East vs. West

Some of my best memories come from my childhood home back East.  Knowing exactly where on this planet my pet parakeet is buried in a Maxwell House can provides me comfort in the wee hours when I have trouble sleeping.  I remember every hornet’s nest, every four leaf clover, every pile of leaves and could walk every inch of that house and acreage backwards, with my eyes closed.  There was a calm security I took for granted, which came from knowing that this was our place in the universe (even as it was inevitably shrinking).

I know a great many people who never had this experience.  Take my husband, for instance.  His childhood addresses read like a progress report on upward mobility.  He grew up on a smattering of Los Angeles properties that his parents acquired, leveled and rebuilt to be newer, bigger, better.  Several times he was wrested from the bedroom he’d come to know, and carted across The Valley to settle into the next dream home before trading up again in a few years.  It almost has the element of military brat, only with a maid and without the military.

If I was my husband back then, I would have sewn my addresses into my pants, because the thought of going “home” to so many different places is confusing.  I’m betting this is the reason why he has such a highly developed sense of direction.  Not me.  I still find myself driving toward my old apartment occasionally.  Just imagine if I were a kid without my current level of crystal-clear acuity!  I’m sure that I’d have been weary from an especially trying day in second grade, walked into somebody else’s kitchen and been halfway through a sandwich before I thought to ask anyone what the hell they’ve done with the fishbowl.  And the wallpaper.  And my mother.

I am normally not this overly sentimental, but I simply cannot help being enamored by the past lately.  Perhaps it has to do with having a little one on the way and the accompanying urge to provide a stable, cozy environment.  Perhaps it is the fact that my family is so far away, and the “family” I married into is too committed to tomfoolery to provide an adequate base of security or affection.  Or perhaps it has to do with the realization that I love my husband more each day and am dreamily envisioning the perfection of our unfolding life.  I’d like to take all those tasty bits of the past, touch up their corners and give them to what’s to come.

See, I can be nice.

 

Haley’s Comet

Being with my family is like a course in opposites.  It causes one to glance from face to face, wondering exactly how many milkmen managed to frequent our neighborhood in the late 1970s.  Nobody looks like anybody else even remotely, including my twin sister and myself.  My twin is the beautiful petite actress, and I am her Amazonian counterpart. My older sister and I CERTAINLY bear no resemblance to each other; she most resembles a tiny German widow from the Hinterland.  Who knows how our genes decided to be distributed?  For longer than I can possibly recall, I have wondered aloud, Whose nose IS this, anyway?  For years I was convinced I was the wayward spawn of exotic royalty, and thereby entitled to a kingdom all my own, until I saw a picture of my grandfather and suddenly realized that my knees were, indeed, related to my family by blood.  Dammit.

There were surrogate additions to our oddly shaped family.  Chief among them were Eddie and Myrtle, the elderly couple who lived on the property next to ours.  They had no children and no substantial family left, so we all seemed to adopt each other.  My father mowed their lawn, we had their house keys and they had ours, my sisters and I raided their apple trees and they came over for dinners and to play cards with my parents – always keeping tabs on our schoolwork and athletics.  It made perfect sense when they became our god-parents, but they were actually far more like Grandparents to us than any other living people. 

Eddie and Myrtle Haley had always been old in my book.  When my sisters and I were born, I believe they were already well into their late sixties and naturally, they just kept getting older.  It was unusual that they never had children, but this was also part of their charm.  Myrtle especially, even at an advanced age, maintained an innocent girlishness that had never been tempered by the trials of motherhood.  Her heart was consistently melty and soft.  Eddie was a long, lanky old man with earlobes that reached down to his knees.  His spirit was likewise never hardened by the cold slap of fatherhood – he did feign impatience with our antics occasionally, but he always allowed us to detect the hint of a smile beneath his disdain.  The man was chronically amused. 

Eddie was a relic from the Depression era.  His was an entirely different way of looking at the world, a completely different way of being.  He worked for the railroad from the time he was 15 years old until the day he retired.  His parents came to the country amid a sweep of Irish immigrants, who apparently were not favored by the groups of Italians who had also just spoken their names at Ellis Island.  His friends were kids just like him: impoverished, playing baseball, fist-fighting the Guineas, eating rationed butter.

When I was a kid we would while away the summer hours sipping cool drinks in Eddie and Myrtle’s sunroom.  The screens served as shelter from bees and allowed just enough breeze in to cool our sweat from just sitting.  Our legs would stick to the worn vinyl chairs, leaving hideous floral patterns for a few hours, but we didn’t care.  We were there for the stories.  Eddie’s stories would come on those hot Jersey afternoons, when I wish I had been smart enough to get my tape recorder.  I always knew when he was going to open his mouth.  It was usually after we had finished a few games of checkers, or had spent an hour in the spare room listening to his ancient CB radio for the sleepy crimes about town.  Myrtle would give us each a glass of lemonade and a magazine to fan ourselves with as we gazed out onto the acreage, silent for a while. 

And then it would come like a dream; a smell, or a thought, or a sound would trigger his voice and he would begin speaking aloud from the middle of a memory, as if it he’d gone nowhere or done nothing else since it happened.  Railroad stories, boyhood stories, neighborhood stories or, if he was feeling slighty acidic that day, stories about the Great Depression.

Myrtle was often his faithful accomplice.  He told me about their courtship and how they married when she was 18 years of age and he was 21.  My sister has an old photograph of a very young-looking Myrtle hanging above her bed, and it’s clear why Eddie was relentlessly in love.  They remained in love for longer than a lot of people are alive these days, and when Eddie finally kicked the bucket at age 93, Myrtle was holding his hand.

There are few things as difficult as losing a husband, and I saw that experience through Myrtle.  The entire year that Eddie was gone was marked by her decline.  Paranoia and what I can only imagine to be a vast loneliness set into her life with the dustballs.  The day before her 90th birthday, she called me in California to say thank you for the little pink rose quartz heart I mailed to her.  I listened to her message over and over and considered her sweetness – she ended her call by saying, “I love you, Myrtle…”, as if she was signing off a letter.

And she was – my mother found her body three days later, after noticing a couple days’ worth of newspapers piling up on the porch.  In a great show of compassion from the forces that be, Myrtle passed away in her sleep and was discovered laying on her side, on what remained “her” side of the bed, a tiny rose quartz heart on the table beside.

I am sorry to say that as I grew older into my teens, I cut short my visits and stupidly grew tired of Myrtle’s kindness and Eddie’s stories.  I wanted a cigarette and independence, not morals and history.  It’s been a long time since I’ve dreamed of them, but I revisited their memory when my husband and I were back in New Jersey for a visit.  Somebody else owns their house now, but each time I return, I am still tempted to walk in the back door and open the drawer where they kept the saltines. 

Once my parents soon retire to warmer climes and greener pastures, packing up house, home and history in search of a different coastline, the Haleys will be one of the harder things to leave behind.  I’ve taken with me the sideways memory of Haley’s Comet from when I was young and my father woke me up at 3am to watch what we then joked was Eddie and Myrtle’s home planet appear on the horizon line.  There are other pieces of them that of course I’ve brought with me, but the rest is a streak of light that blazed, and then faded, against a dark sky.  You only see a show like that once a lifetime.

Back to the Burbs

There seems to be an unwritten law that states the older I get, the smaller my parents become.  The same applies to the house I grew up in, as well as all of the furniture inside.  I go back for Christmas and pick up a kitchen chair, twirl it between my fingers, and squint as I wonder aloud, “I sat in this?”

The Jersey suburb where I grew up is also shrinking with the latest wave of urbanization.  What once was open space is now home to sprawling condominium developments that sport clever names like Windemere Court and Packed Full Acres.  It’s upsetting to me that they are there, but what upsets me more is that somebody from our formerly little town actually sold their property to developers. 

Back home, Nature itself seems to be shrinking.  My first summer job was at Bob’s Fruit Stand, peddling apples, white peaches and sweet corn that were picked fresh across the street at, you guessed it, Bob’s Farm.  People drove by at sane speed on what was then a one-lane road, and occasionally stopped to buy Bob’s produce.  I passed the time punching the big circular numbers on the ancient cash register and picking raw corn out of my teeth with the ends of green beans.  From my rickety stool I could see across the road at the old pickup truck stuttering down the drive from Bob’s Farm, full with bounty, so I’d know when to throw open the side garage door to help unload a few dozen bushels of this or that.

But all that’s gone now, the farm and its yawning old house replaced by condos, clubhouses and community pools.  The farm stand itself held on for as long as it could.  Last time I was there, its skeleton was still standing, but the next time we drive by, I’ll only sense its ghost.

Anyway, we’ll make the most of it.  My husband and I go back this week for a visit, and he’s never been to my hometown.   So I’m making this Suburbs Week here at bewilderedhousewife, so that my husband can read it and be at least a little bit prepared for what he’s about to experience.

Muahahahahaha….

Family Tree

“Look at this!” they cried, the eight of them huddled around an old scrapbook whose leather covers were cracked and binding weary.  “Was that really grandmother?  Gosh, was she ever beautiful!  Look Sophie, you’ve got her cheekbones.  And Henry, I’ll be darned if you don’t have her eyes.  Did she really manage to collect 182 rubber duckies in her life?  Fascinating!”

Or at least that’s how I’d like it to go.  I’ve begun writing down my history, and my family’s history, in the hopes that one day my children will be interested.  I’d hate for it to be one of those memoirs that lands in a box in some unknown distant descendent’s attic.  Inevitably, Uncle Herbert’s picture escapes the fold and lands forlorn in a pile of dust.  Some months later, a person comes along to search for the extra vacuum bags and discovers the picture just sitting there.  Not knowing who the hell it was, she considers for a second before throwing the old photograph aside to deal with “sometime” – and Uncle Herb spends the rest of eternity alone.

No, not me!  I will make sure everything is tagged, checked, marked and sealed for the throngs of progeny that will come tumbling from my loins.  I’ll have recorded anecdotes and memories which will make it clear to little Benjamin why he’s a genius.  The mystery behind little Helena’s bodhisattva nature will finally be revealed, and she will clutch the book to her chest and quietly whisper thank you. 

I will instill a sense of duty and a hunger for knowledge, damn it.  I only hope I’m interesting by then.  And discerning.  Certainly there are things that any one of us would not want to know about our parents, or ever want to even think about – like how we were conceived.  Ew.  In writing our memoirs, my husband and I likewise will have to remind ourselves to leave out all of our gory parts, but I will include all the other important bits that I and my living family can possibly recall.  Such as, Great Grandmother Bebe died along with Asgar in a horse-and-buggy accident, but they said to tell you “hello”.  Unfortunately, I waited a bit too long to start asking questions of my own parents, which has left great holes in the story.  Just when you have gathered your thoughts, people go and die when you don’t expect them to, and they might be the only person who could have connected a few vital dots.  If we cannot draw in lines that we don’t know are missing, whole generations go silent.

My husband prefers to do this online, through Ancestry.com.  We watched a commercial last night and he promptly made for his office to begin our own virtual family tree.  I stood over his shoulder and watched as he created two little squares next to each other, one for each of us.  He remembered my birthday by heart, and wrote it out like he meant it.  It was one of those moments where gravity hit and all of life’s armor fell to the floor.  I looked at my husband and felt a surge of utter love, and I leaned forward and held him close, peppering his soft brown hair with kisses… this is my dear… my family… my future… my other square floating atop a blank page, waiting to be written.