Childhood's dead; time to bury the bones.
May. 15th, 2012 06:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
redneckgaijinI begin with: And this, too, shall pass.
From about December 1977 (and possibly for periods before- I turned four in January 1978, so my memories are cloudy), roughly (not long before my fourth birthday) to November 1980 I lived in what at one point had been my grandparents' honeymoon cottage- a house cobbled together from two or three squatters' shacks sometime around 1941, about the time when the oil boom first touched this particular spot in southeastern Texas. It was pretty much a shack back then, and time was not kind to it over the years. I live next to it now, and have done for the past fourteen years.
After I lived in it, it was left to sit for a while, unused. In 1993 my father, due to much nagging and excruciatingly poor advice from my grandmother, added a room to the front of it to make it an antique shop... on a highway twenty miles from gas... behind a fence and gate. As you might guess, it didn't work well.
When my father died in February 1999, the shop-warehouse became the junk shed- our storage place for anything that had to be kept out of the weather.
Then Hurricane Rita came, and pulled part of the roof off. We had no money to fix the roof- our homeowner's insurance classified the building as an "outlying structure" along with the fence, trees, etc. and included it in the $500 maximum payout for all damage to such. Rain came in the hole, and we did nothing about it. We couldn't afford to. Nobody else in the family was interested in doing anything about it, either.
Hurricane Ike came and made the hole in the roof even bigger.
And now it's like this:
Most of what you see here is the addition Dad built, mostly from second-class or reject lumber. The house itself has yaupon and other brush grown up in front of it in the years since Dad died.
On the other side you can see the damage clearly, including where wood rot from the rain has started to tear the building apart.
In the back you can see a little bit of what the house looked like back when it was still a house, still kept up, still inhabitable.
Now for the inside.
This is the front room of what was the shop- the first thing you see as you enter the door. This played no part of my childhood- there was a front porch here when I lived in it, with a screen door that fastened by a hook and eye. Mostly this room represents to me a grave mistake in my father's life- it cost him several thousand dollars to build, when he could have (and wanted to) pay down credit cards instead. He ended up declaring bankruptcy somewhere around 1996, losing a truck, a boat, and most other possessions of value.
This room is why I never, ever listen to my grandmother's advice on any business matters. Between this and other moves she nagged my grandfather into when he was alive, her advice was always, without exception, 100% BAD.
Onward to the worst damage...
This was, when I was little, the living room- the first room you entered coming in from the porch. You can see a bit of the master bedroom through the door in background. When I tell the Magical Disappearing Beer story, this is the room I remember when I tell it (though I much doubt, looking back, that it actually was in this room). If you look at the red patches on the part of the sheet rock that hasn't fallen in? I used to see animals and cartoon characters in the patterns it made.
Water and mold have pretty much destroyed everything that was in here- including the floor. Part has fallen in, and much of the rest is too rotten to walk on safely.
The master bedroom. My first clear memory of Forbidden Territory; the lair of the parents. As you see, the sheet rock is sagging here too where some rainwater has come this way.
The wooden box you see with peeling paneling is an old wire recorder. It hasn't worked for years, and the only recording we have left is the tangled spool in it. My dad wouldn't sell it- practically the only thing he never, ever considered selling, because one spool we used to have had a recording of my aunt, as a young woman, singing, something I can't recall her doing myself.
The louvers you see in the back wall open and close to reveal a giant fan. That fan was the sole cooling system the house had in summer when I was a kid. In winter there was one propane radiator in the living room, plus the gas stove.
The window I looked out as a child. The only phone in the house was in my room. Also, you had to walk through my room to get to the kitchen/dining room; the door between master bedroom and kitchen was often jammed and usually blocked by the dining table.
I don't know whether Dad got them for me, or for someone else, but I had a full fifteen-volume set of Childcraft since as long as I can remember. Sadly, they're long gone; haven't seen any of them since high school.
The kitchen. Despite the jumble you see, this is the room most like as it was when it was lived in. The stove you see actually came out of the house I currently live in when we quit using propane.
The back room, used during my childhood as a guest bedroom. To my recollection it was used for that purpose only once, when my mother's parents came up from Corpus Christi to escape Hurricane Fred. (I -think- it was Fred...)
Among the boxes here are a couple that were never unpacked since I moved back to the Thicket from San Antonio- mostly 3 1/2 floppies for games and such, old paperwork I didn't need then, much less now, Robert Jordan books I couldn't sell and got sick of reading, etc.
The bathroom. Part of me wants to say I completed toilet training in this room; if I did, I was horribly late!!
So, what memories do I have? I remember many times reaching up over my bed to the breaker box to switch on or off the air compressor that drove water up from the well into the concrete septic tank my grandfather used to build a cistern. (This system was used until I was in junior high; after my grandfather died, a new well was dug to a different aquifer that wasn't full of iron oxide and sulfur. For that one we had an in-line pump and a pressurized tank.)
I remember being hung-over and sick as hell, when Dad let me drink under his supervision as a very little kid. Intentionally or not, it was a totally effective way to put me off alcohol for life.
I remember long, hot days of being bored out of my mind, re-reading the school textbooks the distant cousins brought to me when they discovered my ability to read before entering school.
I remember wetting the bed and using the throw pillows on my bed to soak it up, terrified of the whipping I would get if discovered. (I didn't get whipped nearly as much as I feared at the time, but at the time I feared ANY bad thing would lead to a whipping.)
I remember running around outside in my underwear until my father told me, without any whippings needed, that it was an embarrassment to him and my mother when I did so.
I remember my terror of stinging insects (which I mostly retain), especially the highly territorial carpenter bees... that don't actually sting, but when they hover an inch from your nose trying to scare you into backing off, it's effective.
I remember being up at 5 AM because the school bus came at 5:30, taking an hour and a half to cover a route not longer than ten miles long, and watching the first thing that came on KJAC NBC-4 Beaumont weekday mornings- "Battle of the Planets."
I remember freezing in winter and sweltering in summer, spending a lot of time in my grandparents' trailer house because it was climate-controlled.
I remember my parents and some of their friends playing Pong around about 1979 or so. I wasn't allowed to even lay hands on it, and the system vanished before we got the Atari 2600 for Christmas 1980.
I remember, as a middle schooler entering puberty, sneaking over to the abandoned house and digging around in the master bedroom closet for my dad's porn collection. Even then I focused on the comics, taking most of them to my room at mom's house (where, one way or another, they eventually vanished).
I remember being awakened in the night to be told that we were going to Corpus Christi, immediately, get in the car. My mother's mother had died.
I remember being completely useless at slot cars and at a woodburning kit, both set up in the kitchen of the abandoned house to keep potential fire hazards out of my grandmother's trailer.
I remember Christmases where half the toys would be hand-me-downs from my aunt's kids, the other half either very cheap or educational.
I have a lot of other vague memories associated with that building... but most of them are of a building that hasn't existed since my dad added that shop room to the front. The house of my youth died, for all purposes, when that was done. It wasn't the same since.
And now the structure itself is about to die.
I'm writing this now, and taking these photographs, because by the time I get back from A-Kon, probably sooner, the building will be torn down and all its contents and components hauled away. The people doing it want the salvagable lumber, roof tin, and contents, plus some scrap metal we have. We won't be out a dime. The brush will be cleared back, fences and stuff removed, and the spot of ground on which it sits will be bare for the first time in seventy years.
My memories will fade, and when I die they'll either vanish or go with me to whatever afterlife might await. These photos likely won't even last that long, even with the forever nature of the Internet. Something new, a shed or a used portable building of some sort, will eventually go up on the spot, and WLP's stock will move into it. And that, too, eventually will pass, and something new will be built, or else the Big Thicket will reclaim what man once took from it.
And this too, shall pass. One life, or one portion of life, vanishes from view, leaving no trace... but something new always comes afterwards.
I'm a little sad to see it die... and much relieved that the rotting deathtrap and all its junk will soon be out of my life.
From about December 1977 (and possibly for periods before- I turned four in January 1978, so my memories are cloudy), roughly (not long before my fourth birthday) to November 1980 I lived in what at one point had been my grandparents' honeymoon cottage- a house cobbled together from two or three squatters' shacks sometime around 1941, about the time when the oil boom first touched this particular spot in southeastern Texas. It was pretty much a shack back then, and time was not kind to it over the years. I live next to it now, and have done for the past fourteen years.
After I lived in it, it was left to sit for a while, unused. In 1993 my father, due to much nagging and excruciatingly poor advice from my grandmother, added a room to the front of it to make it an antique shop... on a highway twenty miles from gas... behind a fence and gate. As you might guess, it didn't work well.
When my father died in February 1999, the shop-warehouse became the junk shed- our storage place for anything that had to be kept out of the weather.
Then Hurricane Rita came, and pulled part of the roof off. We had no money to fix the roof- our homeowner's insurance classified the building as an "outlying structure" along with the fence, trees, etc. and included it in the $500 maximum payout for all damage to such. Rain came in the hole, and we did nothing about it. We couldn't afford to. Nobody else in the family was interested in doing anything about it, either.
Hurricane Ike came and made the hole in the roof even bigger.
And now it's like this:
Most of what you see here is the addition Dad built, mostly from second-class or reject lumber. The house itself has yaupon and other brush grown up in front of it in the years since Dad died.
On the other side you can see the damage clearly, including where wood rot from the rain has started to tear the building apart.
In the back you can see a little bit of what the house looked like back when it was still a house, still kept up, still inhabitable.
Now for the inside.
This is the front room of what was the shop- the first thing you see as you enter the door. This played no part of my childhood- there was a front porch here when I lived in it, with a screen door that fastened by a hook and eye. Mostly this room represents to me a grave mistake in my father's life- it cost him several thousand dollars to build, when he could have (and wanted to) pay down credit cards instead. He ended up declaring bankruptcy somewhere around 1996, losing a truck, a boat, and most other possessions of value.
This room is why I never, ever listen to my grandmother's advice on any business matters. Between this and other moves she nagged my grandfather into when he was alive, her advice was always, without exception, 100% BAD.
Onward to the worst damage...
This was, when I was little, the living room- the first room you entered coming in from the porch. You can see a bit of the master bedroom through the door in background. When I tell the Magical Disappearing Beer story, this is the room I remember when I tell it (though I much doubt, looking back, that it actually was in this room). If you look at the red patches on the part of the sheet rock that hasn't fallen in? I used to see animals and cartoon characters in the patterns it made.
Water and mold have pretty much destroyed everything that was in here- including the floor. Part has fallen in, and much of the rest is too rotten to walk on safely.
The master bedroom. My first clear memory of Forbidden Territory; the lair of the parents. As you see, the sheet rock is sagging here too where some rainwater has come this way.
The wooden box you see with peeling paneling is an old wire recorder. It hasn't worked for years, and the only recording we have left is the tangled spool in it. My dad wouldn't sell it- practically the only thing he never, ever considered selling, because one spool we used to have had a recording of my aunt, as a young woman, singing, something I can't recall her doing myself.
The louvers you see in the back wall open and close to reveal a giant fan. That fan was the sole cooling system the house had in summer when I was a kid. In winter there was one propane radiator in the living room, plus the gas stove.
The window I looked out as a child. The only phone in the house was in my room. Also, you had to walk through my room to get to the kitchen/dining room; the door between master bedroom and kitchen was often jammed and usually blocked by the dining table.
I don't know whether Dad got them for me, or for someone else, but I had a full fifteen-volume set of Childcraft since as long as I can remember. Sadly, they're long gone; haven't seen any of them since high school.
The kitchen. Despite the jumble you see, this is the room most like as it was when it was lived in. The stove you see actually came out of the house I currently live in when we quit using propane.
The back room, used during my childhood as a guest bedroom. To my recollection it was used for that purpose only once, when my mother's parents came up from Corpus Christi to escape Hurricane Fred. (I -think- it was Fred...)
Among the boxes here are a couple that were never unpacked since I moved back to the Thicket from San Antonio- mostly 3 1/2 floppies for games and such, old paperwork I didn't need then, much less now, Robert Jordan books I couldn't sell and got sick of reading, etc.
The bathroom. Part of me wants to say I completed toilet training in this room; if I did, I was horribly late!!
So, what memories do I have? I remember many times reaching up over my bed to the breaker box to switch on or off the air compressor that drove water up from the well into the concrete septic tank my grandfather used to build a cistern. (This system was used until I was in junior high; after my grandfather died, a new well was dug to a different aquifer that wasn't full of iron oxide and sulfur. For that one we had an in-line pump and a pressurized tank.)
I remember being hung-over and sick as hell, when Dad let me drink under his supervision as a very little kid. Intentionally or not, it was a totally effective way to put me off alcohol for life.
I remember long, hot days of being bored out of my mind, re-reading the school textbooks the distant cousins brought to me when they discovered my ability to read before entering school.
I remember wetting the bed and using the throw pillows on my bed to soak it up, terrified of the whipping I would get if discovered. (I didn't get whipped nearly as much as I feared at the time, but at the time I feared ANY bad thing would lead to a whipping.)
I remember running around outside in my underwear until my father told me, without any whippings needed, that it was an embarrassment to him and my mother when I did so.
I remember my terror of stinging insects (which I mostly retain), especially the highly territorial carpenter bees... that don't actually sting, but when they hover an inch from your nose trying to scare you into backing off, it's effective.
I remember being up at 5 AM because the school bus came at 5:30, taking an hour and a half to cover a route not longer than ten miles long, and watching the first thing that came on KJAC NBC-4 Beaumont weekday mornings- "Battle of the Planets."
I remember freezing in winter and sweltering in summer, spending a lot of time in my grandparents' trailer house because it was climate-controlled.
I remember my parents and some of their friends playing Pong around about 1979 or so. I wasn't allowed to even lay hands on it, and the system vanished before we got the Atari 2600 for Christmas 1980.
I remember, as a middle schooler entering puberty, sneaking over to the abandoned house and digging around in the master bedroom closet for my dad's porn collection. Even then I focused on the comics, taking most of them to my room at mom's house (where, one way or another, they eventually vanished).
I remember being awakened in the night to be told that we were going to Corpus Christi, immediately, get in the car. My mother's mother had died.
I remember being completely useless at slot cars and at a woodburning kit, both set up in the kitchen of the abandoned house to keep potential fire hazards out of my grandmother's trailer.
I remember Christmases where half the toys would be hand-me-downs from my aunt's kids, the other half either very cheap or educational.
I have a lot of other vague memories associated with that building... but most of them are of a building that hasn't existed since my dad added that shop room to the front. The house of my youth died, for all purposes, when that was done. It wasn't the same since.
And now the structure itself is about to die.
I'm writing this now, and taking these photographs, because by the time I get back from A-Kon, probably sooner, the building will be torn down and all its contents and components hauled away. The people doing it want the salvagable lumber, roof tin, and contents, plus some scrap metal we have. We won't be out a dime. The brush will be cleared back, fences and stuff removed, and the spot of ground on which it sits will be bare for the first time in seventy years.
My memories will fade, and when I die they'll either vanish or go with me to whatever afterlife might await. These photos likely won't even last that long, even with the forever nature of the Internet. Something new, a shed or a used portable building of some sort, will eventually go up on the spot, and WLP's stock will move into it. And that, too, eventually will pass, and something new will be built, or else the Big Thicket will reclaim what man once took from it.
And this too, shall pass. One life, or one portion of life, vanishes from view, leaving no trace... but something new always comes afterwards.
I'm a little sad to see it die... and much relieved that the rotting deathtrap and all its junk will soon be out of my life.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-05-16 11:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-16 11:58 pm (UTC)Where are you based? I don't think I can ship the thing to you...
no subject
Date: 2012-05-17 02:54 am (UTC)I'm in Texarkana, but I'll be at A-Kon. I can pay some up front if you need special boxes or extra bungee cords or whatever to haul the recorder and any other spools you can find. I'd also like to pick up some more shirts as I missed you at Aggiecon.
and if the mangled mess in the machine is still playable.
The mangled wire can often be demangled with tools and extreme patience, at least enough to be read by modern instruments. I'm also working with a professor on some signal processing software that I hope to show can restore the content of damaged media like this.
no subject
Date: 2012-05-16 11:41 pm (UTC)being up at 5 AM because the school bus came at 5:30, taking an hour and a half to cover a route not longer than ten miles long, and watching the first thing that came on KJAC NBC-4 Beaumont weekday mornings- "Battle of the Planets."
Whirlwind Pyramid!
no subject
Date: 2012-05-18 07:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-18 07:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-18 03:05 pm (UTC)