Homage
Depression-era tar paper, green shag carpet, and hallway roller skating: a tribute to my childhood home.
When my parents bought the house that became my childhood home in the early 1970s, it was an absolute disaster of a place and everyone thought they were crazy. It was a typical Chicago two-flat, skinny and flat-roofed, built in 1873 during the frenzy of construction known as the Great Rebuilding after Mrs. O’Leary’s cow kicked the lantern over and burned half the city down in 1871.
Originally, it was probably built as a duplex, with about 2,500 square feet spread over two floors and a basement, but during the Depression it had been converted into a boardinghouse with six tiny apartments. When my parents bought it, it hadn’t been lived in for a while: the inside was filthy and smelly and dark, with a huge splintery hole in the floorboards on the second story in what would become my parents’ closet. The outside wasn’t much better, with a creaking, death-defying wooden staircase leading up to the creaking, death-defying wooden front porch, and the original wood siding covered in ugly brown tar paper, with a rectangular pattern that was supposed to look like bricks.
My parents hired an architect, who gutted the place down to the studs and then built it back up, a phoenix rising from the ashes. The only interior wall left standing was just inside the front door, separating the entryway from the smallish family room, which we called the “den”—appropriate because that was where we spent most of our time as a pack. The den was where we watched TV and my dad read the paper and my mom did crossword puzzles and where we ate dinner at a round table shoved up against the front windows. When my brother and I left for college, the dinner table was replaced by a couch so that my mother’s yipdog could lie along the back and stare out the windows, keeping an eye on the minuscule patch of front yard that my dad mowed a couple of times every summer with a decrepit orange push mower.
The den led into a galley kitchen with a bright yellow linoleum floor and a trash compactor that stopped compacting sometime around 1978; on the far side of the kitchen was a living room with soaring ceilings that took up the entire back of the house. The rest of the first floor was a long hallway with a hardwood floor that the architect told my parents they should refinish every five years. In the forty-five years they lived in the house, they refinished it zero times. The hallway with its battered floor was the papyrus upon which the hieroglyphics of my childhood were inscribed: games of Mousetrap and Clue and Hungry Hungry Hippos; my gymnastics and ballet practice; my brother’s Hot Wheels racetracks and Star Wars action figures; dancing to the Grease soundtrack; the Bozo buckets games at our birthday parties. We used to roller skate around and around the first floor in the circle created by the hallway and kitchen, with sharp U-turns through the living room and den.
Although the entire inside was renovated from top to bottom before they moved in, my parents never did a single thing to update the outside of the house. The rough, ugly, brick-patterned tar paper that was nailed to the exterior remained, weathering the years and the Chicago winters with Depression-era fortitude. “Who cares what a house looks like on the outside?” my dad always said with a shrug.
[Actually, it’s a lie that they never did anything to the outside. At some point in the early 2000s, the ceiling of the living room started to leak, and it was determined that a section of the tar paper on the back of the house had finally given up the ghost and was letting rain in through the century-old wood underneath. I almost had a heart attack when my mother told me they were actually tearing off the tar paper and putting up siding. What I didn’t realize until the next time I visited is that they only put the siding on the back of the house, where the leak was. The tar paper on the front and sides of the house remained intact, stoically victorious over leaks and unnecessary curb appeal.]
Because it was the 1970s, my childhood bedroom had bright green shag carpeting the color of Astroturf; my brother’s carpet was blood red and made his room look like a permanent homicide scene. His room was slightly bigger than mine but had almost no natural light; the only window was a tiny square porthole set into a weird skinny wall opposite his bed. My room was at the back of the house, with three windows overlooking the gorgeous, ancient maple tree in our tiny backyard. During the boardinghouse era my room had been a kitchen, with a door that had probably led out onto a back landing, so one of my windows was door-sized and stretched from almost the ceiling down to the floor. My parents had to special-order a very long set of blinds for the window; the blinds made a satisfying zzzzzzzhhhhh sound when I pulled them up and down.
I loved my bedroom. I have always liked being by myself, and my childhood room had everything I needed: my books, my Barbies, my ballet posters, my collection of Seventeen and Young Miss magazines, my bed with its white and blue Merimekko comforter. As a child, and even more as a teenager, I remember feeling fiercely protective of my room, like a bear guarding her young. Very little about my room changed over the years: the Barbies eventually got tossed, I suppose, and the Little House on the Prairie and Nancy Drew books were replaced with Sweet Valley High and V.C. Andrews and then by Jane Austen and Margaret Atwood, but the fundamentals, including the green shag carpet, remained the same. There was no reason to change it, no reason at all.
I realize now, as an adult, that this is how my parents felt about the entire house.
I remember them painting the walls exactly once. The non-compacting trash compactor was never replaced; it just became a regular trash can in a drawer. The bright yellow linoleum kitchen floor was also never replaced, and it was decidedly less bright by the time my own kids were crawling on it. They played with the Fisher Price Parking Garage and Fire Station my parents had saved on that same battered, never-refinished hallway floor that my brother and I had destroyed with our roller skates. There was no reason to change it, no reason at all.
My parents’ decision to sell the house happened in the same way that Mike in The Sun Also Rises goes bankrupt: gradually, then all at once. By 2016, they had hemmed and hawed about it for years. I had lived in Minnesota since 2001 with my husband and, eventually, two kids; my brother had settled in Los Angeles with his wife and a new baby boy. The Chicago house was starting to feel like a burden. It was way too big for just the two of them, and the leaky living room ceiling was just the beginning; the tar paper wasn’t the only thing in the house giving up the ghost. My parents started spending a few weeks in Los Angeles every winter to escape the awfulness that is Chicago in January; a few weeks quickly turned into a few months. The developers who had been after them to sell for years smelled blood, and my dad stopped hanging up on them.
The end finally came in December 2016. We were in L.A. visiting my parents for the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and my husband and I had taken the kids to Santa Monica for the day. We had plans to meet my parents for dinner on Third Street, so we made our way up the ramp from the pier to find my dad waiting for us on the corner of Ocean Avenue with big news. “We just sold the house!” he announced with a huge grin. “You did WHAT?” I said, trying to avoid getting trampled by the throngs of people coming off the pier. “We SOLD the HOUSE,” he repeated, as if he couldn’t believe it either. “Well, congratulations and THANK GOD,” I said, laughing and hugging him and trying not to cry.
They sold it for an insane amount of money to one of the blood-sniffing developers, who promptly tore it down and sold the land for an even more insane amount of money to the next-door neighbors, who wanted a side yard and also to not lose the gorgeous, ancient maple tree, which provided their back porch with a lot of very nice shade in the summertime.
About two years ago I had a dream about the house. I dreamed that I was in my room and everything looked exactly like it did when I was growing up: the bed with the white and blue Marimekko comforter, the green shag carpet, the bookshelves and ballet posters covering the walls. In my dream, I noticed that there were bins of dusty cloths on the bed, as if someone had been in the room cleaning. I thought “wait a second, who's been in the house?” since I knew my parents had moved out years ago. And then I remembered that the house had been torn down, and I thought, “this house doesn't exist anymore.” I put my hand on the bed, and it felt just like I knew it would. I thought, “I need to touch everything before this disappears,” and so I walked around my childhood room and touched things: the comforter on the bed, the horrible green shag carpet on the floor, the dresser, the walls, the books on the bookshelf. Everything felt real and solid. I put my hand on my childhood bed one more time and said “I love you,” and then walked out of the room and shut the door behind me. And then I woke up.
Lip quiveringly honest and nostalgic. I loved that room. It was a second home filled with love and so much laughter!
Outstanding. Every word true