My Father’s House Shines Hard and Bright.
On how houses become homes.
This old house once knew my children
This old house once knew my wife
This old house was home and comfort
As we fought the storms of life
This old house once rang with laughter
This old house heard many shouts
Now she trembles in the darkness
When the lightnin' walks about
When my Dad and I were planning my Grampa’s memorial service the funeral home director asked if we would like some text, a poem or song lyrics, that meant something to the deceased in the booklet that would accompany the service. My Dad immediately thought of the opening verse to “This Ole House” by Stuart Hamblen. It was not a song that I knew at all, but I felt the lyrics in my bones.
I have always been a homebody. Every apartment I have lived in, including my dorm room, was decorated to the hilt. I may be a nomad, but I am also like a hermit crab, carrying pieces of my previous dwellings with me every where I go.
A few years before my Grampa Gates passed away, we had to close down his house in Redding. It is where he lived with my Grandma Jane when she passed away of melanoma when I was a kid. It’s the only place I held in my memory as their home. I loved the way it was decorated, with things my Grandma Jane had carefully selected herself, some from their travels and some passed down from her family. Her father, my Great Grandfather Joseph, had been in the navy, so Grandma Jane had spent her formative years living in The Philippines and Panama and Shanghai. Her decorating sense reflected that eclectic experience and was filled with objects that I considered rare treasures. While some of her decorative objects now reside with me, I still mourn the furniture we were not able to keep. A beautiful luxe black table, a soft black couch, a cozy circular black chair, and her colorful throw pillows. She died when I was so young that I only have an impression of memories with her, but being among her things every time we visited made me feel like I knew her, at least a little bit.
When we closed up their house, I took photos and cried. It felt like I lost one of the last tethers I had to my Grandmother. I didn’t really think about what it meant for my Dad. He had to clean the house out. He filled up dozens of banker’s boxes with family photographs and papers. He brought old coins and stamps and books with him to my hometown, where they sat in the backroom gathering dust, holding their secrets, but also their memories, and, most importantly, their intrinsic connection to our past.
Now I am cleaning up my childhood home, which is mostly full of my parents’ belongings, as most of the things that belonged to my brother and me have long been taken by us, or been thrown out. Sorting through the many boxes of photos, I have not only found childhood photos of me and my brother and photos of my parents incredibly young and happy and in love, I have also found photos of my Dad in his childhood home. I had never thought about what it must have been like for him when my grandparents packed up the home he grew up in, located in the San Fernando Valley, when they decided to move to Redding, a decision they made so that they would be closer to their grandkids as my parents began to expand their family up here.
Did he grieve for his childhood like I am now?
I remember one time Dad had found his old Lionel train set and we were setting it up in the backroom. Among the miniature tracks there was a piece of something sheer. Tears welled in my Dad’s eyes and he said, “Iggy!” It turned out to be a piece of shedded skin from his beloved pet iguana, Iggy, who had grown so big my Grandmother had to give him away to a zoo. Recently, one of my Dad’s cousins shared with me a story about this infamous lizard and my Grandma Jane. She said the first time Grandma Jane had visited Iggy in the zoo she could recognize him and Iggy could recognize her, but eventually when she visited she could no longer tell which lizard had been a beloved family pet, and Iggy could no longer recognize her either. The tether was lost to time.
In this house I have grieved many pets. Allegedly, my first word was “doggy,” referring to a Labrador named Sarah who my parents owned when I was a baby. My Mom says she used to place me on Sarah’s back when she bottle fed me because it was the perfect angle to prevent gas. We also had many, many cats. There is a photo of my brother in his crib surrounded by three cats — Tina, Smokey, and Timothy. When I was little we found a stray that I insisted we name Squeaky. She had feline leukemia, and passed it down to her many kittens (she always got pregnant before we could catch her to get her spayed). All in, I think throughout my childhood we had about fifty cats or so (the most at one time was when my Dad had 25 cats when I was in college and during the Recession). When I get really blue sometimes I try to recite all of their names and send them a little bit of love. I even dedicated my book to “all the cats whose souls ever kept mine warm.”
It’s probably taking me longer to clean up this house than it should. After cleaning out Grampa Gates’ house, and recalling the memory of when my Mom and her brother had to clean out Grampa North’s house (he had years and years worth of pie tins and sports clippings, among other treasures/trash), my Dad had decided it was time to tackle his own junk. Aside from seventeen pairs of scissors and counting, mostly what he left behind for me is all these boxes of photos, a ton of paperwork, some clothes and knickknacks, and a huge library of archaeological books and journals, his Master’s thesis, several dozen slides, and even notes he took during grad school. Sorting through it all, I can still feel his spirit, and my Mom’s too.
She’s moving in with my brother and his family, so one of my tasks is getting the last of her things all packed up to send down to his house. Going through her things, I have learned so much about her as a writer; she has actually written several unpublished novels; she is an avid journaler; she is always working on herself. My Mom and I have a very strained relationship, one that I have actively been trying to repair over the last few years due to a health diagnosis on her end. Despite all the pain and anger, I want my last few years with her to be filled with nothing but love and light.
Among the boxes of family photos, I have found many photos of me as a baby that I had never seen before, like the one above. My Mom said she used to put me in that thing, put on some rock music, and then let me dance until I passed out. Apparently it was the only way to get me to take a nap. I also found photos of me with my Grandma Jane and my Grampa North, both of whom died when I was still very young. I have found photos of my Dad with my sister Katie, who passed away at just three months old a few years before I was born. I have found photos from family vacations that I only vaguely remember and birthday parties that I still cherish to this day.
One of my favorite photos I found is of my Mom when she was extremely pregnant with me. It was on her 35th birthday, four days before I was born. My Dad took the photo, and she looks so happy. It’s probably the happiest I have ever seen her look. These are the versions of my parents that I never knew, even though they were always a part of the versions that I did.
Every night before I go to bed I look at the door frame to the backroom in the kitchen that has all of our height markings on it. I think of all the versions of ourselves that have been in this kitchen. I think of my brother and me playing our take on the floor is lava, Under Siege edition, where we would pretend there was a bomb in the microwave (iykyk) and jump in and out of the kitchen until it “exploded.” I think of my Dad making me raisin pancakes that looked like teddy bears. I think of my Mom learning how to cook French food from Julia Child’s cookbook, but making two versions, one altered to be vegetarian so I could enjoy her culinary journey, too.
While this task is incredibly painful, I also see it as a gift. A few last weeks in this old house, the home that raised me, for better or for worse.