Comforts of home

Aug. 21, 2008

Dear Patty,

DC and I used to own the house next door. We bought the house because we suspected the renter's son was responsible for the BB holes that began appearing in some of our windows on that side. She assured us that though there was a BB gun in the house, her son would never fire it.

Capital can serve many purposes, including peace.

Peace did not come, of course. DC unilaterally rented the house to some fraternity brothers who'd been tossed off the campus. They were polite, though I wondered why fraternity brothers would ask us to install locks on each of their bedrooms. They were replaced by football players, another vision of the perfect renters on DC's part. Buff young men who like to party could count on us for a home.

One night we returned from a movie to find the partygoers sitting on their roof quaffing beer.

When our friends Robyn and Frank said they would be interested in buying the house, we couldn't thank them enough.

Living next door to friends is a dream. Robyn brings us breads and such, and Frank is always willing to be the handyman I'm not. DC makes them extra blackberry cobbler. Lawn mower sputtering? Borrow ours. It's a chummy little compound.

One day as my golf buddies Don and Rick and I were preparing to start a round we invited a single golfer who was on the practice green to join us. We got along well with Chuck right away. Though he is slightly older than me, he and I remembered each other from growing up in Cape Girardeau. He played sports and drove a Corvette. You remember those guys.

As we talked about our youth in Cape Girardeau, it turned out that Chuck's family had owned Robyn and Frank's house, too. He lived there from age 6 until the family moved to a different part of the city when he was 12.

His memories of our neighborhood in the 1950s are vivid. He was close to a woman he called Aunt Deal, who lived alone in our house. She only occupied the main floor because she was elderly and didn't like climbing our steep stairs. Chuck, who later on made a good living at the poker table, and Aunt Deal played cards. He often slept at her house. They even stretched a tin-can phone line between the two houses.

Chuck's sister Mary was in town for a reunion last weekend, so she and Chuck came by to look at Robyn's house. Chuck pointed out a secret hiding place in the mantel and told of dropping things he shouldn't have down the laundry chute. The house was different -- a wall had been added downstairs, a bannister was gone -- and yet still the place that sheltered their childhoods. The sweetness of good memories shone on their faces.

Secrets of childhood began to be revealed: The day Mary stayed home from school sick and tried to hypnotize Chuck; the upstairs storage room where they held meetings of their Movie Star of the Month Club -- membership 3.

The fences now behind our houses weren't there when Mary and Chuck grew up. A big hill good for building forts stood behind their house; a hollow meant for exploring was behind ours.

Mary had brought black-and-white pictures from their childhood. We saw how the houses and yards looked back then, and how they looked as children.

Sometimes when I'm in the neighborhood I drive by the house where I grew up on Montgomery Street. I don't know who lives there. The occupants can't know how many hundreds of games of Wiffleball were played in that backyard and how many Christmas surprises their living room brought my family.

For every family, the story is the same. The places and people that brought us joy are never forgotten.

Love, Sam

Sam Blackwell is a former reporter for the Southeast Missourian.