Day 126: West & Main

On the corner of West and Main, there stands a house.

The front door is custom hand-carved redwood; the doorknob, iron . It stands exactly 8 ft high. Behind the door lies seven feet and three inches of carpet. The entryway leads to an open room, twenty-two feet by sixteen. Clockwise, starting at the north-east corner, you have a couch, two sitting chairs split by a end table, a piano, and a fireplace. From here, most people go to the kitchen. The kitchen itself is rather unassuming; most of the appliances are aged gas-operated machines. The small dining room table sits lower than the rest of the kitchen, surrounded by five chairs.

After the kitchen, there's the two hallways. The first has five doors. The first door on the left leads to a pink room. The door after it, a blue room. The room at the end of the hall is beige, though you wouldn't know for all the stuffed bookshelves that line the room. On the right, there's the bathroom, recently renovated with hardwood flooring. The last room is empty, both in color and furnishing.

The second hallway is only four feet long, but it leads to the master bedroom, complete with high ceilings and black/white contrasts. The master bath is home to the building's only dedicated bathtub, the kind with the jacuzzi attachments. Outside the windows lies the rear of the house, a spacious backyard that's nigh impossible to fill. The fences were put up one by one over the years as the neighbors moved in.

The house itself is rather unassuming. It stands and exists, just as complete as whenever it was built thirty-six years ago.

Actually, no. That's a lie. The house is incomplete. It stands empty, because I made it empty. You see, that house used to be a home to a lovely suburban family with a man, his wife, and their slightly above average number of three children.

The house that stands at West and Main was my home. I remember a day when turning that final corner and seeing it was often the best moment of day because I knew my family waited inside. That front door was hand-carved by my father and I. It took us all summer, but the end result was attached to our door frame before I left for college. When my parents died, I moved it here. I had to have the entryway redone to fit the larger door.

Behind that door lies seven feet and three inches of carpet. I have scrubbed at that carpet once a week for the past eight years, and I cannot get the smell of dog pee out. Oliver and Abigail both could never train Samantha quite right. The old girl always barely made to the door before she couldn't wait any longer. I never minded cleaning it up, though. The entryway walls were adorned with photographs – when Alice and I had met, wed, vacationed, the pregnancy chronicles, and family photographs as one by one our family had grown larger. This was my happy place; where I could always go to relax; run down memory lane as smiles replayed themselves through my head.

Past the entryway is the living room. Clockwise, starting at the north-east corner, you have a couch, two sitting chairs split by a end table, a piano, and a fireplace. The couch had always been reserved for guests, and then as the years wore on, our children. The two chairs facing the fireplace were reading chairs; at any given time a stack of books knee high were stacked next to each chair, a reminder of long nights spent together in far away places. The piano was mine, and as time wore on Oliver's as well. The boy had a knack for music that I was only a mere shadow of. His reading music was better than anything I've ever bought with money.

The kitchen. Each appliance was inherited, a parting gift in our parent's will to complete our home. Saturday mornings were pancake mornings. Abigail woke up at the crack of dawn to get fresh eggs from the chicken coop that the neighbors always complained about. Michelle and Oliver would take turns beating the batter with the whisk, often to a happy tune Abigail would bless us with as she helped her mother prepare the skillet. The kids loved peanut butter pancakes; a taste acquired from their mother that I couldn't ever stomach. But I ate them anyway. The dishes were always washed and put away immediately. So many Saturdays we spent at the park, walking one of the many rescue dogs that paraded through our yards as the years wore on. The kids loved each one as much as they loved Samantha. Each dog was family.

That first hallway belonged to them. Michelle had the pink room. The youngest of our three children, she had her walls covered in black leaves and balloons, blowing in an invisible wind in the field of her young imagination. She had painted the first branch of leaves herself with finger-paint we'd left out. She finished the entire room with her mother, who added balloons as her own personal touch. Michelle always talked about flying away to places she'd heard of; maybe one day she'll go. But not yet; she's far too young.

Next is Oliver's room. Alternating dark and light blue stripes line the walls. Above his headboard hung his first violin, a small beat up thing his mother had given me years ago that had been passed down to him. Below it was a blue-ribbon that he'd won at State as a soloist freshman year of high school. On his desk was a photograph of a girl he'd met there, a lovely thing with piercing green eyes. He'd never told me her name, but I think she was the only reason he's ever wanted to go back. I can see so much of me in his face, but thank the L-RD that he had his mother's eyes. They are no one color, but are both green, blue, grey, and hazel at the same time. He's already composed his first movie score; a short that he and his friend had put together. They both could go a long way, if they wanted. They possess the skill, but lack the ambition.

The white room was Abigail's. She'd left at the early age of sixteen to pursue her dancing career. Her mother gave her that passion. She was in Chicago now, dancing full-time for the main stage, but she hears talk about moving her to New York. We've never missed a single opening night. She was always my little girl, you know? But she was never settled here. Her room was always barren beyond the necessities. 'Who needs possessions when you have a passion?' she'd asked me. She knew what she wanted, and may G-d damn anyone who got in her way.

The middle room was my office. On one shelf I had leaf pages, printed and haphazardly stacked about as I frantically searched for the next big idea. That's what was on the other shelf; my big ideas bound in leather, sold on the market. Not all the books were mine; I had to pay my respects to every writer who I'd ever read and learned from. But the middle, that was my desk. Everything I'd ever penned after College came from that desk. It'd seen tears, heard screams, and it's seen the best and the worst of me. When we'd first bought the house, before Abigail had come to us, I always thought that my writing time would be my time, and that I'd have to make sure to spend time with my kids before their bedtime. But I could never close the door, never keep them out. Like their mom, they were my everything. I owed it all to them. 'You can't compartmentalize your life away; you are the sum of it's parts'. I penned it and hung it above my desk as a reminder.

After the wedding, Alice and I came to what was now our house. Our new home symbolizing all that was our life and our future together. I'd carried her in, straight through that short narrow hallway to our bedroom. It was our sanctuary. We'd forged a family together in that room, a lovely room where all the world and it's pretenses were stripped away. Outside that room, we were but a man and woman joined in marriage. Inside that room, we were a single being; G-D's greatest creation. Every morning, it overwhelmed me that such a captivating creature could love me. I felt that we were unseparable, even unto death and beyond. We were the greatest love story I'd ever know. Above our headboard hung a picture frame. The photograph was from the Grand Canyon for our first anniversary. We had screamed at the morning sunrise together, our fists raised as we quoted our favorite poet. “We celebrate ourselves!” It was our challenge to the world, and the world had yet to answer.

We spent years in that home.Any soul who needed a home was always welcome in ours. But time wore us down. Our kids grew old, and they moved away. We grew old, and withered away. Grandkids came and went, and then great-grandkids. Our last family photograph as a family had twenty souls in it, every one of them the product of our union.

But that house on West and Main, as lovely as it was, never existed. I never watched it age. I never filled it with my music, my children, or my love. Every memory I have of that house is a painful dream, because it is all dependent on one thing – my love, my devotion, my undivided attention to Alice. It was what my life could've been. It was what my life should've been. It's how I'd always dreamed of it being. But now my dreams torment me every time I close my eyes. The sound of Abigail's voice, her swift and subtle movements; Oliver's fingers across the keys as his eyes read the handwritten sheets, Michelle's deft strokes as her vision guided her hands. The faces of my unborn children are so beautiful; just as beautiful as their mother's, and I know hers by touch.