An excerpt from chapter 2 of my memoir, Finding My Way Home
If you’re following along, you’ve already read Chapter 1, but if you missed either of those excerpts, you can Just One and then Away From to get caught up.
Sometimes when I drive, I don’t turn on the radio. I talk to myself or with a person I imagine riding next to me. Driving westward that first warm summer day, my mind slipped into memory, and I heard Will Smith singing, Summer, summer, summer time. Then the ghost of my 16-year-old self came to sit beside me. She looked almost innocent, like a pretty little doll. Her brown hair, streaked with blonde highlights and teased high, grew almost two inches from her forehead. Cigarette in hand, she inhaled, held it, and exhaled into the gusting wind. I could taste the nicotine long absent from my palate. The hours passed slowly on the highway, so I turned right down the pathways of my memories onto Glen Road, heading toward home, and the music on my internal radio changed to the theme song of Sanford and Son.
I grew up in a ranch-style, 3-bedroom home, the chipping paint on which continued to wane from years of neglect until my father finally gave our house a makeover. He changed the color from subtle beige to a deep pine green and added on a new porch. I am not sure why he chose a color that would make our house pop out to passersby, except for the fact that my dad loves his house. As old, musty, and in need of repair as it is, it is his home.
An old Chevy Van hand painted black with the gold insignia of our last name and the word “Construction.’ The van sat, for years, virtually immobile off to the side of our driveway under the wilting oak tree in the front corner of our yard. The van’s windows, covered in sap, were adorned with fallen leaves and pine needles. Amber rust ate away at the grill, which gave the old machine a monstrous appeal as if it might snarl at anyone who came near it.
Growing up my father lived by a strict ‘never let anything go to waste’ policy, which applied not only to food but also to tangible items like old bicycles, refrigerators, and grills which he kept a growing collection of in our yard. There were not one, nor two, but three dilapidated sheds in our backyard filled with rusted and broken junk: lawn mowers, old tools, rusted toys, rotten nails, decayed wood, an old bathtub, even a toilet. The walls of his tool shed are still dressed in the playboy pinups from the early ‘80s and Farrah Fawcett’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition centerfold poster. When asked in kindergarten, “What does your father like?” my little sister answered, “Playboy magazines.”
It’s true. My father tried to be discreet about his proclivity pornography, but I knew the cabinet in his workroom where he kept his piles of magazines. I knew which drawer was filled with all the dirty videos, and I knew when it was safe to secretly indulge in watching, reading, or looking.
The North School kids, like Jonas Hatfield, lived on Hatfield Way, a family-named street on the northern side of town. My family lived in the neighborhoods closer to the murky Silver Lake. I understood what made me different from those kids on the northern side of town, and I decided early on that life over there must somehow be better than mine.
Around the area of the lake, where few from the northern side of town ever came for a dip, rows of closely knit, slowly dilapidating cottages packed the dead-end streets. In the early 1900’s people used to vacation there. It must have been the exact image of the housing in Dirty Dancing, those adorable little lakeside cottages neatly lined up around the environs of the water. Nearly a century later, these houses still stand, but the vacationers are long gone and have been replaced by families who like my family live paycheck to paycheck.
Though I grew to be embarrassed by the drab look of mediocrity that permeated our yard, there were many aspects of home that I enjoyed in my childhood. Our basement was stocked with piles of games and toys, and there my siblings and I were the governing body of our personal Candy Land. My older sister and I danced, sang, read, and built, and tortured our younger protégés. Doll houses and 33-track records kept us busy for hours.
Several doors down from us lived the Paines, whose cottage-style home was more common to this side of town. It too needed a fresh coat of paint and a landscaping overhaul. In sixth grade I smoked my first cigarette with Liz Paine and committed my first theft. We walked to Parties and Toys, the yester-years version of iParty, where we stuffed the golf ball-sized bouncing balls into our mouths while the clerk wasn’t looking. Then we walked out and laughed, torn between pride and shame for having gotten away with our crime.
Many parents in town shared the same love story as my friend Nikki’s parents, who had dated in high school, then married, and remained in this same town all of their lives. Their family represented the fruits that bloomed from an old apple tree—though small in size, the very idea of their flavor was mouth-watering, delicious, and sought after by many. The sweet taste of the simplicity of our small town was as delectable and predictable as the warm cotton candy I looked forward to at the annual 4th of July carnival, and as a child and adolescent I let it melt in my mouth and hungered for more.