I loved, loved, loved hearing where you all live. Every time a new comment appeared after my last post, I’d inwardly clap my hands with glee—and I would have done it outwardly, but I was in a coffee shop. It was fascinating, and helpful, and just…nice, to hear your stories and to be able to place you somewhere physical.
I was also pleased by how many of you share my fear of being alone in a house. For once, I seem to possess a fairly standard level of neurosis about something. I am very impressed with myself.
In case you are interested, here is MY housing history, in something-rather-larger-than-a-nutshell:
I was born in Boston (well, Cambridge), and lived with my parents (as was the custom at the time) in Harvard “Married Student Housing,” while my mother attended law school. I have no real memories of our apartment, but my mother tells a delightful story about reaching over in the night for my bottle and finding it covered with cockroaches. They call that “character.”
We moved to Minnesota when I was a couple of years old, and lived briefly with my then-single uncle in his apartment. Eventually we attracted the notice of his landlord, and he was evicted—as if sharing a bachelor pad with his older sister, brother-in-law, and their toddler hadn’t been pleasure enough.
Next we moved to a duplex in Northeast Minneapolis. We lived first in the upper level, of which my memories are clear, but possibly not to be trusted. I seem to recall an incident with a lake of fire and dragons? As near as I can tell, this was more realistically a product of the orange shag carpeting in my bedroom and the sudden entrance of firepeople due to a neighbor’s oven, but whatever the details, I was very pleased when we moved to the lower level. The house was blue and white with a red door, and we had a narrow yard, and irises by the front stoop. The neighborhood was mostly students and immigrants. A girl named Amelia lived across the alley—her house was dark and her mother and grandmother spoke Polish; they taught me a few words I have long since forgotten.
It was definitely the fraying edge, but as a kid, I LOVED that neighborhood. The sidewalks were treacherously uneven. I rode my training-wheeled bike around, and there was a candy store that sold those colored-sugar-dots-on-paper—very boring candy, made exciting by the fact that the shop was located around the corner, on ANOTHER STREET, and thus I technically wasn’t allowed to go there. My best friend—named, like seemingly every other girl at the time, Jenny—lived down the block, in the house where “Untamed Heart” would be filmed some years later (we spent hours on that porch swing). A car caught fire across the street, once, which was thrilling. I was bused out of the neighborhood to an Open School, because the local schoolyard was at the time colorfully peppered with drug dealers. Our house had a mouse problem. We went to donut shops a lot, and to the university bookstore to ogle the excellent pen selection, and to a diner in some sort of train car, and to St. Anthony Main, which had a fabulous toy store and a book store called Gringolet.
When I was eight-ish we moved to the suburbs. At first it seemed like a good idea—I would have my own room, while until then I’d been sharing with my brother. But…no. I missed my friends and didn’t seem to fit in. People were religious, and I was constantly being ostentatiously prayed for, which I resented mightily. I was confused by the lack of sidewalks, and felt nervous walking RIGHT IN THE STREET, which would’ve gotten you run over where I’d lived before. People wore different clothes (“punk” had been a big look in my old neighborhood), and listened to different music—Debbie Gibson instead of Madonna—and the teachers no longer found me charming. At my old school, I’d learned Spanish and been on the literary magazine, learned to sew and to sing in myriad languages. I’d taken pottery, and some sort of class where we read books about death (Taste of Blackberries, 1000 Paper Cranes—I can’t quite imagine what that class would have been, for a first grader.) My new school was boring, and the lunches sucked.
My room had carpet—which I hated, and eventually ripped out all by myself. Carpet has always depressed me terribly; I’m not sure why. Even now, I will only consider houses with carpet if they are cheap enough that we can afford to re-do the floors. (I know. Stupid. Who else is plunged into a fit of ennui by flooring?)
I was mocked relentlessly until my junior year of high school, when the particular subculture I was involved in became fashionable. I had the surreal experience, then, of being chatted up by a boy who had SPIT ON ME only the year before. I hung around Minneapolis and made other friends, many days taking the long bus ride into the city after school.
Our house looked exactly like all of the others, and even though I lived there until I was 16, I felt no attachment to it when I left. The house we moved into afterwards felt more like home, even though I was there only a few years before leaving for college. Home is quite obviously more than where you reside.
During my junior year we moved to St. Paul, into a house in a beautiful residential part of the city (a house my brother still lives in.) I switched schools my senior year. My new school was diverse, urban, lovely, and I already had friends there. The administrators didn’t treat me like a criminal because of the way I dressed. The classes were challenging, and there were enough textbooks to go around because the budget hadn’t been depleted by absurdly inappropriate expenditures on sports. Our neighborhood we lived in felt like a small town, and you could walk to restaurants, a corner grocery, a library, and shops. My first serious boyfriend worked at the aforementioned grocery, and my first job was at the diner down the block. I would eventually buy my wedding dress in one of the shops across the street.
I am running out of time. This was going to be a tiny little entry, just wee capsule descriptions, but I got sucked in somehow. I think I will pick it up again tomorrow, with my move to NY, and then my first apartments. If any of you feel inspired to write similar entries, please link to them below, because I can’t seem to get enough of reading about where people live or have lived. It’s a sickness.
Before I go, I will say that what I was most struck by when remembering these places was that the difference between the city and the suburbs boiled down to a feeling of intimacy. Cities are sometimes painted as being impersonal while suburbs are cozier, but in my experience, the suburbs felt isolating while cities have felt more communal. I am sure this is not true for all cities or suburbs, but it was definitely that way for me, and I think this is why I have such strong feelings about it today—possibly in the absence of supporting logic. It’s interesting to note that now, I probably wouldn’t be likely to buy a place that fit the description of our duplex in Northeast Minneapolis, even though my 7-year-old self adored it, and I can see quite clearly why my parents chose to move to a (very-near-to-the-city) suburb. I like the country, believe it or not. Why I should feel drawn only to the ends of the urban/rural continuum I do not know.
Ahem. My god. How I do run on.
*Update* So, according to my mother—who sent me an email that began “Lies! Lies!” my uncle was NOT kicked out of his apartment, after all. I heard that tidbit from my father, who has a rather casual relationship with the truth, so she may be right.
However she ALSO denies the bottle cockroaches, claiming there was simply a little cockroach shoe-slapping by my grandmother, and on that point I refuse to allow her whitewashing of history. I KNOW WHAT I WAS TOLD.
