\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0It’s gone!
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The place where I was born no longer belongs to any Trujillo. My sister Dorothy, who bought us out after Mom died in 2002, let the house go to an outsider whose name I don’t know.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Even when my parents were still alive, when I’d entertain out-of-town friends, I’d drive by their house and my birthplace on Railroad Avenue and say, “See that house, the neatest house on the whole street? Well, I was born there.”<\/p>\n
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0And by “born there,” I meant it literally. No late-night trip to the hospital for my Mom. No hand-picked obstetrician. I know. I was there.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Now things will be different. I don’t have excuses to drop by anymore. Until this month, the house was never occupied by a non-Trujillo. So when family members lived there, it was easy to drop by and check out the place where the wringer washer once stood. That”s where I was born. And my sister Bingy too.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0My wife and I have always overplayed the sentimentality card. Upon checking out of a Hampton Inn in Jefferson City, Mo., last Thanksgiving, we remarked that the day we left, the management would doubtless rent the room, which we had occupied for three days, to someone else.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Where did loyalty go? Why didn’t they convert the room into a shrine?
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The same applies to the old house. Dad bought it around 1935 for the then-obscene price of $1,000. There was only one dedicated bedroom, my parents’, which was off-limits. I don’t know where we five children slept. A few years later, when Tio Juan joined us, we were more crowded. I have a vague recollection of unfolding a hide-away bed at night, next to the coal stove.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0We drove by there last week and saw a woman in what used to be Mom and Dad’s bedroom, washing windows. I wanted to burst in and say, “You know this house you just bought? Well, I was born here.” But sanity prevailed and we kept driving.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0We took the same tack several years ago when we rented the house we’d lived in for 25 years. Our plan was to plant a doublewide on the adjoining lot and rent our house. In June, we were told, “You’ll be in for sure by Thanksgiving.” We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d promised our rental to the family that now occupies it, and because the Thanksgiving deadline stretched into the following year, we moved into our son Stan’s small trailer north of town. He’d taken a job in Seattle. So we had to move twice.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Had it not been for places like Samaritan House and Salvation Army, we would have carted tons of items to the trailer, then back here, when our house was finally ready. It’s therapeutic, if a bit painful, to get rid of everything we haven’t used in a year.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0One creature that refused to join us was “Calico,” a cat that remained feral even though Bonnie used to carry her in her apron pocket as a kitten. The cat had gotten used to a place in the fence where we lodged a cup of cat food, and didn’t budge.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0On a trip to the rental, we noticed our tenants had placed their TV set and sofa exactly where ours had been. In a fit of righteous condemnation, we wondered aloud, “What right do they have to place their TV and sofa where we had ours?” Looking back, we can’t imagine too many other furniture arrangements in that small house.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Soon after we moved into our current home, with twice the floor space, we recovered from any envy and resentment. The placement of furniture became a distant memory, especially after “Calico” deigned to join us.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0But what can we say about the house on the 900 block of Railroad? Many memories have been spawned from that venue. Like the time it became a neighborhood legend that Johnny Lopez from Pecos Street would routinely use our house as a shortcut to school.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s what happened:
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Every street in our barrio had its young toughs whose odds at winning a fight improved when they outnumbered us. Johnny, accordingly, sought the relative safety of our yard to evade the bullies, but rather than trespass, he knocked on our back door to get permission.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0“Of course you can go through our yard,” Mom said. Then Johnny added, “As long as I’m here, can I just cut across your house? And may I use your restroom too?”
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Yes to all the requests. That’s how he got a short-cut-taking reputation.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The old house, virtually empty the last time we entered, produced a host of memories. Among them:
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The room I was in when my brother gave me a fat lip for smarting off.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0In this room, when I was about 6, I burned my hands putting out a fire on drapes that I was told were fireproof.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Here is where I held Lydia, on my first date and first dance, at a party at our house.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0In the back yard, my brother once told me to close my eyes while a freight train passed. I then got sprinkled by ashes. Thinking Severino had tricked me by creating his own shower, I soon realized the train \u00e2\u20ac\u201d most trains in those days \u00e2\u20ac\u201d belched out smoke and ashes, not the best things for one’s lungs but cheaper than smoking.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0This yard was the home to 43 dogs, 73 cats, a white rat and 73,314 rabbits.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0And let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s not forget the railing we kids stood on to bid Dad good-bye as he left for work.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Doesn’t everyone carry a cache of memories? Am I the only person whose dreams center around the house on Railroad Avenue, my childhood home, but almost never on any of the dozen other houses I’ve lived in?
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Every serious novel can be named “Crime and Punishment” or “You Can’t Go Home Again.” Fedor Dostoyevsky, author of the former, certainly would have marvelled at the amount of punishment meted out on Railroad Avenue for crimes I must have committed.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0And as for going home again, well, Thomas Wolfe was right, as that’s not going to happen.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I don’t need more memories, and besides, the old house is occupied.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0It’s gone! \u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The place where I was born no longer belongs to any Trujillo. My sister Dorothy, who bought us out after Mom died in 2002, let the house go to an outsider whose name I don’t know. \u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0Even when my parents were still alive, when I’d entertain out-of-town friends, I’d drive by their house […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rezio.net\/woa\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}