Note: This blog post first appeared in my first blog, DetroitDixieChick.blogspot.com, in 2011. In the spirit of reminiscing, I felt it was worthy of a resurrection for this new blog. My grandparents’ house in Detroit was everything to our family so I hope you’ll not mind indulging me.
This used to be my playground
This used to be my childhood dream
This used to be the place I ran to
Whenever I was in need
Of a friend
Why did it have to end
— Madonna
The last time I was in my native Michigan I found myself hearing this song from one of my all-time fave contemporary movies, A League of Our Own, playing in the back of my mind as I made the sad trip back to my grandparents’ street in Detroit to see for myself if it was really true. Was my grandparents’ home really gone?
Sadly, it was true. Gramm’ & Gramps’ home on Sarena Street is no longer standing. In fact, there was not even evidence a home ever sat on that little tiny piece of property. I don’t know where it went. I don’t know HOW it vanished. Was it a fire? Was it leveled because of how horribly corroded it looked last time I saw it? That was in 2009, when my cousin Dave & I, feeling pangs of nostalgia for our happy childhoods, decided to drive by the old neighborhood. We were horrified by what we found. The once neat little white bungalow we knew and loved was now run down, the front door and windows boarded up, the siding shot up with bullet holes. The porch we grandkids all jumped off from was barely viewable because it was covered with overgrown bushes and weeds.
My cousin Dave is this burly guy, a very smart, articulate teacher with a masters’ degree. He usually has something to say about most everything. Not this day. He stood there silently, looking like he wanted to cry. He was speechless, as was I. Finally we both found ourselves choked up. This was personal. Someone, or something….made our childhood just… disappear.
I couldn’t just stand there ….ever the curious, I simply had to inch in closer, despite Dave’s warnings that we don’t know what might be in there….vermin…crack dealers, who knew what lurked inside the house we once knew so well? So there I was in high-heeled sandals, trying to climb onto something to peer inside the window that was once my mother’s bedroom. I heard water running and for a moment I thought maybe someone still lived there. Was I trespassing? But no, it appeared maybe some irresponsible people now used the house we spent our childhoods in as a drug house….the lump in my throat was hard to swallow.
On the drive away that day, I think I remember saying maybe we shouldn’t have gone by….it certainly didn’t make us feel nostalgic….just sickened and sad. It forever skewed memories of my entire childhood. The hundreds of nights I slept over my grandparents’ house. The trips to the little soda shop at the corner. The scent of Gramma’s lovely peonies all neatly lined up in the backyard. The railroad tracks just three doors down where Gramps & I used to wait for the trains to pass by every night from his covered porch. The quiet summer evenings when I’d sit on the porch with Gramm & listen as she and Mrs. Kroll chatted back and forth from their rocking chairs. The moment of simple excitement I’d feel when Miss Violet would come over with fresh pears from her pear tree. I cannot eat a pear to this day without thinking about sweet Violet Rago. The walks to Arlan’s Department store with Gramm and the sheer joy of hanging out with Gramps as he puttered in his little garage, where he had a calendar with Marilyn Monroe and a poster of Smokey Bear on the wall. All those lovely memories and more…all are now forever gone.
Author Tom Wolfe once famously said you can’t go home again. And I guess he was right. But now, as I stood there shooting pictures of the empty lot, fighting back tears once again….I realized a boarded up house was at least, still a tangible memory. I could still envision what it once was. Now, people who drive by that empty lot will never know that once there was a little white house that held a family of five, that grew into an extended family of grandparents, aunts and uncles and lively cousins who gathered at the hub of our big loud Italian existence for every holiday and at least two-three Sundays a month, just because. It was a tiny house, but it was filled with so much love. And now, it exists only in my memory.
Being a movie buff, please allow me to use a movie metaphor to adequately convey my sadness over Gramps & Gramm’s “lost house.” In the 1990 Barry Levinson movie Avalon, main character Sam Krichinsky, an immigrant to America, is now near the end of his life and in a convalescent center. During a visit from his grandson and great-grandson, it is brutally apparent he has lost most of his faculties. Yet in a moment of clarity, Sam laments to his grandson that a few years ago he drove past his old neighborhood only to see that everything on the street had been modernized and nothing from the old neighborhood still existed. He went on to say thank God he finally found a street sign so he knew he wasn’t losing his mind. For a moment there, he muses, he almost thought maybe he, too, never existed. In the touching final scene, he tells his grandson and great grandson,
“If I knew things would no longer be, I would have tried to remember better.”
I couldn’t have said it better.