...got past the 8th grade. (My mother finished 10th grade.) At various times, I was told, my mother had to pawn her wedding ring (which my wife now wears) to put food on the table during strikes and the like. When the strikes ended, they'd get it out of hock.
It seemed like a magical place to me, that house. When I was a child I didn't know anything about the struggle. Moving into it is my earliest memory. I was two.
After my mother died, and my father remarried to a widow and moved to her house, my future wife and I rented the house from him for a summer before moving out to California. It was a strange time in my life. My wife was a doctor's daughter; and grew up in much larger, albeit less happy domiciles. She was fine with temporarily living in that little house. I remember the fun of having a new lover there, the lover who would become THE lover of my life, but as for having an emotion connection beyond that, it didn't mean much.
My father sold the house ultimately, and flew out to California to give me a little bit of the cash from the sale, which was nice, but unexpected. (His pension had vanished with Jimmy Hoffa's body and he certainly could have used the money.) He made a killing on the house, which kept him afloat until cigarettes killed him.
I drove by that house about 15 years ago when we were out on Long Island visiting a cousin. It had been remodeled, the incredibly tiny kitchen enlarged by building out into the front yard, my father's design eccentricities all removed. I hardly know why I went out of my way to see it, other than to show my boys where I grew up.
It didn't mean anything at all to me, frankly, other than to remind me of my youthful provincialism. I would never think of bringing it back into my family. My life there was as transitory as the wind. I had a relatively happy childhood, but the life thereafter was the life that mattered.
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