Elegy to one of my childhood homes

On certain days I can still recall the smell of faint mildew on a linoleum-lined sun room in my grandfather’s house.

He pulled himself out of the Pittsburgh ghetto where he was born, went to Carnegie tech, now called Carnegie Mellon University, became an draftsman at US Steel and rose to prominence there. When my mom was born they left for the suburbs and he shed his yinzer accent so as not to appear stupid.

Then somewhere in the 60’s, he designed his own house. Modest, but well-appointed. The front yard was a rock garden with shrubs because he hated mowing lawns. It has since been “normalized,” as you can see from the photo above.

You walked up a set up steps to a small porch. Through the front door to your left was the living room. On the right, the den and the big picture window where as a kid during sleepovers I’d watch the airplanes soar and wish I were going somewhere, too.

My grandfather left my grandmother in the 70’s after one-too-many affairs. He packed up and moved to another part of town, leaving her to pick up the pieces in the house by herself. She considered suicide, but died instead by cancer ten years later. Briefly in-between, my parents had money troubles and lost their house, and so grandma’s house became where I lived for a few years. With so many bedrooms now filled, the air became pleasant.

His office was my room. Cork on the walls. I had a small black and white TV where I’d watch hockey. The nearest bathroom had a stand up shower with glass doors. I loved the back yard best, with its three tiered levels and the fountain and pond that once held koi.

We were the poorest people in a blue collar neighborhood but I didn’t know it, was shielded from the dire straits as my dad managed to go from nearly declaring bankruptcy to clawing himself out of debt inch-by-inch.

So many memories haunt that house like ghosts. Fights over money. My mom almost left once. Can picture her throwing random clothes into a suitcase, crying "I cant take this any more," and my brother and I crying right back, begging her to stay. In retrospect, we should have let her go, instead of insisting she stay in a broken marriage for decades. But how could we know what was broken at that age, let alone how to fix it?

Then later, her standing in the doorway, yelling at her father when he came once to see his grandkids, unannounced. It was the last time they saw each other until when he was on his death bed.

My grandmother was fond of windmill cookies and ate depression-era dinners out of habit. Like small amounts of overly cooked ground beef and macaroni with no tomato sauce. I snuck sips of her cold coffee with too much cream and sugar while we sat on the sofa watching game shows.

She died at seventy-six, before I hit my teen years. We’d moved out by then, to a better neighborhood with a better school, and so she sold the house and moved to a small apartment overlooking a grave yard and everything went downhill quite quickly after that.

The last place my mom lived was also an apartment adjacent to a graveyard and I know that thought must have passed her mind when she moved there, that she was one step closer to the end. She didn’t have to say it for me to know it. It was her second stint with cancer and the pain grew worse every day.

The memories appear today, although usually they are stored in a China closet in some grey faded corner of a different room.  Once I was outside on the steps when a cat came out of nowhere and bounded into my lap. My dad opened the door and the cat took it upon himself to walk right in as if he belonged there. For all I know, he did. Other connections are much more tenuous. I wished we would have kept it but we didnt have pets growing up, probably because we didn't have extra money for the upkeep.

In the living room I'd study and read a lot of Daniel Pinkwater because his stories were weird and I felt weird. Lizard Music is still one of the strangest books I've ever encountered.

Though each childhood memory is different, the ones related to that house are all accompanied buy the smell of mildew and linoleum, and that plastic floral-patterned seat cushion on the chaise lounge that was too hot to lay on in summer unless you put a towel down first. 1970’s patio furniture at its best.

Part of me became a writer as a way to communicate with the dead, as much as to tell stories to the living.