Homes

Though it never occurred to me until much later in life, my family was what used to be known as “lower middle class,” a term seldom if ever heard any more. It applied to financial status, but I never cared for its other connotations. Both my parents worked very hard all their lives and despite the fact that neither of them graduated from high school, they did their very best to see to it that I never wanted for anything that was really important in a child’s life.

The first home I remember was the 14' trailer in which we lived in Gary, Indiana during the time I had my broken leg, and which I described in an earlier entry. Imagine if you will two adults and a five-year-old boy, in a full body cast from just under his armpits to below his knees, living in a total area of about 114 square feet. Oh, yes, and we had a dog. As I have mentioned before, the smell of kerosene still pulls me back in time and I see my mom priming the stove with a small hand pump to get the kerosene flowing. I can still hear the hiss of the gas and the “pop” of when the kerosene ignited.

The next home I remember was, in fact, a converted garage in Loves Park, Illinois, a suburb of Rockford. The bathroom was a small wooden 5'x5'x7' (if that) rectangle in the back of the property. We lived there during my first two years of school. The school was less than a block away, and I have fond memories of, in spring, using a flat piece of plywood to skim across the water-filled empty lot between our house and the school.

The one-block-long, dead end street on which we lived was named “Loves Court” and it was here I had my first introductions to sex: playing “you show me yours” with a girl classmate in an overturned outhouse—which, as I’ve said elsewhere, totally revolted me and slammed the door firmly on any however remote a chance there might have been that I could ever have been  straight. The same game with a male classmate, on the other hand confirmed what I already knew. I liked boys, not girls.

From Loves Court we moved to 328 Blackhawk Avenue, on Rockford’s south side. A tiny, four-room structure, it was still another step up in my parents’ march through life.  I think they paid $2,500 for it. It was set far back on a nice lot with a dirt driveway a sagging garage of its own, and another outhouse, from the roof of which I one time fell while playing, getting my pants caught on a nail on the way down and hanging there, upside down, until my mother came—as she always did—to my rescue.

Our next real home was a two-story duplex, at 2012 Hutchins Avenue, on Rockford’s east side. It had at one time had a grocery store on the ground floor with an apartment above, and it sat nearly on the sidewalk. It had a none-too-stable one-car garage which, like the house, had a flat roof. It also had a very nice back yard with a cherry tree and a fish pond my dad and I built.

When Uncle Buck died, Aunt Thyra moved from the Fearn family home (in which my mother was born and my grandmother had died) at 1720 School Street on Rockford’s west side, and my parents bought it. It was the only “real” house that we had ever lived in.

I was in college at that time, and went off on my own. When I moved to Los Angeles, after sharing a house on Tareco Drive with Uncle Bob, I bought my first home, on Troost St. in North Hollywood. My parents had to co-sign for it because, incredible as it sounds, banks would not give home loans to single men.

It was a great house, and I loved it. A swimming pool, a beautiful patio with a huge avocado tree and a flowering bush I never did find the name of, which, when in bloom, smelled like crushed bananas.

I was there about five or six years before buying an even larger home at the edge of the Angelus National Forest. It backed up on the steep foothills which attracted coyotes and rattlesnakes. It was by far the nicest of the homes in which I’ve lived.

I then moved to Pence, Wisconsin, for reasons which will be the subject of a future entry, and had two houses there, which will best be left also for another entry.

“Good Lord, Roger!”, I hear Dorien asking: “Of what interest can this be to anyone?”

He has a point.
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This blog is from Dorien's collection of blogs written after his book, “Short Circuits,” available from UntreedReads.com and Amazon.com, was published. That book is also available as an audio book from Amazon/Audible.com. I am looking at the possibility of publishing a second volume of blogs. The blogs now being posted are from that tentative collection. You can find information about all of Dorien's books at his web site: www.doriengrey.com.