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Ed Lasher

Living

Main Street, Newark runs along the north edge of the University of
Delaware. At its westernmost end it splits roughly three ways into New
London Road heading north into Pennsylvania, South College Avenue,
which begins a vertical line down the length of the state, and Elkton
Road, which extends between the other two in a southwestward course
towards Maryland. For a while, I lived in a house inside the triangle
between South College Avenue and Elkton Road. Iliked living there
because Icould make an easy ten-minute walk into town to drink coffee
or buy CDs at the independent record store. Amid the wash of college
students, Icould easily make believe that Ihad my shit together, that
Iwas one of them. At the time Iwas, for whatever reason, under the
impression that college students had their shit together. A block or two
from the house my family was renting, there were a lot of interesting old
homes, especially on Orchard Road, which had a range from hand-built
bungalows to the huge, ivy-covered mansion of the university president.
One house supposedly belonged to George Thorogood, the guy who
did that song "Bad to the Bone." He's a household name in Delaware
because we do not produce many celebrities. The house next to his sat
behind a chain link fence, deep in the stomach of an expansive front
yard, all of it-the fence, the yard, the house-obscured under layers of
vines and thick shade from the big, ancient trees allover the property.

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