Little Yellow House
The house is the house I grew up in through the age of 5. I have limited memories of it, but behind all those bushes is the little yellow house of my, um, youth. They say your emotional reality is set in your first five years. I can remember little of those 5 years, although I can remember incidents, little scenes and dramas, but without faces or names. I wonder if a list of those remembered scenes and dramas would have any meaning, those being the incidents powerful enough to have left a mark?
I found a hammer one day, for example, and happily pounded a hole in the
walkway from the sidewalk to our door and my father mixed up a tin can full of cement and patched it. I remember pounding away at the walkway, I remember when the walkway itself was laid out with string and wood forms in the first place. I can't remember if I got a spanking or not, but I assume I did although I can only remember maybe two of those in my entire life. It was a different color, that patch, than the rest of the walk and I remember passing it, particularly when I was returning from school. Let's see, age of 5, must have been kindergarten, right? Do kids go to kindergarten when they're 5? Is my memory bad? Did we live there until I was 6? Maybe we did. Far out.
The first picture is of my uncle Vic. He's looking a little spindly here, but in college he majored in music and running, holding the national collegiate record for the hundred yard dash for over 30 years, from the 1930's through the late 1960's and would have competed in the Olympics had it not been for World War II. I wish I had a picture here from his college days. When I was younger I thought of my parents college days in the 30's in archaeologic terms, things you read about in history books. Now I consider my own college years in the 60's, years long considered by everyone else, in that same historic sense. Strange. I've heard people say that. Different when you experience it.
So, anyway, we get older, we get crazier and the Sole Proprietor visits an old house that formed his
first life's chapter so long ago now he's forgotten most everything about it. Worth a picture, certainly, on a weekday morning with nothing much else to do. I wonder who lives in it now, who planted all those bushes in the front yard? Looks like someone hiding out or maybe an employee at a local nursery who's been filching the merchandise. It wasn't that way when we lived there. Not a bush between us and the street, although my parents were into gardening and planted the hell out of the back yard. No way to see the back yard without climbing over the fence and you learn not to do that without asking. With those bushes I didn't feel like asking. My bad luck, no doubt, probably some teenybopper lady about 45 looking to break out of confinement.
Sunday, not much packed, don't give a shit. Should be an interesting week.
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