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March 11, 2000
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a home for thirty-three years I lived in the house a couple of short whiles. Holidays and weekends from college. A half a year in 1970 after college when I couldn't afford an apartment. A few weeks before I left for Europe to tramp around in 1972. A few weeks in 1975 when I was getting ready to move to Austin. Mom and Dad moved to this house while I was traveling around with my sister the summer after high school. The move was delayed until I graduated. It meant that graduation from high school was a huge displacement. I got to go to Pensacola, to California with my sister. I started college in the fall. My parents didn't even live in the same place when I came back. I remember studying in the family room which seemed so big. It was bigger than any room in the house in Sherman. There was a fireplace. Dad liked to fire it up on holidays. I'd warm myself and pretend to study. I used each of the extra bedrooms during various visits and times I lived here. I liked the house, really. Mom and Dad let me invite college friends for parties. A bunch of them would come all the way from Denton. The living room really wasn't that big. It was often quite full, though. The whole house was full. My sister and I thought nothing of inviting our friends and if there was family, there was always room. Games, presents, endless cups of coffee, many Christmases. Now my parents will move again. They move because I want them to be close. They are packing and sorting their things because I want them to and because, really, they want to as well. We all get up and have some coffee. People come and go. My parents' friends. One with a dog and her upholstery guy. Mom wants him to fix some chairs. They belonged to my sister's in-laws. My parents took some of their furniture when they were both gone. My parents often took things secondhand. Fixed them up, made the best of it. Another friend comes by to get some things Dad is giving away. Some pots and things. Another, a neighbor, to show off her cute grandkids. Yet another baby sits on the carpet, looking cute. My aunt and uncle come and my dad cooks. We talk about things. The move. My aunt and uncle going back to Maine for the spring and summer. They have grown old, too. All of us are getting so old. Mom looks for a picture I want. She wonders what to do with slides. They are stored in slide trays for a projector that no longer works. I tell her I'll take them and sort them out, scan some. She makes a pretty large pile of them next to me. I flip through them. My parents at my age, holding their tiny grandchildren. Camping trips. Christmases. Mom finds her genealogy stuff. Still not the picture. The picture is of her father playing the mondolin. I'm taking the actual mandolin to have it framed in a shadow box to hang in the new house. She does find some music, copied by him. He borrowed sheet music and copied it down because he was too cheap to buy it. I remember my grandfather, but always as an old man. He was 40 when he married my grandmother. He had lived with his mother until she died. In the genealogy stuff I read the obituary of his father, my great grandfather. He was a colonel in the Confederate Army. Became a lawyer after the war. In 1906, he died in Houston after being suddenly taken ill. So it says in the clipping. "No," my mother says. "He was shot on the train." "But it says he got sick in the Rice Hotel." "No, Daddy was with him. He was shot and they took him there. And then he died. They kept it a secret." "It doesn't say anything about Daddy Bud, it says the sisters and his brother went to Houston after he became ill." "No, he was with him." This is what she heard. Her family was strange, I think. My grandfather died when I was 11. I was 12 the very next day. My grandfather fought in the Spanish-American War and my great-grandfather in the Civil War. I have a picture of the Colonel in my living room. I wonder if he really just got sick and the 'shot on the train' story is a confused tale. My dad drives me to meet the guys at the hotel. Dad, at 83, can still navigate the metroplex. They are happy to sit and talk while we wait for the guys to get finished with the seminar. We stop at Carl's Corner for some snacks. I offered to drive when Les said he was tired. He takes me up on it. Boy, that's a giant vehicle. And then we're home again. I like getting home.
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"The trees
in the streets are old trees Stephen Vincent Benιt, John Brown's Body |
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full house
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