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Edited on Fri Mar-12-04 04:19 PM by WilliamPitt
I just returned from what will be one of the last trips I will ever take in my life to the house I grew up in. My mom has owned the place since 1978, and I lived there from age seven to age 23, with a four-year blip for college. I pretty much moved out permanently when I moved to California after graduation. If I had any doubts that the place was no longer my permanent residence, they were cleared up when I returned home from California for Christmas to discover that my mom had painted my room a rather robust shade of pink.
Mom has been trying to sell this place for months - it's a great house in a great location, but the real estate market has been pretty flat - so I knew theoretically this day was looming. I was pretty psyched for it, actually. Like I said, it hasn't been my roost for a long time, and my mom really wanted to sell it, so when the call came that the papers had been signed, I celebrated with genuine joy.
I've been in and out of the place for several weeks now, cleaning up stuff and salvaging relics (I found my old tape case filled with my Grateful Dead shows from high school). Every time I went in, it was the same house with the same stuff, the same furniture, the walls hadn't moved, my old room was still frikkin' pink. We've changed the place several times over the years - taking back the attached apartment, renovating the kitchen, gutting the basement - but I was always either watching that happen or doing it myself, so the alterations were just part of the mental flow.
But today I went in and found two little things that had changed. I went down to the basement to throw some garbage in the garage and discovered a new bannister running down the basement steps. I got to the bottom of the steps and saw that the door to the garage was this brand new steel thing. Two little changes.
There had never been a bannister on those stairs before. For 26 years, the basement was like something out of Silence of the Lambs; bad lights, wet floors, rooms that were so totally haunted and therefore never entered into, whole divisions of spiders spinning webs. There was never a bannister. You just grabbed onto your ass and plunged and hoped the mosnter that lived in the darkness beyond the old laundry room was otherwise occupied. Mom had the place renovated, cleansed of spiders and monsters, but didn't put a bannister in. There's one there now.
The door to the garage used to be this rotten behemoth of a wooden door with a metal sheet hammered onto it to give the illusion of sturdiness. As a boy, it was a favorite avenue of entry of mine to kick this door open with a sailing Matrix-esqe karate blow. No wonder, then, that the damned thing has been hanging by one rotted screw for the last couple of months. Now, there's this grey steel door there. If I tried to kick that open, my leg would wind up getting jammed into my brain.
It's funny. You cannot comprehend how different the house is now from that first day I saw it in 1978. The outside and back yard have been re-done. The inside...gad zooks...the inside is a wee bit altered. When we got there, the owners had covered the whole house with this ghastly baby-poop-green shag carpet. We pulled up the carpet to find these gorgeous hardwood floors. Go figure. There were eleven layers of wallpaper on the walls, and nine layers of vinyl/asbestos tiles on the kitchen floor that had to be taken up with a chainsaw by guys in poison-precaution space suits. The kitchen itself was a late-1960s horror of dark brown wood and matching baby-poop-green countertops.
The fellow who lived there before us fancied himself a house renovator, and in his adventures with remodeling took down a bearing wall somewhere along the line. The stairs to the second floor, and the stairs to the basement, were slouching towards Bethlehem before we got them buttressed. At one point there had been a wood-burning stove in the kitchen with a stovepipe running up through the roof. The law says you have to take that stovepipe out when you take the stove out, but he didn't feel like it. He walled the pipe up, and put a Cool-Whip container at the bottom of the pipe to catch any errant rainwater that might come dribbling down. The workers who found this when they broke through that wall were, simply, in awe.
The best - the absolute, bull-moose, gold-medal-winning best - was the anchor. We were renovating the sun room (described below) and pulling up this godawful carpeting there. Under the carpet was this rubber red and black tiling. I kept pulling the rug up, and the tiling went on and on. In the center of the floor was a gaint circle of rubber tile. In the center of this circle was a giant rubber anchor made of the tile. To this day, I have no explanation for this phenomenon. There is a picture out there of this, with a little hand-written sign I wrote that has an arrow pointing to the floor and reading, "Yes. It's an anchor."
See, the new owners had some workers come in to do a little tinkering. They put in the bannister and the door. Two little things, but it isn't my house anymore. I was there for the other changes. Someone else was there for these.
I have a lot of personal history wrapped up in the walls of that place. I celebrated graduating from high school, and then college, in that place. I threw a couple of berzerk parties in that place. I courted the elusive highschoolis femalis in that place, with varying degrees of success. I got my driver's licence while living in that place, and recuperated from several car accidents (as a passenger, mind you) in that place. I dreamed a lot of dreams in that place, and a couple of them even came true.
But I have this secret, see. A mark of permanent ownership, if you will.
When my mom bought the place, it had an apartment attached to it. The apartment had been segmented off years ago for rental to B.C. grad students. In the summer before my senior year of college, and this would be 1994, my mother decided to break through the walls and reclaim the apartment as part of the house. We got a master bedroom, an office, another bathroom, a closet with a door to nowhere, a sun room and a kitchen out of the deal.
Our living room used to have two bookcases in the walls on either side of the fireplace. These became the doors to the sun room. Before the opening was all fixed up, I prepared a shoebox. In that shoebox I put the front page of the Boston Globe for that day, a pack of cigarettes and a lighter, a guitar pick, a mix tape I made, several other sundry items, and a note I wrote to whomever finds the thing. It was walled up when the construction was completed, and is there now, and will be there probably until someone decides to make that part of the house an apartment again.
Ten years and counting. I like the idea that it's there. Moving Day is this Wednesday, the 17th, also known as St. Patrick's Day. In Boston, March 17th is also called Evacuation Day, to commemorate the day in 1776 when British troops left the city forever.
Somehow, that seems appropriate.
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