Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Where I grew up
The two homes I lived in as a kid still stand, although one is unrecognizable. The unrecognizable one is our first home, the one which the new owners uglified soon after my dad sold it. In the old days, we had a porch and a Dutch Elm (if I remember correctly) and some nice ferns and various other shrubbery that gave the place curb appeal. The remodeled home looks like a pastel box.
When I’m down in Southern California, assuming I’m in the neighborhood, I’ll drive by one house or the other. It can be depressing driving by that first house — disconcerting is perhaps a better word — because more often than not, I drive right past it. I shouldn’t have to check the street address to know, “This is the home where I pooped and peed a couple thousand diapers.”
On this recent trip, I drove by my second home, the home where I bought my first 45s, where I cooked my first stew, where I poisoned my lungs with mercury-laced fumes, extracted dyes from fuchsia flowers, and manufactured a sack-o-maggots from a garbage bag full of potato-peelings. Ah, the memories. I took the old GF back to this place when the folks were on vacation, and discovered that poodles don’t like it when you mess with your girl in front of them. They can’t understand it. And I brought Karen here when we weren’t yet married, and here’s where she first got sick, that same night that we had rented Cronenberg’s Scanners from the local Pavilions. Been away what, four years? And they had already built some humongous Pavilions walking distance from our house. The place had become nearly unrecognizable. (Hey, Sis, remember Hinshaw’s? I do.)
I have a photo, one of those old family photos where everyone’s trying to crowd into the shot. My dad’s mom was out visiting; I think this was the last time I saw her. My brother has the big ‘fro, I’m bearded (I think) and skinny as hell (definitely), my sis has her hair tied back. We’re out in front of that second house.
In the living room, a brick fireplace we never used, not once, and drilled into the brick, a circular hole, a pit, a tunnel. I was bored. I wrote my name and the date (all I remember is, it was 1974) on a piece of paper, folded up the paper and slid it into the hole. It’s probably still there.
This is the living room where I listened to Elvis Costello play “Radio Radio” on Saturday Night Live. My cousin Barry was visiting, and I remember the light that came into his eyes as he said, “My God, what energy!”
This is the living room where Karen (still just a fiance) met my mom’s parents and my mom’s brother, and my mom’s brother, never one for appropriate remarks, told Karen how she reminded him of better times: his Korean War duties in Japan, where he had the fondest memories . . . of the prostitutes. He smiled in the reminiscence. Other than that, I can’t recall him smiling. Ever.
In a fit of misplaced aggression, my father charged me in this living room while I was doing my calculus homework. I stood my ground. He backed down.
My, my, all those memories, and that’s just the living room.
My father planted a palm tree out front. I remember it when it went in. Squat little thing. I used to weed that patch of land, nothing but thorny rose bushes and black ants and the palm. Whenever I came back from college, it seemed to grow two feet with each visit. When my parents left that home, it was probably ten or twelve feet tall. Now it looks thirty or forty feet tall.
The new owners have some sort of religious thing hanging by the front door. I didn’t linger, I drove past, and rejoined my family at the hotel.
D.
Have you been using Google Earth street view? I look at my childhood home from time to time.
I grew up here and when I get the nostalgic urge I sometimes make a pilgramage drive past all my childhood homes including my grandparents’ house. I had a blissful childhood and remembering that time is a marvelously pleasant picker-upper. I own my parents’ last home, but would love for it to sell after two years on the market @$&?!&&! That, on the other hand, is a downer.
Lyvvie, no, I haven’t played with Google Earth in a while. I’ve long maintained it would be more popular if instead of street view, they offered bedroom view 🙂
Lucie, I don’t think I could bear to drive past my grandparents’ house. My grandfather was a meticulous gardner and I’m pretty sure the new tenants got rid of all of his precious plants.
Yes, I do remember Hinshaw’s; they only hired refined old ladies as their sales people. Now it’s been turned into a discount clothing store.
I’ve driven past the house on Atlantic more times than the house where you left the paper in the fireplace. And you are right; it’s hideous.
There’s really a discount clothing store there? I had thought they’d leveled everything to make way for the Pavilion’s complex.
Pavilion’s is one end of the lot; at the other, they now have an LA Fitness, some schlocky stores and then Burlington Coat Factory (I couldn’t think of the name of it yesterday).