The Last Ride of Mustang Sally

I have to admit, I took an immediate dislike to Parker Tennessee the second I laid eyes him. No good reason, aside from his athletic build, heroic jawline, and soulful brown eyes. You know, because an outdoorsy REI catalogue model-type is just who you want hanging around when you look like Ducky from Pretty in Pink. Especially in the opening weeks of mix-and-match dorm life with a bunch of horny twenty-somethings coming and going through a summer adventure working in Yellowstone Park. I didn’t need any comparisons with the likes of Parker Tennessee to feel like a Fig Newton on a plate full of Christmas cookies, believe me.

Look at him, just sitting there with that wavy mane of chestnut locks, smoking out on the porch of our dilapidated little dorm like he owned the joint, just blasé as hell. How dare you, sir? I invented smoking on this porch, you smug sonuvabitch. And those cheekbones of yours are sharp enough to cut glass, which is a safety hazard! Ever think of that? No, you only think about yourself, Mr. Fancypants. This porch ain’t big enough for the both of us, pal. And I was here first.

Me and Runa New Mexico on the Lodgepole Dorm porch

All of this I thought as I sat there studiously not talking to him, nonchalantly ignoring him, all Zen and shit. Yup, just Zen as fuck as I watched the parade of lovely ladies giving him the side-eye or exchanging little smiles with him as they passed. He never said a word to any of them though, snootily preferring his stony silence instead. In fact, it was days before I heard his aloof ass say a word to anyone. As it turns out, that someone was me.

“Hey, b-b-bro,” he began. “C-c-can I bum a s-s-m-moke from you?”

At first, I thought he was making fun of me. He was tall, athletic, and good-looking. It wouldn’t have been the first time a member of the genetic elite had seen fit to mock a guy like me out of the blue. Although the stuttering routine seemed like an oddly specific way to ridicule someone you’ve never met. He had a baritone voice, rich and deep, with a courtly southern accent. If he was insulting me, I didn’t get it, so I decided to play it off.

“Sure.” I offered him my hardpack of Camel Wides. He started to take the only upturned smoke from the center of the pack. “Whoah, whoah. Not the Lucky, dude,” I said.

“Huh?” he asked, looking perplexed.

“The Lucky. You turn that one up when you first open the pack and then smoke it last so’s ya don’t get cancer?” I replied. Surprised that a fellow smoker didn’t know to take the precaution. “You never smoke another man’s Lucky.”

Obviously bemused, he smiled sheepishly and took a different smoke. Then said, “Sorry, n-n-ever heard of that. W-w-we d-d-d-on’t do that in T-t-ennesee.”

“Well shit, brother. What do you do about the cancer stick?”

“Uhhh, n-n-not s-s-smoke, I guess?” He had a bashfulness about him when he spoke, but a really nice, genuine smile. It was getting harder to hate him by the second.

“Well, sure, if you want to be all sensible about it. But since I’m not about to start doing that…”

“The L-l-lucky,” he said.

“The Lucky,” I agreed.

He lit us both from his zippo and leaned back against the rickety porch railing next to me. For the first time in the week we’d been sharing the Lodgepole Dorm porch, we smoked in affable silence for a minute. Funny how stony silence can become affable silence in the blink of an eye.

“So what else don’t you Tennesseans do?” I asked.

“C-cuss, chew, or g-g-go with girls that d-do,” he replied at the ready.

“Well that eliminates a lot of candidates,” I replied.

“It sure d-does. Wh-why do you think I’m h-h-here?” he asked.

I thought about that for a second. “To find a nice girl who chews tobacco and date the hell out of her, I guess.”

L-R: Sean Pennsylvania, Lawrence Oregon, Jesse Utah, Lang South Carolina, Kristin Illinois, and Eddie Arizona

Spending the summer working in Yellowstone Park drew folks together from all fifty states and a half-dozen foreign countries. We sang for our supper in return for room, board, and minimum wage, as we provided logistical support of the tourists who also came from around the world, performing all manner of services from vacation reservations, to housekeeping, maintenance, and cooking. As such, all of us wore employee name-tags with our first names and the state we hailed from, which seemed to confuse an alarming number of Touron (tourist + moron) who thought it was strange how many of us had the last name of states. The employees took the expected Touron inanity in stride and referred to each other as though the state were indeed our last name.

So Parker Tennessee called me Lawrence Oregon and proceeded to drag me about eating granola and hugging trees. In reply, I just whistled Dueling Banjos back at him, which every southerner just loves. If you’ve never been an insult battle with a proper southerner, I highly recommend it. They can lay down a pretty sick burn and you might not actually realize it's happened. In fact, maybe you even agree with them a little bit. A knife so sharp you don’t even feel it going in.

Over the course of the next couple of days, I’d meet Parker on the porch for a couple of smokes a day at various times. He was a cook over in the employee cafeteria, and was biding the days until we got our first paycheck because he’d run out of smokes a few days shy of the finish line. I was sitting on a carton I’d hoarded against just such an eventuality, so I had enough to dole out a few per day to him and a couple other poor souls in need, because I’m a helluva guy. He was on a break from Culinary School in Kentucky, just looking to kick up his heels for the summer before his senior year. Which was more of a plan than I had, just on the run from life in general.

As I spent more time with Parker Tennessee, I saw that each interaction with a new person cost him a little something. Because in those opening moments, when the other person didn’t know about his stutter, they had varying degrees of surprise and/or confusion go across their face as they decided how to react. Most people were cool, and just rolled with it. But one or two snickered, several more got uncomfortable and found an immediate excuse to exit the conversation, and still others openly pitied him. Even the ones who were decent human beings about it still had a moment of realization that went across their face in some form or another.

Parker was highly attuned to it, and mostly stayed in the background when he could. I didn’t blame him. If even I could see the whole script play across their faces in that moment, how much more for him who had been dealing with it his whole life? With every new person, every time? That’s rough. He’d jump in a kick a hacky-sack or shoot some hoops if he knew everyone in the crew, and he was well liked by the small-ish circle of those of us he hung with. But he rarely ever talked to girls, which made him seem like a snob because he was ostensibly a talented athlete and a perfect specimen. When I thought of my own troubles breaking the ice with the opposite sex—shyness, nerdiness, goof-ball looks—I suddenly felt glad that those were my only handicaps. I’d never seen a girl outright reject Parker, but when we were hanging out in the employee bar I’d seen a couple of them excuse themselves to go to the bathroom and not “remember” to come back. I guess all of us are fighting our own battle in one way or another.

After a few weeks, the players had all sifted into place for our summer adventure, and we’d sort of picked our crew that we hiked, camped, and drank with. We’d spend a few nights a week in the smokey employee bar, shooting pool and hooking up. The head bartender, Bob Minnesota, was always looking for ways to keep the natives happy, because employee turnover in an environment like that was a huge problem. Although Bob Minnesota was voted the guy least likely to be named Bob, he had the best ponytail I’d ever seen and he excelled at drumming up business. Trivia games, drink specials, dart tournaments, just about anything you could think of to keep a flighty group of drunks, neo-hippies, and perpetual party people from moving on down the road before their employment contracts were up. I guess it was inevitable that he’d dream up an open mic night at some point. Hell, we’d had a magician come through to do card tricks and pull a bra out of my shirt for me. How much worse could an open mic night be?

As it turns out, Parker Tennessee was going to test that theory for us.

I formed a little power trio with Dave Michigan and Jesse Utah to perform a couple of Pearl Jam songs, which were met with a rousing response. Full disclosure, I doubt a sober crowd would have received us as charitably, but I take my wins wherever I can find them. You’ve heard worse, I promise. After us, a couple of less-than-stellar Grateful Dead covers were met with tepid reactions, at which point I saw Parker get up from his stool at the bar and walk over to the little stage. I thought he was going to help one of the poor Grateful Dead guys with their instruments or equipment, but he didn’t. Instead, he leaned in like he was whispering conspiratorially with Tre Florida, the poor bastard who’d just finished murdering Fire on the Mountain. Tre looked at Parker dubiously, then shrugged and handed Parker his guitar.

Parker took the guitar, slung the strap over his shoulder, perched on a barstool, and slid up to the mic. You could feel the silence sweep across the room in a palpable wave as, one by one, every conversation came to an abrupt end when people realized what was about to happen. Within five seconds, we went from a chattering mass of drunkards to a uniformly silent congregation, solemnly considering the disastrous implications of what we were witnessing. You could have heard a pin drop as Parker Tennessee strummed the borrowed guitar, obviously stalling as he nervously tuned the strings. There wasn’t one person in that room that wanted to see him to drive off the cliff of humiliation he was careening toward, but not one of us could look away either.

When he could tinker no more, Parker cleared his throat and started to say something into the mic. A couple of stuttered plosives came out and then he thought better of it, sat back, and just started strumming. He played with a bit of confidence, and the steel-stringed guitar resonated warmly in the dim little pub. The chords were simple, a standard one-four-five progression, but there could be no doubt that he was in his element as he dropped into the groove. Whatever initial jitters he’d had fell away as he closed his eyes, leaned into the mic, and started to sing.

My God, you’ve never heard anything like the wall of sound that came out of that boy’s mouth.

“MUSTANG SALLY!” he belted, his powerhouse voice a visceral shock, like getting gut punched. “THINK YOU BETTER SLOW YOUR MUSTANG DOWN!” His baritone was as raw as a stray dog howling, so powerful and so completely unexpected, it shook the room.

After a moment of stunned disbelief—the whole room rocked back in their seats like they’d been hit by an earthquake, mouths agog at this breathtaking display of emotion and talent—a spontaneous burst of praise and enthusiasm enveloped the entire pub, briefly drowning Parker out. It felt like a mix of unparalleled relief at seeing him succeed in defiance of all expectation, and genuine astonishment at this huge talent confronting us. He was like a beast out of Greek mythology, equal parts Joe Cocker and roaring lion.

When he finished, there was a moment of dumbfounded silence. It only lasted for a beat, then we erupted into cheers, whistles, and cat-calls for the Tennessee Kid. A dozen people “rushed” the stage—by which I mean they took ten steps or less—to clap Parker on the back, smother him in high-fives, and buy him enough beers to kill two girls. It was like we’d all just found out that our hometown boy, li’l ol’ Clark Kent, was actually Superman. 

If Parker Tennessee was on the fringes before, he wasn’t anymore. After that, he got invited to join in everyone’s Reindeer Games. Girls that had been on the fence were suddenly lighting his smokes. And the open mic became a weekly event where Parker was King. I would certainly never follow him on those nights, and of course, I had no choice but to go back to hating him, just a little. You know, because of what a helluva guy I am. I heard a couple people ask over the next few days if Parker was faking a speech impediment for sympathy, because how could he have such a profound issue in one moment, and then literally transform into a rock star in the next? 

But I’ve long known the truth about Music. It’s not a human invention, like guitars and pianos. It’s a discovery, like fire. It exists as an intrinsic pillar of nature, irrespective of human existence. As such, it comes to us through osmosis, through inspiration, by way of magic and revelation. It has the transcendent power to circumvent logic, rationality—and every other reason-why-not—entirely as we channel it through ourselves and into the world. Nothing can stop it. Stutters, Alzheimer’s, traumatic brain injury, all be damned.

I’ve heard Mustang Sally a million times since that summer of ’95. I think of Parker every single time. Some people think it’s a Wilson Picket song, others swear that The Commitments made it their own. But they’re wrong. I saw Parker Tennessee take old Sally out for a spin in that Mustang and she never came back again.

It's All in the Wrist

I once had the pleasure of being on hand for a young woman’s very first day of work, at her very first job, ever. Although I say young woman, she was actually a couple of years older than me at the time (probably still is to this day), as it was 1992 and I was just 21 and she was 25. She was a single mom raising three kids, and had never held a job before, relying on her family and social programs up to that point. Admirably, she’d decided that she wanted to make some changes and do what she could to improve her situation and gain some independence. Her mom worked at Messenger House, the Alzheimer’s care facility where I was employed, and put in a good word for her. Thus, she found herself landing her very first job as a… janitor. Seeing as it’s been 27 years, I can’t say I actually remember her name, the reasons for which will become clear shortly. Let’s just call her Sally.

By that point, I’d been in exile at Messenger House for almost  a year, scrubbing toilets, waxing floors, and scraping dried tapioca pudding off of every possible surface. As such, I was one of the longest-running housekeepers in the joint, because it turns out that watching people lose their minds as they die in slow motion is actually kind of a bummer, resulting in high turnover, especially in relatively unskilled positions. It was like a factory that specialized in tragedies. But since, as an ex-pat Californian, no one else in the state of Washington would hire me, I was locked into my groove there and Judy, the acerbic, chain-smoking battleaxe that ran the Housekeeping department, knew it. 

I worked exclusively in the locked wards, which was where the residents with the most advanced forms of dementia were housed to prevent their escape. The locked wards were the source of the lion’s share of employee turnover, and I worked on Ward 3, which was the worst of the worst in terms of the mental health of the residents. So Judy sent all the newbies to me to train, because I was the Crazy-Whisperer, and she'd noticed that when I broke them in, I had a way of putting a spin on the horror-show that somehow increased employee retention by a few months. 

It was a grim job, no doubt about it, and more than a little horrifying on an existential level. So much so that after a dozen years of clean living in the LA area, it only took 2 months up on Ward 3 for me to pick up what would turn out to be a fairly serious drug habit. On the plus side, being permanently stoned, all day everyday, meant that nothing going on in the Tragedy Factory really fazed me much. Between the perpetual haze of my altered state and my finely-calibrated sense of gallows humor, I pretty much took everything in stride. So no matter what fresh Hell a day put in front of me—whether in the form of bodily fluids or the relentless tide of human insanity—I was imperturbable. But don't get me wrong, kids. Drugs are bad, mm'kay? You shouldn't do drugs. I mean, you know, unless you really, really need them.

Sally, however, being a normal, presumably sober human, did not enjoy the aplomb and equanimity induced by the assiduously concocted mix of THC and mordant cynicism that protected me, and was thus in for an awakening. She had a slight frame, a no-nonsense affect, and her blonde hair was lying damp on her shoulders. No time to dry it, obviously. Rookie mistake showering before work at that job, though. There’s a lot to wash off at the end of a day in a place like that, believe me. But who wouldn’t want to show up at a new job putting their best foot forward?

So there she was, scrubbed and polished, ready to embrace this next step as a career woman. Having never held a job outside the home before—never flipped a burger, never stocked a shelf, never been accosted by a customer—Sally probably would’ve been a little daunted no matter where she landed. But instead of starting off on a bunny hill, like maybe at a convenience store cash register, she’d come to Messenger House and was staring down the precipice of a black diamond run, and she didn’t even know it. My God, the humanity!  

Our shift began at 6:00a, and the place was on the back end of nowhere that was somehow 40 minutes from anywhere you started. So on the first day, of her first job ever, she had to be out the door at 5:15a, at the latest. Maybe that’s why she seemed so exhausted right off the bat. Then again, since she was outgunned at home three-to-one, maybe not. By 6:05a, introductions had been made, Judy had admonished me to take good care of Sally, and we got all dolled up in the polyester smocks they made us wear to annihilate any vestige of dignity that might have accidentally regenerated in us overnight.

Walking toward the elevator, I tried to make small-talk with Sally, and met with only a little success. Then again, I’d long since gone nose-blind to the aggressive deodorizers used in everything from the laundry detergent to the carpet cleaners and furniture polish to cover over the sickly-sweet undercurrent of urine that permeated the place. I could only tell that it wasn’t really working when I saw the look cross a noob’s face when they got their first snoot-full and reality began to dawn. Awww… sweetie. That’s adorable. So we hopped onto an elevator that required a key to operate, and headed up to my personal fiefdom, Ward 3. Third floor: uncontrollable swearing, maniacal laughter, and adult incontinence at your service.

At Messenger House, the rabbit hole goes straight up.

Since the residents couldn’t be relied on to refrain from drinking the Lysol while your back was turned, we were in a constant battle to either stay ahead of them, or come in behind after they’d left an area. So before anyone was up for the morning, we headed into the communal restrooms to give them the first of three daily cleanings. First day of her first job ever, and Sally’s very first duty is to clean a public restroom? Obviously, that is not great. But we began with the Women’s room, because I wanted to start her off easy, as much as that’s possible in that world. Since men are absolute savages even at the best of times, you can imagine what a public men’s room in a place like that would be like. Actually, you really can’t, but whatever. Playing the odds, the women’s room usually presented the fewest unpleasant surprises after any given night shift.

Sadly, not so this fine morning.

The door swings in and there, smack dab in the middle of the room, was an 80 year-old, hatchet-faced Sicilian lady named Dolores. She was built like a fireplug, and had the temper of a wet tomcat, she smoked like chimney, and her voice sounded like a buzzsaw that spent its downtime marinating in Southern Comfort. On her more lucid days, Dolores had a great sense of humor and could weave tales about life in the Old Country that made you feel like you were in the Godfather. The rest of the time, she was cantankerous as fuck and known to swing for the fences on the unpredictable occasions when she came for you. She mostly acted like the whole of Ward 3 was an old school comedy roast, and the other residents and staff were the guests of honor. Over the year that I’d been there, I’d learned to do pitch-perfect impression of her, which she loved. Except when she didn’t. She would swear constantly, throw things at you, and then laugh like the Devil just told a good one. For all of those reasons, she was one of my favorite residents.

This fine morning however, Dolores had her Hawaiian-print mumu hiked up around her thighs and was squatting to defecate a lake of diarrhea right out in the middle of the floor. She looked over at us and, in that tender way she had about her, started shrieking at us to get the hell out. Like I would with a charging grizzly, I backed away slowly, not making eye-contact, and prepared to play dead at a moment’s notice. Although I’d herded Sally out the door along with me, she hadn’t know not to look directly at the horror. It ain’t for the faint of heart, and just like you don’t look right at the sun, you don’t look right at surreal carnival of everyday indignities that make up your 9-to-5 life here. Like Perseus dealing with Medusa by reflection, you get a sense of it, and then look away. Poor noob never had a chance. Well... it’s a black world, what are you gonna do?

Once we’d alerted the CNAs on the floor to the situation, they came and collected Dolores and wrangled her, kicking and biting, into a shower and some clean clothes before turning Sally and me loose on the environmental cleanup of Lake Biohazard. I’ll spare you the more visceral details of the job, but suffice it to say I poured a liberal amount of sterilizing agent all the way around the pool of vileness to contain its spread, then handed poor Sally the mop and said, “It’s all in the wrist.”

For a few seconds there, I actually thought she was gonna do it. She trudged over to the event horizon like she was climbing the steps to her appointment with the gallows, and stared at it for long moment. Then she executed a crisp about-face on her heel and handed the mop back to me.

“Nope. I’m out.”

Sally walked straight onto the elevator right behind the CNA who was taking Dolores’s soiled clothing down to the industrial laundry, and I never saw her again. Can’t say I blamed her. Hell, it was actually kind of a baller move, and I grudgingly admired her for it. Her illustrious career at Messenger House lasted a grand total of 15 minutes, which I imagine must hold the record to this day for shortest ever. Mine, on the other hand, went on for another year and half until the stink of California blew off of my résumé and I finally earned the right to be a dishwasher at a local Tex-Mex restaurant.

But before that fine day arrived, I still had a job to do in the wake of Sally’s exodus. So I went out to the maintenance shed to “gather some supplies,” and smoked a blunt that would have embarrassed Bob Marley. Then I waded straight into Lake Biohazard and took care of business on Ward 3.

Like I said, it’s all in the wrist.

Legends, Lies, and Fairytales

Mark Twain once said that a lie is halfway around the world before the truth even has its boots on. Of course, he was only thinking of that obsolete nervous system, the telegraph, when he said it. If he could have foreseen the web of fiber optics and microwave transmissions encircling the globe, he’d have known that the lie would make it around the world so many times that it would have festered into fact long before the truth had even gotten up off its ass to head out the door.

By the time we’ve actually done the research and looked into the last lie to be churned out into the world, two more have been born. At least. And each of those spawn two more, and so on exponentially, so now fact-checking is basically a full-time job. Sadly, the agencies we rely on for that often have their own political agendas and can’t always be trusted. Intuitively, the invention of the internet seems like it would make it easier to discover the truth. Unfortunately, the web's Groupmind often makes the truth harder to find, because it sifts down into the morass of comforting narratives and palatable lies. Of course, this only amplifies the natural human tendency to draw conclusions based on whatever we’ve heard repeated enough times.

For example, as everyone knows, you eat 4 spiders a year in your sleep. Or is it 8? Neither. It’s actually zero. You eat zero spiders. Not only would they find the temperature and moisture in your mouth repellent on an instinctual level, but the whole stat was purposefully made up by a journalist named Lisa Holst for an article she wrote for PC Professional magazine in the mid-90s. She was attempting to illustrate how easily disinformation—even preposterous claims—could spread via the Internet (even as rudimentary as it was at the time) and other electronic means, so she purposefully fabricated an absurd statistic for her illustration. Unfortunately, she proved her point a little too effectively, such that there was no defense against it becoming a “fact” after enough years of ignorant repetition. She started off trying to show how easily lies become the truth and now her invention is more believable than the truth itself. Now the truth sounds wrong, because EVERYBODY KNOWS…

Here are some other things that everybody knows that are also totally wrong:

1.      Richard Gere never had that infamous liaison with a gerbil.

2.     Half of marriages don’t end in divorce. Not even close. Divorce rates in the US peaked in 1984 at 41% and have been declining steadily ever since. They’re now down to about 15% nationally. A couple of the Midwestern states actually have about a 2% rate.

3.      Al Gore did not invent the Internet. He also never actually claimed that he did. But it’s funny, so let’s keep this one going.

4.      Henry Ford didn’t invent the automobile.

5.      Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb.

6.     Penguins don’t mate for life, and those famous gay penguins at the Berlin Zoo were really just good friends. When they went to the next zoo, they both mated with other females and the caretakers at the first zoo later admitted that although the penguins were noted to have performed mating rituals, and even babysat a rock together, staff never actually witnessed the two having sex with each other.

7.     The Great Chicago Fire wasn’t caused by a cow kicking over a lantern. That was invented by a reporter.

8.     Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds did not cause any mass panic. That was also invented by newspapers that saw the radio as a competitor for news. Wells and the radio station decided that it worked in their favor and began repeating the hyperbole themselves.

9.      The Earth is not round, it's actually… Uh, wait. It is round, right? OK, scratch that one.

10.  JFK did not refer to himself as a jelly donut. Berliner is a nickname for a confection, but also for the residents of Berlin, in the same way that a subway is a nickname for a kind of sandwich but also a form of conveyance. If you told someone you took the subway to work, they wouldn’t assume you rode a sandwich to the office, any more than the Germans assumed JFK meant he was a jelly-donut.

11.  The Declaration of Independence was actually signed on August 2, 1776. The language was approved and distributed for signatures on July 4^th. It took until August 2^nd to gather all the signatures.

12.  Pasta wasn’t invented by Italians, but by Arabs from current day Libya. It was introduced to Sicily in the 9^th century during an invasion.

13.  Gum doesn’t take 7 years to digest. It passes right through, just like everything else. Although gum is only about as digested when it comes out the other end as that penny you swallowed when you were 5. What’s that? That was just me? Alrighty then.  

Also? Mark Twain never said that bit about the lie being halfway around the world. That’s been attributed to any number of people from the 1700s on—most popularly to Twain, although he’d been dead for 10 years by the time he was supposed to have said it. See? I started off with a lie about lying. Now you don’t know if that business about the gay penguins, Al Gore’s Internet, or the divorce rates are even true. You just can’t trust anyone these days. 

Or is it that you can’t trust just anyone?

Needle in a Haystack

Recently, in response to one of my blog posts called "Searching For Home"—about trying to find the place you used to live by scouring Google Earth—a friend of mine asked me to help her find the place she had lived when we first met each other back in the 80s. To aid in the search, she had one landmark, a hotel, that she knew she could walk to from her place, but other than that, it was a total blank. To be fair, it has been a looooong time, and it was before she could drive, which is when most people's sense of geography and navigation truly kicks in. Actually, there was one other landmark she could remember, a soccer field, but it had disappeared from the area, probably long since turned into houses or businesses. So she sent me this map, and three other pictures of herself, her sister, and a friend at their house, and then tried to describe some of the idiosyncrasies of the neighborhood.

She thought the road was an off-shoot with no official name, and that the mail carrier always had to have hand-written instructions on the envelopes to get them to her house. It was as if none of the houses on the road had working addresses or something. The pictures she had were obviously intended to capture memories of her with her sister and friend together, not to document the house or the neighborhood itself (because who would do that?). There was a lot of ground to cover in the map, especially one click-and-drag up and down Google Street View at a time, and precious little to go on.

So I put on my detective hat, and started looking at all of the details in the background of the photos, trying to find ways to narrow the search and eliminate the dozens of houses and apartment complexes in an area completely unfamiliar to me. Her place was a two-story duplex, and I could see from a sliver of background that it backed up to an apartment complex that was at least three stories, and might also have been a mauve/pink color. Across the street and up the block from her house there was another two-story place, and maybe that balcony on that place—just in the periphery of the shot—was built in an unusual architectural style? The place next door may or may not have a corner-entrance to the building? Her driveway was abrupt and sloped down, and the front entry was a double-door with an interesting inlay. It was within walking distance (for a 15 year old) of a particular landmark that still existed.

I flew over the neighborhood in Google Maps, with the 3-D feature enabled so I could see where the two and three story places were in relation to each other. I looked at the color of the buildings, old neighborhood features that she would likely have remembered had she been adjacent to them. Anything to exclude entire blocks at a time. I decided that even though she didn’t remember much, she probably would have remembered living by an ancient archeological dig. She certainly would have remembered living by a huge canal that ran out to the sea. I mean, I know I’d have had some adventures over there at that age if it was a feature in my neighborhood. I had to believe that she or her friends would have, too. Since she didn’t have any memory of those things, she probably didn’t live on that side of the main drag. So I jumped over to the neighborhood on the east side. There looked to be a new-ish school in the area. Maybe that’s where the soccer field had disappeared to?

So I dropped into Street View and roamed up and down a few streets fairly near the school, basing it on mutli-story buildings and that mauve/pink place that I thought might have stayed mauve/pink, lo these many years. That's a bold choice, and people that commit to a decision like that might be tenacious about it. Found a couple of places that seemed possible, almost but not quite. Looked almost the same, but the building behind it wasn’t three stories. Or the facing street seemed too wide. Even though the street in her pictures was barely visible in a sliver of background, and out of focus, it still seemed pretty narrow and cramped somehow. Since there was barely anything to go on, I decided to trust my gut impressions of what was and wasn’t in the photo, and kept moving if the spot I was at didn’t feel right.

I went past the real place twice before I realized I’d actually found it. I initially rejected it as similar, but not the same. Then I realized that it had probably been given a facelift in the past 30+ years. So if I mentally subtracted an awning running across the front of the building, the brick pillars supporting that awning, and altered the color in my mind’s eye from the mustard yellow it is now back to the fabulous 80’s-Mall color-motif it sported back in the day, it became clear I’d actually found it.

So I zoomed in, took some screen shots, and then did some side-by-side comparisons with my friend’s photos. For all that had changed (new paint, new doors and windows, new fence, new roof awning and brick posts), there were still enough features that were identical (placement of handrails and light fixtures, step-downs in the dividing wall between the duplex units, double-panel entry doors with that unique inlay) to eliminate any doubt. I’d for sure found it. My friend and her dad have since confirmed. And by the way, she was right. Google only records four working addresses for the dozen houses on that narrow street.

Now the kicker here is that not only have I never been to this house that she moved out of over 30 years ago, not only was their virtually zero information to go on, not only were the photos I was working with—that live in a shoebox in the attic—originally taken on an 80's instamatic that she then shot with her phone and messaged to me, not only have all the landmarks changed and the exterior been noticeably remodeled over the past three-plus decades, but it’s in… Naples, Italy!

That does it, I’m cashing it in on the whole construction racket and hanging out my shingle as a PI.

A Culture of Two

We’re standing at the sink together when she gives with the little growl that generally lets me know that I’m being annoying. The funny thing is, I can tell by the growl that I’m being annoying in a specific way. There are several variations to the growl, nuances of timbre, volume, and aggression that communicate specific things. There are ones that are preemptory, warning me not to proceed with a given enterprise; others communicate “What fresh hell is this?” However, this particular one is reserved for the kind of misdemeanors I commit repeatedly, which she finds annoying but knows will never change, if they haven’t in the 18 years we’ve been married.

I look over to see what infraction I’ve been convicted of, and see that she is rinsing out something that I had previously loaded into the dishwasher. This is a source of some comedic friction between us, the competition of who is best at loading the dishwasher and, as a subset of that contest, which techniques of preparation and loading are actually necessary to get a load of dishes clean. I have been grudgingly forced to admit over the years that she has better top shelf technique, but maintain that I am the Shao-Lin master of the bottom rack. In any event, that old roll around dishwasher may seem like a piece of 1950’s technology, but it’s motor sounds like a jet engine that McDonald-Douglas would be proud of, and it can blast the paint off dishes. There is absolutely no need to rinse any dishes, so I don’t. Lindsay doesn’t see it that way, so when I see her rinsing out the glass of orange juice I respond to her subvocal growl with a practiced eye roll and chuckle. It occurs to me that a whole drama has played out in a moment’s time, representing years of discussions and arguments, without a word ever being spoken.

Which gets me to thinking about how anyone else in the world would have perceived these events, had they been a fly on the wall. A low growl from her, and I instantly break up in laughter? We’d look crazy to just about anyone. They say that 90% of communication is nonverbal, but around here that’s a little on the low side. The kind of reductive shorthand that you develop in a marriage is hard to describe, beyond the generic fact of it. A look, a word, a gesture can be emblematic of thousands of words, dozens of hours of bickering or rambling late-night discussions. Some are hilarious, inside jokes and private narratives, while still others are outliers marking the edges of a minefield of unsettled disagreements and lingering emotions, best left untrodden. This emotional slang is the hallmark of a unique culture. A culture of two.

A culture is, essentially, the shared memories of a group. These memories manifest as traditions and
taboos, values and mores, as well as affected behaviors and communication. In the macro, it looks like the emphasis a culture places on different values, like education and work ethic, or different kinds of communal holidays and celebrations, incorporating classes of jargon and slang. The smaller the group, the more specialized their cultural traits; the jargon used on a construction site differs vastly from that used in the halls of an attorney’s office. The same is true in microcosm of a marriage.

We’ve evolved an argot that would be unrecognizable to anyone outside of we two. A series of catcalls, nicknames, tidbits of movie dialogue, gestures and facial expressions that, if recorded, would be as strange as anything Diane Fossey found cohabitating with those gorillas in the mist. For example, we literally never use each other’s names at home. Ever. My wife is the person in the world who uses my given name the least. One memorable exception came about a dozen years ago on a nice spring evening, I was just stepping into the shower and Lindsay called my name from the living room. By her tone, and the fact that she even used my name, I knew it was an emergency, so I tore out of the bathroom and down the hall, naked as the day I was born, half expecting to have to confront an intruder in the buff. Turns out we’d started a fire with an unattended candle, which is only slightly better to a naked person, believe me.

There are some rules in this culture of course, most of which we set down while we were dating, before we were even engaged, refining and adding to the lexicon as we’ve built our lives together. The Golden Rule is this: no making fun of the other. No put-downs, no name calling, no zingers, no sarcastic asides. There are plenty of things to laugh at in the world, and other people to make fun of; neither of us is fair game. Another basic tenet is that we rarely ever have a conversation in anger, preferring silence in a heated moment and rational discussion after the fact. That can be a tough one, but it’s lead to way more harmony over the years.

For as much as we’ve planned in our lives, other things have evolved outside of any intentions. Like the way the walk together, never hand in hand but arm in arm. The second she links her arm to mine, I change my stride and lock step with her, sometimes with a little hop to land on the same foot she’s leading with –left, right, left- quite unconsciously, so that we move together in sync. Or the division of labor, who could have guessed that I would wind up the decorator and she the tree-trimmer?

It’s the little things like that which define your culture. The nicknames and the inside jokes are all a way of taking ownership and personalizing your intertwining lives. And the more we do this and grow together, the more I realize that our life amongst friends, family, and coworkers out in the everyday world casts into specific relief the unique inner life that exists between us, like a secret history.

We took a professionally administered personality test once, with a group from a church we helped to build. The test was designed to assess your personality in both public and private settings, so as to find the best place for a person to work in a group. Both Lindsay and I scored so unusually that they had us take the test again. It turns out that the disparity between our public and private personas is so vast that it threw the whole test parameter out of whack. It was like Clark Kent/Superman different, like we had secret identities. As I’ve thought of that over the years it occurs to me that that is exactly right. When we are in public, Lindsay is demure and reserved while I’m assertive and ebullient. At home, however, the dynamic is completely reversed. I become quiet, pensive, even philosophical, while Lindsay becomes a complete maniac.

No one believes me when I say this, any more than anyone believes that mild mannered Clark Kent is actually Superman. I can talk until I’m blue in the face about the dancing, the ambushes, the karate chops, the catcalls and chases that run from one end of the house to the other, but to no avail. No one knows this version of her but me. The version that is stubborn as a mule, but patient as the day is long. The one who can balance a checkbook to the cent, and in the next moment get jiggy when Uptown Funk or Can’t Fight the Feeling comes on. And she’s got the moves, believe me.

Of course she knows me equally well, in some ways better than I know myself. Over the past several years she’s surprised even me by being able to predict what I’m upset about when I let out a particular “awwww” in relation to something that I’m reading. There is an “awwww” that means an animal has been injured or killed; an “awwww” that means someone I admire has died; an “awwww” that means something truly awful has happened to us on a personal level. Even I can’t say what the difference is, but she can.

Sometimes I wish that other people knew the person I know, instead of just the facet that is shown to the public and our friends and family. There have been those in my life who wondered why I would pick someone so unassuming to marry, and I can never fully explain to them that I didn’t marry the mild mannered alter ego, but the superhero. Most days though, I’m content to just keep that under my hat. It’s alright with me if this world is just us two.

Happy 18th Birthday to our Marriage.

Leave the Light On

Dear Warren Family,

We were really moved by your letter expressing interest in buying our home. Of the people that made offers, you were the only ones to appeal to us directly like that. Apart from the fact that your husband is a carpenter, like me, and a veteran, like my Dad, what put you over the top was that you had so much enthusiasm and appreciation for the house that it kind of bowled us over. It reminded me of how Lindsay and I were when we found out that our seventeen-month odyssey into home-buying had at last reached its fruition, twelve years ago.

Day One.

I know that you’re first-time homebuyers, just as we were when we first found Ol’ 425, and it’s possible that you have even more exuberance than we did when we first moved in. Although I think that’s mostly because of how much work was out in front of us. It seemed almost insurmountable, but we had dollar signs in our eyes back in those halcyon days of quick flips and quick bucks, and we thought we’d be in and out in a year. That was a nice few months when it actually seemed like that was going to be the case. I guess life really is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.

The vision you laid out of how you’d use the various spaces was really nice to read, although it’s a little surreal talking to someone about how they plan to spread their lives out in the places that we used to eat and play and lay our heads. But for some reason, I kind of like it. It makes it seem like the house is stationary in time, while we live our lives flowing around it. Coming and going, buying and selling, living and dying while this tiny, unassuming cracker-box stands as a bulwark between us and the world. Giving us a warm light to gather round, just a little something against the wind. In return, we paint it this color or that, caulk the gaps, patch this and that, clean the gutters, and water the lawn. Or not, depending.

The idea that what we think of as the Office will become your sewing room was really satisfying to read, since we really just tossed an IKEA desk in there, slapped a printer on it, and called it an “office.” I guess I pictured my wife doing the bills at that desk, but she wound up doing those at the kitchen table like everyone else in the world, or on her laptop in the big easy chair in the Living Room as the world has moved on to its PayPals and its Venmos. Three years after we moved in, I started my own construction company and actually had need of an office then, but I still wound up sitting on the living room floor and spreading out the work orders, invoices, and bills in a fan around me, and hacking away for days on end. So the Office never did live up to our expectations (more like delusions) about how life would pass. I guess nothing else did either, come to think of it.

Eventually, the business moved into a shop/office suite out in the Western Badlands, and we admitted to ourselves that the Office was really more like a catch-all where my wife’s workout equipment and my guitars lived. Along with anything else we couldn’t think what to do with. That door was always closed when company came around, so we could pretend to be civilized human beings instead of admitting that we were raised by wolves. Unless the visitors were family. In which case we threw an inflatable mattress down on the floor and shoehorned them in, because no one can stick it to you like family. Yeah, I think the hum of a sewing machine might really improve the space. Someone truly inhabiting the room, filling it with life, is just the change this old girl needs. You have our blessing. Not that you need it. This is your place now.

It’s nice to think of your grandkids coming to stay in your/our Guest Room, because our homes—even simple nine-hundred-sixty square foot boxes—are made for lives to happen in. I always loved it when my sister and nephews would come for a visit. I’d be the last one out of bed on a Saturday, listening to the sound of my wife and sister chattering away and the kitchen, while the smell of coffee and bacon beckoned me from my womb of blankets, and there would come the patter of the kids’ stockinged feet tearing up and down the hall to do the long slide into the living room, like I taught them. Their mom, my sister, hated that, because they brought the practice home with them. But I always considered it my job as Funcle (fun uncle) to teach them all the possible ways to drive mom crazy.

That gorgeous Mahogany floor Lindsay and I put in has certainly garnered a lot of praise over the years, and I’m glad that you found it so appealing. It’s just slippery enough in socks to be fun for kids of all ages, so maybe your grandkids (or you!) will find equally as amusing. Word of advice, though: be careful what kind of furniture you put by the kitchen pantry cabinet. If the kids (or you!) don’t stop in time, whatever you put there will be the thing that arrests their slide. For us, it was our entertainment center. May we suggest a sofa, instead?

What we rarely mention about that gorgeous floor is that, although it’s supposed to be a “hardwood,” we discovered the hard way that the Mahogany is a thin veneer, and a soft one at that. The first time the TV remote fell off the arm of the couch and made the tiniest dent in the otherwise pristine floor, we both almost cried. After that, we immediately turned into those annoying people who make you take your shoes off when you come to their house. That douchey metamorphosis was a bit embarrassing, but we spent so much time and energy down on our hands and knees installing all that flooring, cramming it in over one weekend, that any injury to it was like a physical blow to us. It was the first construction project Lindsay had ever been a part of, and she discovered how brutal the process really was.

So when we ran a little shy of glue toward the end, we were so completely exhausted that another trip to the store seemed like the Bataan Death March, and we tried to make what we had stretch instead. That was a mistake. That squeak you hear over in the corner by the front door is the result of skimping on the glue. Sorry about that. If it’s any consolation, I had to hear that squeak every time I sat down or got up off the couch for over a decade, a constant reminder of my mistake. It seems much louder at night, or any time you get up off the couch to sneak a snack out of the fridge. And by the way, the squeak in front of the sink is my friend Tony’s fault. Dude couldn’t swing a hammer to save his life, so the tile-backer right there isn’t quite nailed off as hard as it should be. I shouldn’t complain, the guy was doing us a solid at a time when we were completely overwhelmed. Still, I’m glad he’s a psychologist today, so the world isn’t counting on him having any hand-eye coordination.

We aren’t the most naturally hospitable people in the world, kind of preferring each other’s company and our solitude to a busy house. No kids, no pets, and the houseplants are not thriving. That’s partly due to Lindsay’s fastidious nature and how nice the house has to be for people to come over to stay, but mostly due to there being just the one bathroom in the house. That’s a lot of pressure on one toilet. In eighteen years together, Lindsay and I have never had two bathrooms, which is a situation we are eager to remedy upon the transfer of our home to you. Word to the wise, when you’re in there always turn on the fan. Since the bathroom is right in the heart of the house, perfectly positioned between bedrooms and common areas, if that fan isn’t on, the whole house is in there with you.

In spite of that, we still hosted friends and family alike over the years, and all of them slept better in the Guest Room than we ever did when that mattress was in our Master. My sister thinks it’s a magic mattress, but every time my snoring (or cigar smoking) got me banished to the Guest Room, I always woke up with a crick in my neck. The couch is much better for banishment purposes, as white trash as that sounds. What the hell, it’s Springfield—aka Sprintucky. No need to put on airs.

The neighborhood has certainly improved over the twelve years that we’ve found ourselves here. That’s good, because when we thought our nest-egg was going into a get-rich-quick flip like on HGTV, a bit of blue-collar blight was of no concern to us. But the economy collapsed like…an hour after we bought the place? OK, it was six months, but fifty thousand dollars of home value evaporated overnight, taking our nest-egg with it, and suddenly we felt marooned in a marginal part of a crappy town.

The house next to ours—whose appalling condition we leveraged to reduce the purchase price of Ol’ 425 and get our closing costs covered—began to seem like a bomb that was continually going off. It was a complete shit-heap, and was slated for demolition by the city because unpaid taxes had triggered a foreclosure, which in turn caused them to stop paying their bills, which got the utilities turned off. At which point, they abandoned it with all of the windows open, and it became a den of offal for raccoons, stray cats and dogs, and the occasional nutria. It smelled like hell and appeared to be receding into loam day by day. The sibling owners apparently didn’t open the garage door when they backed out of it to leave for the last time, because it was burst out from the inside. Our next door neighbors, ladies and gentlemen.

But since then, the dozens of houses throughout the neighborhood around us that were in foreclosure, with crispy brown lawns, Sheriff’s eviction notices pasted to the door, and walls ripped out for their copper, have recovered. Including the one next door. Families came in and bought them at the low point of their sale value—as opposed to their apex like we did—or for pennies on the dollar from banks desperate to unload them, and have made a go of building their lives here. And, really, that’s what makes a neighborhood good. Not fancy landscaping or Roman columns out front, but a group of people sincerely committed to building their lives amongst others doing the same. Raising our kids, mowing our lawns, shooting off firecrackers on the Fourth of July. Summer barbecues, other people’s annoying weekend projects that start way too early on a Saturday, and the occasional party that runs too long and too loud. Like Alejandro’s Easter Bash of ’09, or my fortieth birthday party in 2011.

By the way, I hope you like those 4th of July fireworks, because this neighborhood sounds like Iwo Jima for a week before and after, and like the end of the world the day of. But overall, it’s a pretty great area, despite the somewhat outré appearance of some of the denizens and domiciles. There’s never been any crime in our little circle. No cars broken into, no Amazon packages stolen. Which is nice, because before we replaced the garage door and opener, it used to open up randomly after we left for work or while we slept, and would then stand open all day or all night, depending. Zero problems. Unless you count a couple of teens screaming at their parents and slamming doors as they tore out of the house, or the Pastor directly across the cul-de-sac getting a divorce and dying alone in his own little cracker-box.

Over the years, we’ve watched as the neighborhood kids that rang the bell to sell us candy bars and beef jerky for school fundraisers began driving cars and playing their damn rock-n-roll music (or rap, as the case may be) at all hours. As our three hundred sixty five day plan bled into thousands of days, we watched Ricardo’s son Abel go from racing his go-cart around the cul-de-sac to becoming a budding entrepreneur, asking to rake our leaves to earn some pocket money. In that same forty-three-hundred day period, a half-dozen houses in this blue-collar burg have been knocked down and rebuilt, and two dozen more have had face-lifts. Since spending all these years here, I’ve discovered two things: Nothing makes me feel older than other people’s kids, and that any lawn mowing or house painting in a neighborhood are the adult-equivalent of peer pressure.

It’s fair to say that, had we only known, we never would have chosen to stay here as long as we have. Actually, had we known that the bottom was about to drop out of the world, that everyone was about to lose their job, and even the banks were about to lose their shit, we never would have bought at all. If only there had been some sign, some omen warning us off. A harbinger of doom that could have alerted us that we were headed down a path fraught with peril. Like, say, spending seventeen fruitless months in the market, losing six bidding wars to Californians who were buying houses in bulk, sight unseen. Or maybe the reckless availability of one hundred percent financing for every tap-dancing pimp who could legibly sign his name. Yeah, if only.

Still, we pressed on until we found Ol’ 425. By then we’d about worn our poor realtor out, and now have the dubious distinction of being her longest running clients. By the time we found this old girl, we knew the market so well that we could tell exactly which houses were in the railroad cancer-zone and which were double-wides, based solely on square footage and zip code. We looked at houses built on no foundation, houses with illegal garage additions, and patio-covers consisting of camper-shells grafted on with spray-foam and caulk. Even one with a tree growing up out of the floor. And still those places sold for top dollar. Insane.

When we found Ol’ 425, she was in decline, to be sure. There was a rotting wheelchair ramp out front for Melvin and Violet Elving, the Baptist Minister couple who spent their final days here. Their kids were pretty motivated to sell, because the plywood siding was delaminating, the paint was flaking off like dandruff, and the whole thing was an inexplicable aqua blue. The inside was like Easter exploded, with aqua, avocado, mustard, neon-rust, and baby poop all coming together in a perfect storm of why the 70’s should have been the end of human civilization. But the bones were good. Every single aesthetic thing needed to be changed, from the popcorn ceiling to the hideous shag carpet, and virtually everything in between. The windows, the doors, the trim, the siding, the deck, the counters, the shower. Just…Every. Fucking. Thing. But she was straight, didn’t leak, and the Elvings were the very first people to own it, making us just the second in forty years, so it was still the best thing to come along in seventeen months. The prospect of living in AC for the first time in our marriage didn’t hurt either. So we bought the old Aqua Monster (as we called it) and started the long process of bringing her forward in time with us.

Back then, we didn’t know how to read the tea leaves, or interpret the signs. We thought it was heroic to overcome obstacles and stay the course, no matter the resistance. After all, you gotta prove that you’ve got the mettle to meet life’s challenges before you find your reward, right? I guess that’s probably true sometimes, but just as often, you gotta recognize that not every brick wall needs you to smash your head into it either. Some walls have doors in them that you can walk right through. Others, you just aren’t meant to see the other side of. Nonetheless, with enough tenacity—and brain-cells to spare—you can usually force the issue and make it through almost any barrier. Which is how we found ourselves occupying Ol’ 425. I’ve heard it said that God always answers prayers. Sometimes it’s yes, sometimes it’s no. Sometimes it’s…wait. Not yet. Soon, but not yet. Because the right thing at the wrong time is the wrong thing. We could have bought 425 (or a thousand other, better places) within six months for tens of thousands fewer dollars if we’d had the wisdom to see the difference between tenacity and stubbornness.

Still, if you’re going to be saddled with a consolation prize, you could do a lot worse than Ol’ 425. So we made a go of it. We had a life here. I started a construction company in the teeth of the worst recession in our lifetimes (in the worst-hit industry and the state in which that industry took its hardest blow) and made it four years before shuttering the doors. It was during the lulls of unemployment in the slow winter months that my business partner and lifelong friend, Ron, and I replaced all the exterior trim, windows, and siding, just to keep from going stir crazy, or spiraling into depression. My fortieth birthday bash was held in a tent out back, with guitar amplifiers and a river of Jaegermeister, for which august occasion I painted the siding that had been left fallow for eighteen months. Being rid of the multi-colored pre-primed siding (otherwise known as Springfield Camouflage) was a relief to my wife, even though the ultimate color was a bit of a disappointment. Don’t worry, We’ve repainted again since then with a more pleasing palette, which we hope you enjoy. I had you in mind when I chose it, even before we’d ever heard the name Warren.

Just as we had you in mind during a thousand other big and little projects, as we tightened, cleaned, repaired, patched, caulked, touched-up, or replaced entirely a host items all around the house, as we prepared her to become someone’s home. Yours, as it turns out. All the little things I could have and should have done for us years ago, just to make living here a wee bit nicer. Things like cleaning out the lint in the dryer exhaust line, scraping off speckles of excess grout on the cabinet toe-kicks from when we tiled the kitchen, or changing out that greasy-ass ghetto hood-vent over the stove to something that doesn’t sound like a helicopter taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. Even before we knew you, we wanted this to be a place of rest and refuge, as much a blessing for you as it was for us, but easier.

A place here you wouldn’t have to tear out any rot, replace any appliances, or chase any leaks down in the crawl-space. Where you could just come home and put your feet up. Or maybe do something fun, like add some curtains and a flower-box to the window at the kitchen sink, like I always wished we had. Why I didn’t see fit to do those things when it was for our own lives, I’ll never know. At least we got to enjoy those little touches for a couple of months. We joke that now that the improvements have been made, it’s much more enjoyable to live here again and now we don’t want to leave. But escrow is escrow, and that second bathroom is calling. So we’ve gone around and blessed the lintels and all four corners of the house, and now leave we will.

Of course, we did make some improvements for ourselves and our own enjoyment, once we’d realized we’d be here for the long-haul. Others we made strictly for the re-sale value, and some because we just plain had no choice. We hosted some of Lindsay’s high school friends as they toured the state in 2013, and as they were departing one of them stepped clean through a rotten spot in the ramp and fell right off the front porch. Thankfully, she wasn’t hurt, but the second their vehicle rounded the corner out of our quiet little cul-de-sac, I grabbed that ramp in my bare hands and straight-up ripped it apart. In so doing, I did away with the last vestiges of Melvin and Violet Elving, with exception of all their beautiful roses. Oh, and that old-school retractable clothes-line out back. Do yourself a favor and dry your bedding out there. Trust me. You can’t buy that smell for love or money. I replaced the Elving ramp with a stoop constructed of pressure treated wood, composite decking, and other materials never intended by nature, so it would be sound for a lifetime. Better living through chemistry, I always say.

I’m sure you’ve experienced the same myriad of things that happen to us all over the course of our lifetimes. The marriages, the births, deaths, Bar Mitzvahs, Quinceaneras, graduations, birthdays, new jobs and the occasional lost dream. I suppose all of those things happen to everyone, everywhere, and no doubt they would have happened to us down the span of years, no matter where we were. When I got the news of my Niece Kailee’s death in June of 2009, it was this living room floor I collapsed onto and began to wail like a man undone. When we got the news of the family births of Clara, Bryan, Noelle, Leon, Alexander, David, Kevin, Gatlin, Marcelle, Levi, Amelia, Evelyn, Rosie, Ellie, and Jade these walls resounded with our hoots and hollers. Many a prayer, many a tear, and many a milestone came to pass here. Just as they would have anywhere else fate had seen fit to deposit us, I guess. But in the end, they happened at Ol’ 425, and that matters to us.

When we discovered in 2010 that the shower wall with the window in it had been leaking for many years and had rotted away to nothing, I bared my teeth and went straight in. I lost my job the day after I ripped the tub and back wall of the house out, so that beautiful tile surround that you commented on was, to me, an act of faith as much as any minute I ever spent in a church pew. I started my company right after finishing that project because literally no one was hiring, so these were the floors I paced at 4:00 AM when I couldn’t sleep from sweating the business bills and staving off foreclosure on the house. Or when I was passing kidney stones in pure agony, when I couldn’t sit or lie down for days on end. The fate of our marriage was decided here, not once but twice. We both had our lives changed by being accepted for career-defining jobs at the University. Toasts with friends, bull-sessions around the kitchen table, living room jam sessions with guitars and ukulele with my Dad, Wife, and good friends. From the momentous to the mundane, from all the back-breaking work to the meager parade of Trick-Or-Treaters we welcome most years, all the little losses and victories that make up a life, happened here in our quiet little cul-de-sac in this unassuming little cracker-box.

They say that every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end, and I’ve learned the wisdom in mourning the little things—the end of beginnings—as they pass. In recognizing the good old days while I’m still in them, before they head into the rearview. Even when they’re replaced by new opportunities, blessings, and challenges that will become the new good old days soon enough, these little endings deserve our attention. So as much as I’m looking forward to that next bigger, better, newer house, no amount of self-closing cabinets, LED lighting, soaking tubs, or home theater rooms will be able to replace the affection that I have for Ol’ 425. Although that extra bathroom will be a close second. And even though I hope I never have to lift a finger to do more than add some decorative flair or a fun weekend-project on the next place, I will never get over how much love we poured into this, the first place that we ever called our own. Nor will I likely be able to replicate the amount of time, energy, and effort anywhere else, because I was a young man when we started, and I’m a middle-aged bureaucrat as we move on to the next. So you, Warren Family, are now just the third owners of Ol' 425, and the caretakers of my best work.

The mistakes and foibles represent the best we knew how at the time, or at least the best we could do in a given moment in time. So please forgive me for the squeaks, the little puckered spot in the carpet-pad in the Master, and that one door on the Kitchen cabinet under the sink that doesn’t quite close without a little extra oomph. They don’t make that exact same 60s hinge anymore, and the next best thing is off by about a millimeter. Close, but not quite. Also, we found out that the broken couch spring had been gouging the Living Room floor the same way you’re discovering it now, by surprise. Sorry about that. I sanded, stained, and refinished the spot, but there’s no hiding it completely in a floating floor like this one. Realistically though, with that stupid fireplace where it is, there’s really nowhere else to put the couch anyway. No doubt yours will cover it, the same as ours, and out of sight is out of mind, right?

A couple of last things before we lock the door behind us and toss the key under the mat: Keep an eye out for Maxi-cat before you start the sprinklers, he likes to sleep in the little hollow around the base of the Dogwood tree out front. Those beautiful apple trees in the back yard are going to start dropping apple bombs about a month after you move in, and keep going all the way to November, and they’ll probably number somewhere around two-thousand. They’re sour and wormy, but there’s a horse two blocks down on the left that will love you for them. If you leave them to lie, you’ll have an apple-sauce lawn for months afterward. I never minded, but it drove Lindsay crazy. That’s how I know they drop two thousand apples a year. She counts them as she’s dispensing with them. Because of course she does.

Also, you may want a pellet gun to discourage the Gaze of Raccoons (that’s what a group of them is called) from getting too comfy approaching the house. I’m afraid their squatter’s rights under the shed are pretty much grandfathered in, but they know the deal. Don’t let them push you around. I made that mistake one summer and wound up having to put a few rounds in one of their butts to keep them from destroying the screen door. After that, they went back to making their nightly crossings—which trigger the security light in the back yard and leave that trail along the fence-line—at a respectful distance. We eyeball each other every night at 11:00p as they go by, but thus far the détente remains. Good luck with that. Hold the line.

Day Four-Thousand-Four-Hundred-Thirty-One

If we’re being honest, since you’re in your fifties and this is your first home, with a thirty-year mortgage, who knows, this may well be the place that the kids and grandkids say goodbye to you, while your belongings are shuffled about to make room for the next family of first-timers. This, too, happens to us all. But may it be on the far side of decades of Thanksgivings, Christmases, birthdays, babysitting the grandkids so mom and dad can have a date-night, and ten thousand quiet evenings with a good book and the dog warming your feet. We never once had a fire in that hearth, but I’m betting that if we’d have had a dog, we would have. I hope that you do, because every part of a house is for living, and I think we might have missed out on that bit. We may not be ending our days in this place, but we still count the ones spent here among the best of our lives.

They say life is what happens while we’re busy making other plans. Well, I say that life has to happen to us somewhere, and there are worse places you could do that than Ol’ 425. So take care of her for us, and for the ones that come after. Blessings to the Warren Family. We’ll leave the light on for you.

Elliotts out.