Years ago, I was riding in the passenger seat of a friend’s car on the way to a small party at a house in the Vollintine-Evergreen district. During some lull in the conversation, I asked where exactly the house was located.
“Close to Snowden, on Faxon,” she said. “About four or five houses down.”
“Wow, I used to live on Faxon,” I said, or something close to that. “I think we must be going to my old neighbor’s house. How crazy, right?”
We pulled up in front of my childhood home. I recognized the red brick, the now-shaggy hedges my dad used to trim so diligently, the dogwood tree I used to climb, and the sycamore my dad planted when he and my mother brought my younger sister home from the hospital.
We lost the house when I was about 8 years old. It was the first time in my lifetime one of my parents would be evicted, but not the last. Since then I’d lived in duplexes and apartments all over Memphis and Phoenix and in a little white house that was slowly caving in on itself near the borderline between Chester and Madison counties. So, back at that party, it was a Big Deal to be able to walk around my childhood home. I spent most of the night telling anyone who would listen what the place used to look like and how it had changed — the red-and-black linoleum floor in the kitchen was gone, as was the rotary phone with its long, coiled cable.
At some point, people were standing on the front porch smoking cigarettes, and someone spotted an orb-weaver spider clinging to a web near the porch light. There was a call to “squash” the little arachnid, but I intervened. I remembered watching the same kind of spider build webs when I was a child.
“This is the great-great-great-granddaughter of the spider I used to watch — we can’t kill her!”
I share this memory because I recently moved and have once again returned to my old neighborhood, just a stone’s throw from my old craftsman-style abode on Faxon. It’s strange. I feel a bit like a rabbit, settling down less than a mile from my childhood home. It seems a bit uninspired. On the other hand, I now find myself once again in the neighborhood where I felt a touch of the magical alongside the mundane. How could I not have? From our front porch, we could hear the lions and the howler monkeys at the Memphis Zoo, and we used to walk to the zoo on free admission day. We walked to Overton Park, and I could walk to and from school. But that was two-dozen moves ago. And besides, that old house is a rental now.
When I was a teenager, my mother, sister, and I lived for a time in my aunt and uncle’s garage. Their un-airconditioned garage. In Phoenix, Arizona. To say that was uncomfortable would be the understatement of my life. After a stretch there, my sister and I moved in with my dad in a little house in the woods of Chester County, about 80 or so miles northeast of Memphis. The house was dilapidated and slowly giving up the ghost. My room was the dining room, which acted as something of a hallway. It was the only way to get to the bathroom or kitchen or my sister’s room. If you were in one of those rooms and wanted to get to the living room, my dad’s room, or to leave the house, you had to traipse through my quarters. I was teaching myself to play guitar at the time, and it used to drive my dad absolutely up the walls. Privacy wasn’t really a part of my life back then. Neither were hot water or walls without mice in them.
It’s amazing how acclimated we can get to those kinds of things. Taking cold showers before school, brushing mouse poop out of the bed before sleep. So to me, even years later, our half of this duplex feels like a mansion. Sure, we share a wall with a neighbor, but he seems like a nice guy. He’s quiet as a mouse — quieter, actually. Those little suckers can make a racket completely out of proportion with their size.
I just hope he doesn’t climb the walls if I play a little guitar now and then.
