How does someone really tell when one decade is ending and a new one beginning? It's not the difference of a day, really. And yet, to my memory, no two decades were more clearly distinguishable than the 1950s and 1960s.

Being born late in the year, I was still 9 years old when the new decade dawned on January 1st. I knew that my brother would graduate in June and that we would be moving to North Sacramento the following month to take advantage of the summer break to avoid any disruption in my schooling. How it all actually happened, all that packing and unpacking, unsettling and resettling, I have not even a trace of memory. I only know it happened, and it changed our lives forever.

The contrast between the old home and the new apartment was enough to clearly demark the new decade for me. Gone were the 5 acres of pastures, all the animals and the familiar playmates, replaced by the narrow confines of a small 2 bedroom apartment, one of 14 in a single 2 story building. We were on the bottom, 3rd apartment from the end away from the street.

The name of our new street was Del Paso Boulevard, a very wide suburban street with single family houses on either side, and I believe our building was the first apartment house to be built there. In fact, the owners were already constructing a new wing facing this one. The foundation was being laid when we moved in.

For the entire time we were there, I could cross a gravel road behind our complex to a large 10 acre field that belonged the Cannon Brick Company, but it was nothing like the pastures of Rio Linda, being an industrial wasteland and home to the hobos who rode in on the railroad boxcars at the edge the Cannon Property behind the mounds of earth dug to extract the shale the company needed.

I believe for a time I was the only child in the complex, and I remember those days as lonely ones, it being summer and school a little ways off. I walked everywhere just to keep from being bored — up and down the boulevard, turning left at Hagginwood to check out my new school, crossing Marysville Boulevard and quite nonchalantly walking through all the Mexican and negro neighborhoods. My brother was gone a good deal of the time, and my mother worked.