The house I grew up in sat 2nd from the corner on the widest street in the neighborhood.
It was built around the turn of the century, a white clapboard affair with what seemed at the time to be two majestic cedar trees in the front (the older I got, the weedier these trees began to look) and it had an enormous L-shaped porch made of cracked cement and a rail of loosened brick that at age five seemed made for climbing on.
As an adult, thinking of that house now brings to mind Garrison Keillor's description of Lake Wobegon's store fronts; trying to be everything two stories can be and a little bit more.
My memory is that we moved in at the beginning of winter, though after thirty five years, that may be something my mind created or pieced together from other events, but at any rate, the day we moved in, I remember feeling like we'd bought a mansion. A run-down, dirty mansion with buckled linoleum and cracked plaster, but a mansion nonetheless. The place my family had moved from was the upper floor of a farmhouse, one of those apartments that wasn't really built to be an apartment, and moving to our own two-story house in the city seemed miraculous.
Many things about that time, though, seemed miraculous. Like how I learned a couple of years after we moved in that our neighborhood actually sat on what used to be a landfill for the city of Grand Rapids. Of course, this would have been a period in history -- a hundred years, or so, earlier -- when 'landfill' would have actually been meant 'dump.' But rather than feeling uneasy or embarrassed, I was instead awed by it; you could actually go into our tiny back yard, dig down into the soil and find broken bottles and rusty license plates.
Incredible.
That was hardly the limit of my amazement with the place, though. I found out at one point our house actually hadn't been built on our property, it had been moved from about four blocks down the street. My dad even took us to the spot it had been moved from, where another two-story house stood. I always wondered about this; in my mind I imagined somebody actually thinking about buying our house sixty or seventy years ago, and saying something like, "mm, I'll take it but only if you move it...over there. Right to that spot. Yes."
And it was a great neighborhood for a boy to grow up in. So many truly remarkable things happened while we lived there that when I think of all the things my own children haven't seen, I feel like they're being cheated a little.
And I got to see these things with my own eyes.
Like the time a one-armed man, drunk or high, chased his girlfriend down the street trying to beat her up. As an adult, I'm mortified to think I couldn't take my eyes off this sight; but again, through the eyes of an eight year old, I was left speechless.
Or the time the apartment building around the corner and directly across the street caught fire. It was a two story monstrosity of a building that held about six apartments, I think, and when the fire really took hold, you couldn't stand in our front yard for more than a few seconds -- so much heat radiated from the front of it that it burned your skin and you had to move farther down the block. I remember feeling sad for the people who were losing all their stuff in that fire, but again, I couldn't take my eyes off it: flames twenty feet high.
Our neighborhood was so typical of big city life at the time, I think. As kids, we knew virtually every house by memory within about a four block radius, and you knew who the nice people were and who the grumpy ones were as well.
We drove back through that area a few years ago, including the area a few blocks south where I had my paper route and I realized how much everything had truly changed.
And yet, in a way, had not changed at all, really.
The buildings, for the most part, all looked the same. But I thought about how much society had changed.
Or maybe just I had changed.
The houses I and my neighborhood friends all grew up in now seem inadequate in so many ways. Hand-me-down houses. There's an inefficiency factor, for one thing. Houses back then weren't insulated so well, and the windows (if they opened at all) were all drafty. And they all had old furnaces, old appliances, old everything, really.
And it made me realize how our neighborhood had become the 'new' bad part of town, in a way. It hadn't turned in to a ghetto, full of pimps and drug users and gangs. But you could clearly see that was where it was headed.
Though I'd feel comfortable living there by myself, I wouldn't raise my children there.
And the good and bad of all of that is this, I think; that my parents, who had bought that house for around $12000 back in the early seventies had purchased it as an investment toward obtaining bigger things, living in better places. For us it was a starter home, and little more. That was the good. But how many of those same families still live there? How many parents passed those house on to their own kids, without ever considering that maybe it was time to move on?
It's a tricky thing, really, because for a place to not become run down, a group of people have to create a neighborhood like the one I had growing up. But more and more, our society is asking for bigger and better things. To live in a some of the houses my friends and I lived in almost wouldn't seem like a middle class existence any more; it's encouraging and frightening at the same time as it says something about my own values and the materialism of the culture we're creating.
We were fortunate to have what we did. I grew close friendships there with several kids, and I attended a local school with great teachers (one of whom still knows me by name, even after thirty plus years!) But my parents never wanted to stay in the city, and by the time I was sixteen we moved about ten miles out of the city to a ten acre piece of property where my parents built the house they still live in now.
Seeing my neighborhood change was hard; thinking about who might be living there now is even harder. And thinking about how high I've set the bar for my own kids -- what I'm teaching them is acceptable, and what they are growing to 'need' -- is the most difficult of all.
It was built around the turn of the century, a white clapboard affair with what seemed at the time to be two majestic cedar trees in the front (the older I got, the weedier these trees began to look) and it had an enormous L-shaped porch made of cracked cement and a rail of loosened brick that at age five seemed made for climbing on.
As an adult, thinking of that house now brings to mind Garrison Keillor's description of Lake Wobegon's store fronts; trying to be everything two stories can be and a little bit more.
My memory is that we moved in at the beginning of winter, though after thirty five years, that may be something my mind created or pieced together from other events, but at any rate, the day we moved in, I remember feeling like we'd bought a mansion. A run-down, dirty mansion with buckled linoleum and cracked plaster, but a mansion nonetheless. The place my family had moved from was the upper floor of a farmhouse, one of those apartments that wasn't really built to be an apartment, and moving to our own two-story house in the city seemed miraculous.
Many things about that time, though, seemed miraculous. Like how I learned a couple of years after we moved in that our neighborhood actually sat on what used to be a landfill for the city of Grand Rapids. Of course, this would have been a period in history -- a hundred years, or so, earlier -- when 'landfill' would have actually been meant 'dump.' But rather than feeling uneasy or embarrassed, I was instead awed by it; you could actually go into our tiny back yard, dig down into the soil and find broken bottles and rusty license plates.
Incredible.
That was hardly the limit of my amazement with the place, though. I found out at one point our house actually hadn't been built on our property, it had been moved from about four blocks down the street. My dad even took us to the spot it had been moved from, where another two-story house stood. I always wondered about this; in my mind I imagined somebody actually thinking about buying our house sixty or seventy years ago, and saying something like, "mm, I'll take it but only if you move it...over there. Right to that spot. Yes."
And it was a great neighborhood for a boy to grow up in. So many truly remarkable things happened while we lived there that when I think of all the things my own children haven't seen, I feel like they're being cheated a little.
And I got to see these things with my own eyes.
Like the time a one-armed man, drunk or high, chased his girlfriend down the street trying to beat her up. As an adult, I'm mortified to think I couldn't take my eyes off this sight; but again, through the eyes of an eight year old, I was left speechless.
Or the time the apartment building around the corner and directly across the street caught fire. It was a two story monstrosity of a building that held about six apartments, I think, and when the fire really took hold, you couldn't stand in our front yard for more than a few seconds -- so much heat radiated from the front of it that it burned your skin and you had to move farther down the block. I remember feeling sad for the people who were losing all their stuff in that fire, but again, I couldn't take my eyes off it: flames twenty feet high.
Our neighborhood was so typical of big city life at the time, I think. As kids, we knew virtually every house by memory within about a four block radius, and you knew who the nice people were and who the grumpy ones were as well.
We drove back through that area a few years ago, including the area a few blocks south where I had my paper route and I realized how much everything had truly changed.
And yet, in a way, had not changed at all, really.
The buildings, for the most part, all looked the same. But I thought about how much society had changed.
Or maybe just I had changed.
The houses I and my neighborhood friends all grew up in now seem inadequate in so many ways. Hand-me-down houses. There's an inefficiency factor, for one thing. Houses back then weren't insulated so well, and the windows (if they opened at all) were all drafty. And they all had old furnaces, old appliances, old everything, really.
And it made me realize how our neighborhood had become the 'new' bad part of town, in a way. It hadn't turned in to a ghetto, full of pimps and drug users and gangs. But you could clearly see that was where it was headed.
Though I'd feel comfortable living there by myself, I wouldn't raise my children there.
And the good and bad of all of that is this, I think; that my parents, who had bought that house for around $12000 back in the early seventies had purchased it as an investment toward obtaining bigger things, living in better places. For us it was a starter home, and little more. That was the good. But how many of those same families still live there? How many parents passed those house on to their own kids, without ever considering that maybe it was time to move on?
It's a tricky thing, really, because for a place to not become run down, a group of people have to create a neighborhood like the one I had growing up. But more and more, our society is asking for bigger and better things. To live in a some of the houses my friends and I lived in almost wouldn't seem like a middle class existence any more; it's encouraging and frightening at the same time as it says something about my own values and the materialism of the culture we're creating.
We were fortunate to have what we did. I grew close friendships there with several kids, and I attended a local school with great teachers (one of whom still knows me by name, even after thirty plus years!) But my parents never wanted to stay in the city, and by the time I was sixteen we moved about ten miles out of the city to a ten acre piece of property where my parents built the house they still live in now.
Seeing my neighborhood change was hard; thinking about who might be living there now is even harder. And thinking about how high I've set the bar for my own kids -- what I'm teaching them is acceptable, and what they are growing to 'need' -- is the most difficult of all.
Dude:
ReplyDeleteI have no idea what your whole long story means. Truthfully I scanned. Blah, blah, blah. Here's what's most important about your post today:
YOU GOT A STRETCH ARMSTRONG FOR CHRISTMAS!
Boo and Ya