Later, home

I left my childhood home, my mom's house on Mayview Rd., for the last time ever a few days ago. My mom and I moved there in late 1986, when I was three years old, after having first lived on Oakwood Avenue. I don't remember much about Oakwood, but I know we moved away from there after having one too many drunks stagger into our yard to pass out. (My mom may well have embellished this, but I still kind of like the image.)

I remember the first time I ever saw the inside of the Mayview house. What I noticed were ... stairs. Lots and lots of stairs. I did not like the fact that my bedroom was only reachable by climbing what seemed like Mount Everest at the time. But I'm sure it didn't take me long to get used to it.

It was really a wonderful place to grow up. It had a big backyard -- seemed much bigger to me as a kid -- two stories and a basement, a lot of nooks and crannies to explore. The basement started out as my playroom, where I hosted many an imaginary sword fight with plastic weapons and suits of armor. There was this wooden toy chest that was filled with all kinds of random plastic crap and nicer toys as well, and in those days of constant entertainment, it felt like I could just drop a hand in there and pull out something that would define the entire day, at least in my imagination.

The yard was amazing, too. It felt like there was just so much running space for my friends and me. When it snowed, it was an even better playground. And when I was eight, a treehouse would be added to the mix. I spent the night under its little tin roof during sleepovers with friends many times, and have vivid memories of being woken up by the sound of rain on that roof.

Other things that come to mind include: Christmases. It was always me and my mom, and while she was alive, my grandmother. Our tradition of buying a tree every year slacked off over the past few years, but we used to get a big tree that filled up almost a quarter of the room. When I think of this, I remember the smell of the tree mixed with the odor of cider on the kitchen stove.

It's funny how you can't write about this without sounding like cliched tripe. I apologize, this is a rare occasion on which I am getting sentimental without much cynicism mixed in. I am actually a little embarrassed of that, but it's probably because I'm programmed to distrust cliched images like rain on a tin roof or cider cooking on a hot stove. But that's actually how it was.

Some other completely random things I remember:

-Getting Shaq's rap CD, Shaq Diesel, when I was in 5th grade. Thinking I was the coolest human being on the planet, and, in an attempt to impress a girl in the neighborhood I had a perpetual crush on for many, many years, opening my bedroom window, setting my boom box on the sill, and letting it blast its siren song out into the neighborhood. "You better than Shaq Attack? Fool, shut up liar, / I lean on the statue of liberty when I get tired."

-my 5th birthday party, which included a crazy amount of organized games in the backyard, a crazy magician dude named Tate the Great, and the gift of a Nintendo Entertainment System from my dad. Hooking it up in the basement after all partygoers had left (because I was ordered to wait until they had all left, damn these stragglers!) and completely killing it on Duck Hunt.

-going ahead exactly one decade for the hell of it ... my 15th birthday, where all my friends came over for a game of Diplomacy. Aaron Dixon and I, as Italy and Austria, kicked some Russo-Turkish ass. Then a limo came to pick us all up and take us to ComedySportz (greatest use of a limo ever. I don't know why I wanted that as a birthday gift, but it was my gift that year.) Afterward, we all came back to my house for some rousing battles in Bloody Roar and Mortal Kombat Trilogy.

-the time Hurricane Fran destroyed the place. My mom and I had just moved downstairs to sleep in the living room when two gigantic oaks fell on both sides of the house, destroying both of our bedrooms. The living room ceiling was starting to leak major water so we bailed out, drove through the hurricane to a friend's house and came back the next day to survey the damage. I'll never forget how incredibly upset my mom was, the most frightening mix of terror and grief I've ever seen anyone express.... and I guess I was in such shock that I was amazingly calm, almost shell-shocked as I walked through the rubble in my bedroom, trying to find things to salvage. We moved into an apartment for a year, the place was rebuilt, and we finally were able to return. I was so happy to be home. Man... I'm going to miss it.

-my grandmother picking me up from a Christmas Eve visit at my Dad's house, telling me my mom has my present ready for me, but I 'won't like it very much.' Arriving at home to see my new puppy Chopsticks, with a bandana tied around his neck, running down the stairs to greet me. I thought there was going to have to be a catch, that we'd have to give him back for some reason. We took him for a ride in my grandmother's car and he puked a ton. I thought that was going to be it for ol' Chopsticks -- take him back to the previous owner! We don't want a puking dog. But fortunately, he was forgiven, and he lived until I was a junior in college.

-being allowed to have a girlfriend over, with privacy, at age 16.

-other ways in which I pushed the limits of what I was supposed to be allowed to do as an older teenager. Not things I'll share here :P But I do associate some of those memories with that house, and they're mostly good ones.

-the draft in the kitchen, the way my mom always kept house plants next to the table that grew much too large for their allotted space, and the framed Yeats poem with illustration she kept on the wall. It was one of the first things I was able to read on my own after learning to read.

-the way the basement went from my playroom to a room for Ed, at the time a graduate student who rented the room in exchange for teaching me guitar lessons and driving me places. I looked at him as the big brother I always wished I had. Then when he moved out, his room became my room. I felt like more of a man, just having turned 15. These days, Ed is still a great friend of mine, and I'm past the age he was when he lived there. Time moves far too quickly.

This is just a random assortment of memories and nothing approaching a coherent post, but I don't care -- I just wanted to save some of these things for later, when the house will be more of a distant memory. Because just as with all things that were once a given, or routine, change is inevitable after enough time has passed. The thing that bums me out, though, is that there is no replacement for "home." My mom's new house isn't my home, it's her home. My apartment now is sort of a temporary home, but it doesn't have the same comfort, exactly. Anyway, I've been enjoying remembering things about the place, and I'll continue to write other things down as they come to me.

Next post won't be so sentimental, I promise. It might also have coherent paragraphs, but I can't guarantee that.