a room of my own
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| 12036 Roosevelt Way NE |
As much as I love living in my room in the garage, cash flow problems have forced me back into the house. Spending the summer fixing up the room so we can find someone to rent the place.
Needed someone in by the first of July, looks like September first now - if we are lucky. The exact same thing happened my senior year in high school. Vividly remember stubbornly refusing to move while Dad and Justin stood on my bed nailing wall paneling in the unfinished room, prepping the house for sale. Loved that room as much as my garage room here on the beach.
August of sixty-two dad started his new job as associate pastor at Lake City Presbyterian church, north Seattle. When we finally told the folks in Entiat we were going to move, this one kid, Bryan Carter wondered what associate pastor meant. Suggested maybe the preacher stood up in front shouting "praise the lord" with my old man standing halfway up the hall repeating "praise the lord" so those for those on the back benches could hear the sermon. Turns out that was closer to the job description than one might think, but that's probably a different story.
The Lake City church owned a house for the preacher's family, an older brick home that I recall seeing a time or two, but dad's contract reimbursement for house payments if he elected to purchase his own home. Deciding it was a better deal to get their own place, we started making trips over the hump house hunting during June and July that summer.
The smell of those new houses still lingers in my mind. Split levels mostly, even on a flat lot. Entry to a landing with a short flight of steps going up to the main living area on one side, down to an unfinished basement, more like the ground floor on the other. I thought the cantilever sundecks were about the most beautiful thing ever. Mom and dad seemed more interested in kitchens and dining rooms and style of the fireplaces.
After looking at lots of houses both new and older, the folks made an offer on a new house at 12036 Roosevelt Way North East. On a sloped lot down from the street, daylight basement. Mom loved her kitchen with ceramic tile counter tops with room for breakfast table, and her 'antiqued' round oak table around the corner in the living-dining room. Classic sixties pull down lamp over the dining table, veneer wood paneling accenting the walls and a nice sandstone fireplace.
Probably shouldn't admit to this, but one time when Jon and I were home alone for an evening, we hung Playboy pinups all over the walls in that living room. Carefully pushing thumbtacks into the grooves between the simulated planks in the paneling. We figured that if carefully done no one would notice the little holes. Worked too, the folks were none the wiser. We got the porn form some kid Jon knew who kept the stash in two coffee cans taped together hidden in bushes out behind his house. After he showed the collection to us we snuck back later and stole the cans for ourselves, hiding them in the grove of cottonwoods below our place for safe keeping. Fun stuff, but that hasn't got anything to do with this story.
Mom and dad got the larger bedroom on the first floor, Annah got the room on the street side, I got other room on the back, overlooking the cottonwoods, a couple older houses on the next street and a small park. We shared a single bathroom across the hall from my room. Seems odd now that none of the new homes we toured that summer had private bath attached to the master bedroom. Seems yuck to share a bath with the rest of the household to me these days, but times change I guess.
Justin got the one finished bedroom in the basement with his own private bath. Night of the famous Columbus day storm we holed up in there, mostly below ground as the gale screamed around the corners of the house. Seems to me dad was over at the church in meetings.
Growing up Seattle had represented the promised land, ever so much better than the shit-hole towns where we had to live. But when we finally settled into our new place in the city things didn't seem so rosy. Dreams of high school football on the Entiat Tigar team evaporated last week in August when the club team for ninth graders in our area required one to sell sixty dollars worth of raffle tickets to pay for equipment. All the other boy's folks just bought their tickets, but my folks couldn't come up with the cash, probably wouldn't have done so anyway. I must have knocked on five hundred doors and didn't sell as a single one so I couldn't be on the team. Probably saved me lots of knee trouble over the years but I never fully recovered from the disappointment, and my knees ended up pretty much fucked up anyway.
By the time November came around the rain started driving me nuts. Couldn't imagine why the whole place didn't dissolve and run downhill into the sound. Also hated every minute in school too. Jane Addams junior high, huge mob of kids and even though I had two or three school friends they were nowhere near as cool as the gang back in Entiat. Eighth grade in Entiat I came out Superior in the fitness testing that had been instituted as part of the John F. Kennedy health and vigor movement. Remember the fifty-mile hikes? Without any actual change in my muscle mass or endurance, I scored in the inferior grade, due to feeling depressed and lost in the huge school.
Things started improving for me sometime during the following spring or summer when I got to move into my own makeshift room downstairs. Not quite the garage room I'd been dreaming about, but it did have a garage connection. The first snow in the city happened one day while dad was still at work. After years of living east of the Cascade range where the weather in winter is colder and dryer, his notion of driving on snowy rodes differed significantly from the Seattle crowd. One would hear it all the time from people who moved into the area from the east. Seattle drivers don't know how to drive in the snow. Turns out that it was the other way around. Cold, dry snowy roads in small towns with light traffic is an altogether different kettle of fish from steep hills slick with slushy snow and choked with cars and busses.
Finally making his way through Lake City and up the long hill on 125th street, chomping at the bit in the line of cars creeping along at snail's pace, dad turned into his drive and couldn't get stopped. Fifty-seven Chev slid down the hill breaking through the brand new garage door. Broken plywood panels ended up in the basement for a few months until I got the notion to brace them in place across the far end of the framed in the rec room, add some cardboard here and there, duck tape and an old blanket for the door. Move out of the stuffy upstairs into a room of my own.
From somewhere I got an old oak library table for the desk, set up in the corner so I could sit behind, and one of the youth group leaders gave ma an old TV. Bulky cabinet black and white. Watched reruns of Doby Gillis and black and white Dr. Who after school every day, homework spread out on the desk in front of me, KJR tuned in on the transistor radio. Alone in that room some of the happiest moments of late childhood years.
At some point along the way the cardboard and splintered plywood wall got replaced with two-by-four studs and insulation, maybe even a door instead of hanging sheet curtain. Spring of senior year wood paneling started getting nailed up, preparation for selling the house so the folks could move on to dad's next job. I disapproved. That's when dad and Justin straddled my protesting body, standing on the mattress nailing the paneling up behind my bed.
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| Justin picking banjo in his basement room |
Same thing around here now. Thought I could influence MJ to put in enough time at the school para pro job I lined up for her to pay her share of the bills so we wouldn't have to take in a housemate. Didn't work this time either. Only now it is me and her son, Dan, doing the hard work fixing the place up for a renter -- occasionally took long naps in protest to the job, but it hasn't done me any good now either.
A few days after high school graduation I flew out to Alaska to work in a floating cannery for the summer. Small ship, hundred-fifty tons or so, LSI surplus from the war, salmon canning equipment welded to decks that had originally supported anti-aircraft guns. Sward to plow sheer.
Lots of fun stories about life in that ship, but for now, it's the end of the trip that loops back to my beloved little room in the house out on Roosevelt way. Mid-September found Jon and me, along with another kid we called Lurch traveling down the outside of Vancouver Island. The experienced crew, Bjorn the skipper and the chief Sandy, a cauliflower ear rugby player from Northumbria. Also and an older woman Crystal. All of twenty-six, a vision of loveliness to our boyish eyes. She took us into the woods outside Klawock to see a ring of ancient totems, moss covered sacred ground. The next spring she told me that our skipper on that trip Bjorn lost his life sometime that winter when the crab boat he was running up the coast didn't make it through a gale. But September on the coast can be magic. Green kid standing midnight watch in the thick fog doesn't feel the stress of picking our way through the troll fleet. Cute little boats and what the hell are they doing drifting around twenty miles offshore anyway? Jon said his dad Simon said trollers are all crazy - having been one myself for a couple decades I wouldn't be able to dispute that, but again another story.
Couple days out of town the shortwave radio set in the wheelhouse started picking up KOL. Impossible to describe the feelings welling up in my chest at the sound of Elinor Rigby. Delights of the city reaching over the horizon tugging at our longings. Wish the city could really be as cool as it seems from the dim lit room in that boat rolling along on a lazy westerly swell off Nootka Sound.
Almost dark the next day when Bjorn directed Jon and Lurch to the forepeak and me to the fantail to handle lines as he maneuvered toward the Ballard locks, tie up to pilings on the south side of the channel waiting our turn to enter. One gets used to frantic running around, shouts and curses trying to get that boat up to a birthing position. Originally designed to be powered with eight six-seventy-one's, four on each propeller, the cannery only needed one on each side to make its way out to Alaska and back, which left the thing woefully underpowered when it came time to maneuver in tight quarters.
To make matters worse that evening, Bjorn only had one shaft to work with. Instead of a marine gear for forward and reverse the Bearing had variable pitch wheels, one of which stripped out when we were coming into Craig a week before. From my station down at the stern, I missed out on the hale of curses and shouts that must have erupted in the wheelhouse when the one functioning propeller wheel feathered to neutral but failed to go into reverse. We slowly drifted up toward the beach. Warm lighting in livingrooms close aboard a calm and tranquil scene compared to the atmosphere in our little ship.
Turns out that the motors that controlled the propeller pitch were powered with a twelve-volt car battery, little Chubby and Tubby special sale charger that had to be plugged in with an extension cord threaded through a hole in the engine room bulkhead forty feet away. With the monotony of the trip, Sandy forgot to go down and check the plug, battery drained flat. By the time he got the wheel working again, it was too late to back off. Smoke hole for that little six-seventy-one wasn't swinging the stern out toward the channel, then the sound of a moring buoy chain wrapped around the shaft rattling through the hull. Nothing more to do but shut the machines down and wait for the next high tide to float us off.
Earlier that day, trundling down Puget Sound with an estimated time of midnight tieing up at the company docks directly under the new freeway bridge I hatched a plan to catch a late bus out to the north end, sneak into the basement door unannounced. Snuggle into my own little bed, show up for breakfast next day same as usual. We had spent nearly all of August out of contact with home and then the boss chose us to help run the boat back to Seattle during a short layover in Yakutat before we had a chance to call home. The folks had no idea when we were due back in town so the prank would work. Jon went along with the idea, not sure if he intended to try the same stunt or just sleep in his bunk on the Bearing, call home in the morning.
Spending a tide on the beach in front of the locks put the kibosh on that little scheme though. I wanted to hold our ground and not call the folks, just show up at home but Jon went ahead and dropped a dime into the pay phone at a 7-11 across the street from the locks park, talked to his mom. Lucky I didn't sneak into the Roosevelt way house. While I was away the folks sold it and I would have walked into straingers kitchen for breakfast, might have gotten myself arrested if not shot.
Never saw the inside of that house again, probably only drove by on the street a time or two. Last time I was there it had been torn down, apartment buildings lining the street, couldn't even tell where it had been. Lots of adventures between September of Sixty-six and now, but it is not too much of a stretch to say that until I settled into the room in the garage here a couple years ago I have not been as happy and content in my own little space as I was in that room*, behind my desk smell of the old tube TV set, social studies homework spread out in front of me.
Mom calling us up to dinner.
*not counting living in my little fish boat Shirey B of course
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