a big hole in a lot of Falconer hearts, but they did leave their swingset in the backyard, which must have made the Josephson boys happy.

My cousin, whom I’m close to, looks upon their leaving in a wistful way. They made a nice life in DuBois, but they’d given up a lot, too. “We gave up family traditions,” she told me. “And you don’t ever get those back. They just go away.”