Family Dreams

The family moves in. It's a nice family. The wife and the husband have been married for about seven years. They have a girl and a little boy, who is almost two. The dad has a good job, and the mom stays home with the kids. She's 33, he's 37. They're moving here from Farmers Branch, seems they ran out of room at their old house. They've finally got enough money to buy a brand new home. It's a new house, in a great neighborhood that's developing. Highlands North, they call it. Good families, great public school system.

The year is 1978. It's a house in the middle of a quiet street. A good development. Brick homes, big alleyways, new streets. A two car garage which is perfect for mom's rust red 1978 Oldsmobile and dad's brand new 1979 10th anniversary
silver Trans Am with an 8-track tape deck, t-tops and the giant bird on the hood. There are two trees in the front yard. They're small now, but they'll grow. The maple tree will end up dropping propeller seed pods that will create endless fun for the kids. At night, you can look up to the left and see Orion.

When you move in, you have to remember to take photos of the house for insurance purposes. It's brand new, nobody has ever lived here before. Nobody ever used that shower, nobody has played baseball in that back yard, nobody has ever cooked a meal in that kitchen, nobody ever burned up their Saturday playing Atari on that TV, nobody has ever fallen in love in this house, or had a fight in this house, nobody ever had Christmas in this house, or stayed out too late, or said things they wish they hadn't. Nobody ever laughed too loud in this house or drank too much in this house. The sounds of the piano, and the oboe, and the trombone, never filled this house. Nobody ever practiced their flag drills in the back yard for the marching band. The house never saw a game of hide and seek. The cat never barfed on the carpet. None of this happened. It was all brand new.
All that there was were the hopes and dreams of this young family and the promise that their kids would have a nice safe place to grow up.

And we did. The neighborhood filled up with families and their young kids. The Starks, the Werners, the Jablos, the Colemans, the Dillingers, the Bernsteins, and the Newbrands, and the Zapolskys, and the Sherouses, and the Shillers, and the Francos, and the Spillmans, and the Bertchers, and the Reaves, and the Suttons, and the Chases, and the Cottens, and the McElvaneys, and the Flutches, and the Hultzes and the Minters and the Pattersons and the Greys and the Ellises and the names that go on and on and on. They all came. They all had their dreams. And the promises of their kids.

The parents were all young. The kids were all .... kids. We went to Bowie and we rode our bikes and we heard about how Reagan got shot, but we didn't know what that meant. We rode our big wheels in the street because there was never any cars, and besides, we had a big flag sticking up on it so cars would see us. We weren't allowed to cross Meandering Way, but we sure could ride our bikes in the dirt under the powerlines. We played with Star Wars figures until they broke and our mothers glued them back together again. We played tackle football in front yards in bugle boy pants pretending we were the 1985 Chicago Bears.

Mom and dad had friends in the neighborhood. They would get together and stay up late and make noise and laugh and play music after the kids were supposed to be asleep. When you came in the house and the kitchen was filled with cigarette smoke and laughter, you knew which friend that was. It was a new neighborhood with young people.

The house got older. Things got spilled and broken. Friends came over, we hosted Thanksgiving, Santa Claus came every year, looking remarkably like the older neighbor one street over. The backyard grew a swingset, which replaced a custom-built bicentennial "Sprit of '76" sandbox. We got a VCR in 1984, so now we could record anything we want to watch. Bones got broken, bikes got wrecked. Pets came and pets left. Bottle rockets exploded in the back yard. Attic spaces became filled with boxes of mounting memories. Friendships began and ended and began again. Fights happened. Sometimes fights you don't want to remember. But they happened there. In that house where that young family took those photos for the insurance company so they'd remember what they had.

It was the mid 80s. The Challenger exploded, I broke my leg, we got an Apple IIGS Computer with the Oregon Trail and a dot matrix printer and call waiting. We played soccer and baseball and went to the mall to play video games.

But the perfect families are never perfect, and our neighborhood was no different. Moms and dads split up. Some families went through unspeakable tragedy. Sometimes we knew. Sometimes we didn't know until much later. Sometimes we went through our own tragedies. Sometimes people knew, but a lot of time they didn't. Then came one day when we were sat down in my room to have a talk about how dad would live somewhere else. And then it was three of us in our house in our nice neighborhood. Mom was in her mid 40s at this point. And now she was alone with just a teenage daughter and a troublemaking son. She didn't stay home any more, she taught school, but not at our school. So this home became more independent. We let ourselves in, we heard the term "latchkey kids" but didn't understand why that was such a bad thing. After all, we could drink as much soda as we wanted when we got home, there wasn't anyone there to tell us no. The kitchen oven made frozen pizza taste like it came from a restaurant.

Mom eventually dated, some of these guys were pretty nice. But nobody was really into both us and her, which is to say, nobody was right. Until somebody was. Mom got remarried in 1994. By then, the house was showing its age. The latch on the fence broke. The basketball goal started falling apart. Some walls cracked. The maple tree in the front yard got too large and sick and had to come out. Fortunately, this new guy knew how to fix this stuff. Soon the linoleum floor in the kitchen gave way to tile. Counters changed. Appliances change. Some scars of time stayed. The holes in the wall where I tried to hang my CD case, the cracks in the garage floor where the settling happened. Wood in the house was new in 1978, but now it was rotted and had to be replaced. The brick containers by the alley for the trash bins that all the houses had started disappearing one by one until nobody had the brick containers for their trash bins any more.

The house was there for my sister and me as well. Bikes gave way to cars, which led to the inevitable bad decisions of 16 year olds driving cars. The 1984 Honda became a 1985 Honda after the 84 model got wrecked. That 1985 Honda barely survived the torture its manual transmission was run through from both my driving and the demands of delivering Campisis Pizza throughout North Dallas and Plano.

The house saw my sister and me grow up, moving from Bowie to Westwood Junior High on to Pearce. We had our crushes and their loves and their heartbreaks. First kisses and long telephone calls. New friends at new schools and the drama of getting older. Days and nights safe in our rooms in our safe house in our safe neighborhood listening to music or just thinking about our place in life. The house heard the laughter of singing made up songs about how a "boligrafo" is not a "pluma" for some unknown reason that they didn't teach you in Spanish class. It saw the bad ideas connected with a three person singshot or a half dozen 17 year old boys riding around in a Jeep Wrangler in the spring. It saw my stepfather "hide" the beer he found in my car so mom wouldn't find it. He hid it in his belly. It saw Friday night band parties after football games. It saw prom and the folly of 18 year old kids acting like grown up sophisticates in their tuxedoes and dresses and rented limousines.

It was the mid 90s. Bill Clinton became President, Kurt Cobain died, Waco burned, some asshole blew up a building in Oklahoma City. My car stereo had a cassette player.

Sister went to college in 92. I followed her in 95. We'd both come home to visit, and for holiday breaks. We still had Christmas. And summers, although those became less. We had new friends from school, and they didn't live in our neighborhood. We got jobs of our own. Colorado and Utah, and Arizona and North Carolina. Graduate schools and relationships that began to look like families of our own.

Families moved. Some moved up, to bigger neighborhoods with wealthier neighbors. Some just moved on. One by one all the names of the neighborhood became the "old 'X' house." Oh that house? That's the old Smith house. Because the Smiths didn't live there anymore. After a while, you notice that there are more "old 'X' houses" than there are familiar neighbors.

Parents split up. Some parents died. Friends of mom and dad died. How could they get cancer? They aren't that old. Or am I just remembering the version of them from 1982? The kids became adults and they fluttered away like butterflies in a field.

All from this neighborhood where their parents moved in with the hopes and dreams of young families and the promises that their kids would have a nice safe place to grow up.

When the original families started leaving, they were replaced by new families, but who could relate to them? They were all so young. Families in their 30s with infant children. What were they doing here? The neighbor in the house across the street? Don't know them. Come to think of it, I don't know anybody on the opposite side of the street. Who lives in Nathan's old house? I don't know. What about the Sutton's place on the corner? Never met them.

Grandchildren came along, four in all. They stay overnight in the rooms that had been their parents rooms when they were children. See that weird hole in the wall? I did that in 1991. That cross pattern still indented in the carpet, that was from the waterbed. "What's a waterbed?" Well that's a longer story. See this tennis ball? I bet you can't throw it over the roof ... we used to call that a "roofer." The grandchildren play in the sandboxes in about the same spot as where their parents played in their "Sprit of '76" sandbox, but time is a relentless villain. Before you can blink, they're too old for that. Too old for plastic pools in the yard and water fights with grandma.

After a while, the home that held the promise of the future in a neighborhood of shared promise stands out like an island. It's just this old house with this old couple who have been there since the place was built, if you can believe that. Way back when insurance photos were in black and white. That little boy in the photos is now that old guy with the graying beard who sometimes shows up with his family to visit. He's 43 now. His parents are well into their 70s. The house is so big. And it's just them. They're the last original owners on Kevin Drive.

and that's when you know it's time to go.

After 42 years, it's time to give the keys to someone else. So they can live their hopes and their dreams and give their children the promise of a nice safe place to grow up, in a neighborhood that's now full of young families like them. Families that will see their kids grow up, and fall in love, and have their hearts broken, and fight and laugh. Families that will watch their kids become adults and leave, only to return with kids of their own. Just like we did.

The homes are all older, I think that means this is an "established" neighborhood, but what it really means is that everybody has to factor in the cost of opening a kitchen up and scraping the popcorn texture off the ceilings when they buy the place.

All of the stuff is gone. The home is reduced to what amounts to a large garage sale wiping out the detritus of four decades of living that you don't really need. The built up collection of clothes and pictures and boxes and unfinished projects and dated furniture that was once brand new and frames and books and baseball cards. it's all gone. The slate is clean for a new set of memories. For a new family. 

It's still a good safe neighborhood with excellent public schools. Take the pictures when you move in. For insurance purposes.