BY PETER ANDERSON

Our house on Florence Street looks solid still, but the apple tree is gone and so is the barn. I know there used to be a barn with that house because I tried to paint it at age 3 or 4. My father did not punish me for painting but spanked me for crossing the street alone to the fountain at Healy Field. It has been 51 or 52 years since we moved from that house, but memories of childhood last almost forever.

My mother would take me to the corner store, a short walk up Florence Street toward the Mt. Hope section, and there she bought me a succession of penny gliders, either for good behavior on the walk or because I was the baby, the last of six children. Those balsa gliders flew well if not for long. Recently I went in to that corner store to ask if it was indeed in Mt. Hope. No, the clerk said, pointing, Mt. Hope started across the rail- road tracks. I had interrupted him and another man looking at a picture in Penthouse magazine. Possession of Penthouse in the day of the penny glider would have been grounds for, if not criminal prosecution, certainly excommunication.

Florence Street becomes Brown Avenue, which meets Cummins Highway at the Sacred Heart Church. Two of my sisters were married at Sacred Heart the same autumn, to soldiers who were off to the war, both of them smoking Camels.

Florence Street and Cummins Highway look about the same as they did 40 years ago, or however far back I can trust my memory. I am more certain of Walter Street, where we moved when I was 4 and where I lived until age 22, when I graduated from college and was off to the Army and gone from Roslindale forever. That was 33 years ago, but the house on Walter Street and the neighborhood around it look almost exactly as I remember them except for one thing: Houses have grown closer together, because in my mind they were farther apart.

The same houses, single, two-family, and some three- deckers, stand where they always did. If anything, the wood dwellings look better than I re member, every fourth or fifth house with new siding, and all roofs solid against weather, not because people are more careful now than before but be cause, so many years removed from the Depression, they have more money. Houses have new paint or a new porch, and a house in Roslindale has become more than a home: It has become valuable real estate.

A house on Walter Street sold recently for $160,000. My father bought our house on Walter Street in 1939 for $3,400 from the bank, which had a lot of houses then, in the Depression. My father put in oak floors and otherwise fixed up the three-story house before we moved in. That day, half a century ago, I was sitting on the curb in front of our new home when a boy sat down be side me. His name was Tommy White, he was 4 years old, too, and we became friends that day. For years we would fight in the morning, make up in the afternoon. As teenagers we broke the law together with a firearm without malice.

The two maple trees in front of my old house are gone, and the little back yard has been covered with blacktop. My father used to grow a few marigolds and petunias in that back yard before he died of hard work and Camels. I did not want to see the inside of that house, where he had lain on his deathbed, and instead walked the streets of my child hood and of my paper route. I delivered The Boston Traveler at night and, at a different time, delivered a morning paper, Globe or Herald or Post or a combination, I can't remember.

It was a tight route, only four streets, Congreve, Fletcher, Farquhar, and Hewlett. Al though I walked those streets for years and studied literature in college, I was in middle age before I knew that the four streets of my paper route were named for English playwrights William Congreve and John Fletcher, English novelist Maurice Hewlett, and Irish playwright George Farquhar. It would have given me some pleasure to have known it back then.

The canvas bag of newspapers got lighter street by street, and at the top of Congreve I would tell myself I had only three more streets, and at the bottom of Fletcher only two more. Being an adult has not been so different: instead of just one more street, Hewlett, it is one more story, two more tuition payments, five years to a pension, seven years to Social Security.

Houses on Fletcher Street are well kept. It could be a street in Newton or Brookline, and if it were, the houses would be worth a lot more. Roslindale does not have a good image. Most everyone I talked to said so in one way or another, and none of them could give a good reason, except for the two housing projects, which were not there in my childhood.

Also, Roslindale has no pride of place. In a sense, Roslindale does not exist, for even people who have lived more than 50 years in Roslindale cannot describe its boundary. I always thought I knew the line, and I found a cop, a native, who drove me around Roslindale and showed me a boundary known at least to him and to me. I could trust him because he knows the Holy Name Church is in Roslindale, not West Roxbury, and he knows of White City and Mt. Hope and where the gypsies used to camp.

I cannot remember one house or customer on my pa per route, an indication of how little I liked that work, but I recognized the houses of my old friends, including the three decker on Farquhar where lived a boy whose name should be in a record book. I do not know what happened to him since, but about 1950, in a time before grade inflation and when no slack was given to any student there, he got five 100s on his report card at Boston Latin, supposedly the first to do so. It was like hitting .420 in the big leagues.

There is no familiar sign in the blocks of stores at the bottom of Walter Street. Banushi's Fruit and Produce takes up the building where McKinnon's Bakery and Harry's Market used to be. McKinnon the baker was a palefaced man, from being indoors, I suppose, and the white flour on his face could make him look like a ghost.

I worked for Harry, delivering meat and groceries in a little cart. Harry used to carry a fat wad of bills in a pocket under his butcher's apron, had a bad heart, and did not close his mouth while chewing. I learned to eat raw hot dogs from him. Harry's prices were high, but customers could run a tab and got my delivery service for fee, though I expected to be tipped and usually was.

Mae White was famous in her time but is forgotten now even by people in middle age. Mae White's Variety is now Tex's Barbecue Express, a store with so little window showing that it looks ready for an attack from Santa Anna. The Italian cobbler is gone to dusty death as is the Jewish tailor, the Chinese laundryman, and Mr. Sullivan, the white-haired druggist who drove a black Ford. Most cars were black then, about 1946.

The corner store at Walter and South streets is out of business, burned by a suspected arsonist who died in the fire. The Longfellow grammar school has been closed, declared unneeded. People maintain their homes, but corner stores struggle against the chains. As for the schools, they are beyond neighborhood control.

Many people with children in school began to leave Roslindale when court ordered busing began in 1974. They could not comprehend any benefit and would not have their children put on buses to go elsewhere in the city while other children were bused to local schools such as the Longfellow. (I would have moved, myself, for it is one thing to bus me and quite another to bus my children.)

Real estate prices slumped, and a new wave of immigrants came to Roslindale. In my time, people were Irish or Italian, mostly, with a scattering of others, including Syrians, who lived way over on the other side of Fallon Field, a mile or so away. I know some lived over there because the catcher on our pickup baseball team had a Syrian name, and I re member that because when ever he didn't show up., I had to put on pads and mask, learning to catch a ball while the batter swung and I blinked.

The new immigrants, those who took advantage of de pressed real estate prices after school busing, were Greeks. People say, "The Greeks saved Roslindale."

Thirty-three years is a long time, enough for a city neighborhood to change, but my old neighborhood, just as it is, could be a set in a 1950 movie, except for the cars. There are so many cars. In the late 1940s, just after the war and into the 1950s, kids and young adults walked to the bus or trolley and thence to Forest Hills and the elevated train into town or surface cars down Huntington Avenue. Only fathers had cars.

I walked down Ardale Street, past the house of a kid much older than I who had a Lincoln Zephyr, a 12 cylinder car. For me, who had no prospect of a car, that was a big league machine. Ardale runs into Selwyn Street, which runs into the Little Woods. The Little Woods was known by that name to at least two people, myself and Tommy White. It was 10 or 12 acres, big enough to hide in. There were many pheasants in the Little Woods, and I picked wild strawberries there one Sunday afternoon while wearing my First Holy Communion white pants. I don't know if the strawberry stains ever came out. Most of the woods has gone to road and houses.

The Little Woods was just a stop on the way to the Big Woods, across Centre Street and the Veterans of Foreign Wars Parkway. The Big Woods was boundless, maybe 40 or 50 acres of hardwoods and abandoned quarry; now houses and churches have intruded. We roasted potatoes in the Big Woods by a brook, almost beyond the sound of traffic. Tom my and I shot a .22 rifle in those woods, smuggling the rifle there in two parts, the barrel down his leg, the butt under my shirt, as we walked down streets, through the Little Woods, across a corner of the Arnold Arboretum to our sanctuary.

Trees and drugstores have not survived as well in Roslindale as gas stations and bar rooms. A hundred yards from the Little Woods is P.J. Kelleher's bar-room&emdash;"Established 1909," the sign says. Not here on Centre Street it wasn't; this was Flynn's bar room. I went in and ordered coffee, for it was early after noon, but the bartender said she had none. I thought I might recognize someone, but the only familiar faces were of James Michael Curley and Maurice Tobin hanging on the wall.

I walked through my child hood from this new barroom on Centre Street to Roslindale Square, up Knoll Street past Ernie Bradbury's old house. He was probably the strongest kid in the neighborhood. Knoll Street was steep enough for good coasting in that brief time after the street was plowed but before snow was worn down to the blacktop. In other places it is called sledding or sliding, but in Roslindale it was coasting. I was glad to hear the cop call it that, to confirm my memory.

Bobby McGillicuddy lived on Walter near Knoll, and he was probably the smartest kid in the neighborhood, graduating from MIT. A young woman who lived at the corner of Symmes and Walter streets helped me once. I had broken a jar of something&emdash;I think it was cream &emdash; on the way home from the corner store, and seeing me there looking unhappy, the cream dripping from the paper bag, she went into the store and bought me another jar. It does not seem right to have forgotten her first name, but her last name was Decourcey.

Walter Street was an Irish street, mostly. An Irish woman who lived near us, a good and kindly woman from the old country, delivered several marvelous malapropisms, including one when her grandchild was inoculated against infantile paralysis. She said he had gotten a polo shot.

The Unitarian Church on South Street is now St. Mark of Ephesus Orthodox Church. I walked up Tappan Street past the house of a girl who had told someone who told someone else who relayed to us boys where babies came from. She had it a little backward. The house I came to see looks the same, as does the barn behind it, where we played. I could not forget the name of the friend who had lived here, Philip Morris.

We were playing a game we called squash on Tappan Street the day in 1946 the Red Sox lost the seventh game of the World Series to the Cardinals. Squash was a form of baseball using your fist as a bat to hit a rubber ball. On a cold day the ball would hurt like hell, especially if the batter missed hitting it with a fist and caught the ball on the wrist instead.

We also played squash on the next street, Basto Terrace, where someone used to call the cops. The old cop would walk up from Roslindale Square and shoo us away. (When that cop retired, there was a story in the local weekly describing his claim to fame: He had never had to draw his gun in Roslindale.) We were doing nothing wrong and figured some old crank must have called the cops. Now, from the perspective of middle age, I can be sure.

People working to revitalize the shopping center call it Roslindale Village, but it will always be the square. The real estate saleswoman, the travel agent, the cop, and almost all natives still call it the square, although Mary McGrory, the syndicated columnist for The Washington Post who grew up on Kittredge Street, remembers calling it the village as a child before the war. I think I remember, during the war, standing in line at the square with my mother for rationed sugar or butter when the word swept down Corinth Street in the mouths of many people: Jimmy Doolittle had bombed Tokyo.

I did not see a familiar store at the square. Parke Snow's department store burned down and is an empty lot. Kresge's and the First National and Publix supermarkets are gone, as are the smaller stores: Thom McAn's, where I got a new pair of $3 sneakers each summer; the hardware store that sold sports equipment and, before such things were banned, fire works.

The Liggett's drugstore, where I worked while in high school, is a laundromat. I mopped the floor at Liggett's and stocked the shelves, some times clerked behind the cigarette counter. I think the manager was inured to his high school help taking cigarettes, but, under influence of the church, I didn't steal even one. Instead, I bought the cheapest cigarettes Liggett's sold, Kegs, which might have cost 20 cents a pack minus my employee's 20% discount, or 16 cents. They were terrible cigarettes.

The First National Bank of Boston, where I deposited $14 a week in preparation for college, changed its name and moved. That building now houses the National Mortgage Bank of Greece, which has a simple "Closed" sign in the window, as well it might, having been charged with trying to defraud the IRS. In 1950,I was naive enough to think people paid all their taxes willingly to defend us against the Reds.

Roslindale Square was an important place in 1950, before postwar affluence allowed nearly everyone to buy a car. In the 1960s the big stores began moving to places such as the Dedham Mall, leaving holes in the square. Shoppers followed the stores in their cars. The square went into decline. The public power grid was so old that electricity failed periodically, shutting down business and causing permanent damage to perishables.

Three deckers on Washing ton Street below Healy Field were sagging, as were three deckers on Belgrade Avenue. Heroin was being sold in the square. In my time, houses might deteriorate, but people went to the square to buy tub butter at Kennedy's or clothes at Parke Snow's without thought of crime or drugs. Heroin was some place else.

Roslindale became separated from West Roxbury in 1870, was a rural area until about 1900, and until recent decades was considered almost a suburb of Boston rather than part of it. With the arrival of court ordered busing, middle income families fled Roslindale and the Boston school system, and houses and rents became cheaper. Greek families could buy a three decker on Belgrade Avenue or Washington Street for $30,000 or less.

Rev. Peter Chamberas is pastor of St. Nectarios Greek Orthodox Church, the largest of three Greek churches in Roslindale, all of them new since 1974. St. Nectarios started that year in a rented Episcopal church, then moved to the Allen's Furniture building. The church is being rebuilt, and two domes and a watchtower will change the building enough so even old timers will see a church and not Allen's.

Father Chamberas has 350 families in his congregation, about 1,000 people in all, with almost all of the adults born in the old country. Most of the families live in Roslindale, others nearby. There are 200 children in his Sunday school, and he has hopes for a full parochial school some day.

In the meantime, Father Chamberas does not object to the phrase "The Greeks have saved Roslindale," but he does not want to make too much of it. These new immigrants, directed by Old World values to ward the family, helped stabilize housing and businesses in the 1970s so that houses in creased in value. Then, in the 1980s, along with much real estate in Greater Boston, houses tripled or quadrupled in price. So did rents. It is not as easy for immigrants to move to Roslindale now that rents are much higher.

Marilyn La Rosa started selling real estate in 1974, almost by accident, when she sold her parents' house. She did not have to solicit real estate listings, for people sought her out. Things change. Young people who once lived in Roslindale are moving back, and, of course, there are many old people who have never left, La Rosa's mother, Rose McIntyre, for one.

Rose McIntyre, 76, grew up in Dorchester and moved to Roslindale with her family in 1928. When she and her husband married in 1937, they took a three-room apartment on Poplar Street for $26 a month and lived there for five years. In 1942 they bought a two-family house on Cedrus Avenue for $6,400. Now she lives in my old neighborhood, on the first floor of a two family house on Selwyn Street. For as long as she has lived in Roslindale, she does not know (and how could she?) that she is living next to the Little Woods.

Her daughter, Marilyn, has seen real estate prices rise since 1974 and the big slump caused by school busing. The asking prices of some houses just off the West Roxbury Parkway are up to $250,000. The Parkway separates West Roxbury and Roslindale, although there are houses on the Roslindale side just as grand as any in West Roxbury.

People in those houses, some of the nicest in the city, are apt to say they live in West Roxbury, not Roslindale, and will cite the deed, not realizing that deeds have no weight in deciding neighborhood lines: Only natives can do that. It is amusing but understandable. If somehow they could say they lived in Brookline, their houses might be worth half a million. Some Roslindale residents use a West Roxbury ZIP code, even though it delays their mail. I asked the postmaster, who nodded and said it was so.

The new post office, built in 1962, does not seem so new to the postmaster. The old post office, in the Rialto Theater block, is a union headquarters, but the Rialto itself has been obliterated. I saw my first movie there, The Wizard of Oz, and was frightened by the trees with mean faces. As teenagers we used to go in the fire exit, opened by a confederate who had bought a ticket, and we would go on hands and knees down the sticky floor until we could slide, insouciantly, into a seat.

Costello and Kelly's bar room used to be just down from the Rialto and had a big window where they roasted little chickens on a revolving spit. We were too young to go into the barroom but could salivate at the window. The bar room on that site has small windows and only a peephole in the door. Next to the bar room is a store undergoing re pairs. It had a handwritten note posted on the door not meant for the general public, since it was in Arabic.

The little park at the square, not much bigger than a good suburban lawn, looks much better than it did in the 1950s and is maintained with money donated by a bank. Roslindale Village Main Street, part of a national, quasi public organization, supervises the maintenance of the park and is trying to revitalize the square. It is having some success, though the square has no anchor store such as a Stop & Shop, and no bookstore, no store selling expensive clothing, and no movie house, and it is not the place it used to be.

I crossed Washington Street at the same time as two women, one elderly, one middle aged; we all had to step quickly to avoid being hit by a car going through a red light. The elderly woman grumbled in a Roslindale way; the younger woman grumbled, "They crazy," in an accent I took to be Greek.

Judie Leon operates a travel agency in the square and has acted as liaison for Arabic concerns with the city. She grew up on Washington Street, near La Grange, which is over the parkway and thus in West Roxbury. However, it was the Roslindale side of West Roxbury, and she took the bus to the square as a girl and remembers the smell of roasted coffee beans at Kennedy's and the excitement of going to Parke Snow's for new clothes for school. She has the perspective of time from which to watch Roslindale walk by her window.

Ten years ago the people walking by were elderly or teenage. She sees more mothers with babies now, an indication that Roslindale is no longer just a steppingstone to West Roxbury or beyond.

The first Syrians came to Roslindale in the 1800s, Judie Leon said, many of them starting as peddlers. In the last 10 years a new wave of immigrants has come from the Mideast to study here or because of strife at home, especially Lebanese but also Syrians, Egyptians, Jordanians, Saudis, Kuwaitis, and Palestinians. She thinks a few thousand Arabic people live here and that they came to Roslindale because some of their people were already there, running bakeries and meat markets in the square, and because rents were relatively cheap.

As for Leon herself, she likes Roslindale and thinks the square is making a comeback. She lives in Roslindale, and her business is there, as is her Arabiclanguage church, Our Lady of the Annunciation. She does not know (and how could she?) that her church is built on the edge of the Big Woods.

I knocked on the door of my old house (35 Walter Street), and a woman answered. She looked at me a bit skeptically, until she recognized my last name as that of a former owner and invited me in. The pantry has been made into a bathroom, but the china closet in the dining room is still there, as are the fireplace and the circular plaster sculpture on the ceiling where a chandelier still hangs.

The stairs and banister to the second floor are as solid as the 19th century, and the oak floors are as strong as my father's decency. The woman, Sally Grealish, said, "I love this house. It's so big." I guess it is, but I remember it as being bigger. Sally and her husband, John, moved there from Dorchester 24 years ago and bought the house for $14,000. She was interested to hear we bought it for $3,400.

John came in from his job in construction. We three talked a few minutes. Did I know the Prendergasts, who lived next door? she asked. Of course, all of them. And the Glancys across the street? Well, only Richie, known to us as Lefty. As for Sally and John Grealish themselves, both were from Galway, their accents strong, and wouldn't my late mother, born in Cork, be surprised to know that and be pleased to see how good the old house looks. Sally offered me tea, but I declined, saying I did not want to intrude and was afraid of the ghosts. John said there were no ghosts, not realizing, and how could he, that the ghosts were not in the house unless I was there, too.

There are other new people in Roslindale. Hispanics and the New Irish from the old country. There are enough Hispanics so that Sacred Heart has had some Masses said in Spanish, and enough New Irish so that the 11 o'clock Mass on the second Sunday of the month is celebrated partly in Irish. When I went to Sacred Heart there was no question of language, for the language was Latin.

Public school kids went on Wednesdays to catechism class at the Sacred Heart school; they sat in large classrooms, lectured to by nuns who kept good order. I forget much of what they told us but almost remember the difference between a mortal and venial sin. That difference is less clear now because, for one thing, what was a mortal sin then is no sin at all now, specifically eating meat on Friday. It makes me wonder about the perpetuity of dogma or any thing else.

Leaving catechism class one Wednesday afternoon in the late 1940s, a boy was accosted by a nun for talking in line, a venial sin. He said, "I wasn't talking, Sister. I was praying." I can see that kid's face in my mind; I think he was telling the truth. In those days, some of us walked from Walter Street to Sacred Heart, a goodly distance, each morning of Lent. I do not think going to Mass did us any harm, in fact did me no harm at all, except make it impossible to under stand the social revolution that began in the 1960s and continues to flourish. Roslindale hasn't changed as much as society has.

Roslindale had no political muscle when I lived there. Politicians and heads of agencies lived in West Roxbury and still do. Josef Porteleki Jr. owns Roslindale Hardware on Washington Street up from the square. It was he who told me that things were so bad in the 1970s, fires among them, insurance companies and banks were redlining Roslindale, and he had to get fire insurance is sued from England. He said that things were desperate and that former Mayor Kevin White (a West Roxbury boy - didn't help) that all along, Roslindale has been split up among state representatives and city councilors so that no legislator and no councilor has had Roslindale as his or her own, whole district. There are five state representatives each with a piece of Roslindale, and two state senators, as well as a city councilor who also represents Hyde Park.

Porteleki said that he and others tried to have Roslindale represented by its own legislator, but it was technically almost impossible. He has changed strategy and hopes that having so many representatives can be a help to Roslindale. I remember seeing only two politicians in Roslindale, one of them Mayor Curley speaking in a voice given in to old age at Fallon Field, the other one Mayor John Hynes opening a season at the George Wright golf course by hitting a few drives off the first tee. That first tee is probably in Hyde Park, but down the fair way about 160 yards, the length of Hynes' ladylike shots, was probably Roslindale.

There are recent improvements in the square. "Incremental" is the word used by Kathleen McCabe, director of the Main Street program. She means a new storefront in one place, a new business in an other, most recently a car lubrication shop opened just up from the square. Dapper "did the ribbon" for this new business.

City Councilor Albert. (Dapper) O'Neil is the only politician of power who admits to living in Roslindale, but be cause he is elected at large rather than from a district, he does not represent Roslindale alone. O'Neil lives on Washington Street up from the square in a three decker, one of those square towers that are as useful as they are unbeautiful. He says: "If it wasn't for the Greeks and the Lebanese&emdash; and this is my personal opinion &emdash;home property values, they saved it. What they did, for ex ample, on Belgrade Avenue. They fixed them [three deckers] so great it is a pleasure to go up there." He is not as pleased with the physical condition of the two housing projects.

The housing project at the corner of Beech and Washing ton is not far from where O'Neil lives. The Beech Street project was first occupied in 1952, a year after the Archdale project was built near Forest Hills. They are similar in appearance, red brick buildings, and in size, about 260 families each. Forty-eight units at Beech Street are occupied by elderly residents.

The term "housing project" has a negative connotation, and people who live in them prefer the word "development." Mercedes Cash has lived in the Beech development for 15 years and likes it because the bus line is very close, the area is quiet, and she "always felt comfortable going out pretty much any time of the day." Other tenants tell her it is the safest public housing in the city, but she has not lived in any other.

Cash, 49, originally from Florida, moved into the development with her children after a fire in the South End building where they had lived. She lives with five of her seven children plus three grandchildren in one of the two seven bedroom apartments in the development. Racially, the development is nearly balanced: 103 white families, 90 black, and 63 Hispanic. Cash says the kids get along and don't even call each other names.

But tenants complain about young people hanging around the corridors and are concerned with educating their children about the danger of drugs. Cash says, "The problem [of drugs] is not going away."

When I was growing up, "heroin" was a word that looked foreign on the printed page, and the only one I knew who took cocaine was Sherlock Holmes. Today drugs are everywhere, not just in housing projects, but still public perception of the projects hurts the reputation of Roslindale. A woman who moved back to Roslindale and was excited about the house she bought told me her pleasure was met with "Oh?" when she said the house was behind the Beech Street project.

It is a short walk from the square to Fallon Field. The brick field house is gone, but we kids never got to use it, anyway, only the Park Leaguers did. I saw a Park Leaguer from East Boston hit a ball to the dirt beyond the left field wall, 420 feet, maybe more, the kind of thing that sticks in a kid's mind but is of little importance. We played a lot of baseball in Fallon Field and at age 13 or 14 formed the Roslindale Rangers. We walked to away games at Healy Field; for other home games we took bus and trolley, to Forest Hills, Mattapan, even to South Boston. Win or lose, we did it with out supervision of parents or Little League, only with the organizational ability of our coach, an old bachelor with no teeth who earned his living setting up bowling pins at an alley in the square.

Later, boys in our group drifted from Fallon Field to the Brookline Municipal golf course. That golf course is now called Putterham Meadows but will always be the Munito caddies and players of that era, about 1950. It was a time when caddies smoked Luckies and the doctors on billboards smoked Camels. (Caddies are like wheelwrights, hard to find in 1990.) Although it was not our purpose, caddying kept us from mischief. Most of us were too tired at the end of 36 holes, two loops, at $1.25 a loop, to do anything more harmful than smoke unfiltered cigarettes.

Fallon Field looks better than I remember it: no litter, a smooth playing surface. Though it was winter when I walked it, the field appeared to be of real grass. In the old days the outfield was flooded for ice skating, and sun shining through ice murdered the grass, leaving only plantain and other weeds.

The tennis courts have been converted to basketball courts and a street hockey rink, which is all right, because Roslindale is not a tennis town. We used the tennis courts for our kind of squash and maybe for stickball. I remember the evening of a big game, the crowd overflowing the grand stand up onto the hill, when pa per boys went through the crowd selling the afternoon Globe with the headline "JAPS SURRENDER." Just outside the tennis courts, the city has built a miniature playground for toddlers. Mothers with toddlers were engaged in play on the winter day when I walked there. Except for some trees, dead from old age and road salt, Fallon Field looks remarkably good, credit for which must go not to the Greeks but to City Hall.

As far as I knew, no member of our group ever was in trouble with the cops, and for good reason. The worst thing we did was steal apples. So it was high drama the day I was watching the older guys playing poker in the Fallon Field grandstand: A man sauntered down the hill until he got close enough to jump into the middle of the game and grab the money. He was a detective who, as I remember it, did not bother to chase the scattering players.

That was in the era of Station 17, a wooden police station on Centre Street in West Roxbury that has disappeared so thoroughly that even older cops are not sure just where it was. I was in Station 17 only once, when my wire-haired fox terrier had run away again. My mother called the station, and the desk sergeant said they had a dog in a cell that fit the description. I took the street car, or maybe it was a trackless trolley, to West Roxbury and examined the dog in the cell for less than a moment. It looked nothing like my dog. I walked down the long flight of steps at Station 17 and across the street to the trolley stop, and there, as if waiting for me, sat my dog, Mike. After mutual displays of affection we rode the trolley home together.

The new police district is called Area E and is headquartered in a building on the West Roxbury side of the Holy Name Circle. Deputy Superintendent Gerard McHale, commander of Area E, does not have a Roslindale accent because he grew up and still lives in Dorchester. There are gradations of neighborhood accents, and someone trained in the subject could differentiate Dorchester from South Boston and South Boston from Charlestown. But even Professor Higgins couldn't discern a Roslindale accent from a West Roxbury, at least in my era.

McHale knows newspaper writers don't come to talk to him about bluebirds and daffodils. He got in some licks first. Had I seen Fallon and Healy fields since they were reconditioned? Yes, I said. And Roslindale High? Yes, I had walked through that building which was closed in 1979 and reconditioned for elderly housing, and the transformation of the school from shabby to polished is remarkable and a credit to the city.

I asked about crime, the last homicide in Roslindale. Not one in all of 1989, he said, not since Elaine DiCenso was murdered at Zayre's shopping plaza on American Legion Highway in July 1988. That shopping plaza is way on the other side of Hyde Park Avenue, a section we considered Mattapan 40 years ago. But it is Roslindale, and we were as selective about the boundary then as some residents are now.

Drugs and crime are not major problems in Roslindale, McHale said, but his officers do make a lot of arrests around the Archdale and Beech Street projects, sometimes for bad stuff but often involving kids fighting over a girl or an imagined slight on the school bus. As for drugs, McHale said they are everywhere, which they are, and then he said something less obvious, that "Roslindale is the city."

He called in his captain and asked him about Roslindale crime, and the captain said there is less now than when he was a lieutenant. I asked the captain about armed holdups, and he said anyone who walks into a variety store and says "Holdup" gets the money in the cash register, the same as in the real suburbs. There are bank holdups in the square, of ten with the robber shoving a note at the bank teller, who gives him the money, which he places in a paper bag. If no gun is shown and no wheelman is at the curb, it is not a heist, just a paper bag job.

McHale introduced me to his community service officer, Richard W. Laham, a Roslindale native of Syrian descent who grew up on Beech Street not far from where the gypsies camped at the corner of Washington Street and the West Roxbury Parkway. He did not go sliding as do suburban kids but went coasting as we did.

Laham went upstairs for his hat and his gun, then drove me around in his cruiser. Roslindale is a relatively safe neighborhood, he said. There are more house break-ins in West Roxbury than in Roslindale, and Laham thinks it's because more women in West Roxbury work, and no one is home. Younger people are moving into Roslindale, something La ham knows because he is getting more kids in the Parkway Little League from Roslindale than from West Roxbury. This is called anecdotal evidence, the best kind, and more reliable than government statistics.

When Laham was going to Roslindale High in the late 1960s, pushers were selling heroin in the square, using the foot traffic from the high school for cover. When the school closed, many of the dealers moved on. I asked Laham to outline Roslindale on a map, something more difficult to do than he had thought, and the Hyde Park boundary becomes somewhat arbitrary.

We talked of the new immigrants, and I tried the line on him about the Greeks saving Roslindale. Laham said Roslindale has always been a buffer zone against inner-city blight, something that never occurred to me, probably because it was less true 40 years ago. Then Laham said, "If the Greeks saved Roslindale, then Roslindale saved West Roxbury."