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Akron, Ohio —
When I heard her message on the answering machine asking me to please give her a call back, I shuddered.
Knowing that both her parents were elderly and in a local nursing home, I expected the worst. So I took a deep breath to muster up the courage, and then I held my breath, tensing myself for the bad news, as I shakily dialed the phone.
With the uncouth tact of a sledgehammer – to the side of the head about four times – I blurted out immediately after she picked up the phone,
“Hi, this is Steve returning your call. Is everything OK?”
Yes, her parents were still around and in fact doing fine, thankfully, but their Suburbanite area house was gone.
It wasn’t gone, actually, just gone from their possession.
The daughter, using her power of attorney, had decided to sell it. As you read this, the sale is closing.
She made that tough decision after her mother, en route from visiting her dad, passed out, drove off the road and hit a tree, totaling her nearly-new car and also nearly totaling her not-so-new rib cage. Fortunately, no one was coming the other way, so she was the only one hurt.
Now mom was in the nursing home, too, and, with the fact she had proven she was no longer able to take care of herself, she wouldn’t be returning home. At least her parents were back together again, which made dad happy but is still taking some getting used to for mom.
She had been bound and determined to stay in her house as long as possible, but it was time to make a change, and even she knew it.
Still, it’s not easy to say goodbye to home for the last time.
I can sure understand that, and it wasn’t even mine.
But it was still special to me. Theirs was the last home on the street owned by the people who had built it. Everybody else had left, and most had died off.
So the last original connection to the old neighborhood – from the time the neighborhood was built nearly 60 years ago; three families still remain, though, from when I moved out years later – is gone. No longer can I take a shortcut down that street, stare at their house and say with a great degree of satisfaction, “Everything else has changed from my earliest memories of this neighborhood, but at least they’re still there, offering a small window into the past – theirs and mine.”
When I heard her message on the answering machine asking me to please give her a call back, I shuddered.
Knowing that both her parents were elderly and in a local nursing home, I expected the worst. So I took a deep breath to muster up the courage, and then I held my breath, tensing myself for the bad news, as I shakily dialed the phone.
With the uncouth tact of a sledgehammer – to the side of the head about four times – I blurted out immediately after she picked up the phone,
“Hi, this is Steve returning your call. Is everything OK?”
Yes, her parents were still around and in fact doing fine, thankfully, but their Suburbanite area house was gone.
It wasn’t gone, actually, just gone from their possession.
The daughter, using her power of attorney, had decided to sell it. As you read this, the sale is closing.
She made that tough decision after her mother, en route from visiting her dad, passed out, drove off the road and hit a tree, totaling her nearly-new car and also nearly totaling her not-so-new rib cage. Fortunately, no one was coming the other way, so she was the only one hurt.
Now mom was in the nursing home, too, and, with the fact she had proven she was no longer able to take care of herself, she wouldn’t be returning home. At least her parents were back together again, which made dad happy but is still taking some getting used to for mom.
She had been bound and determined to stay in her house as long as possible, but it was time to make a change, and even she knew it.
Still, it’s not easy to say goodbye to home for the last time.
I can sure understand that, and it wasn’t even mine.
But it was still special to me. Theirs was the last home on the street owned by the people who had built it. Everybody else had left, and most had died off.
So the last original connection to the old neighborhood – from the time the neighborhood was built nearly 60 years ago; three families still remain, though, from when I moved out years later – is gone. No longer can I take a shortcut down that street, stare at their house and say with a great degree of satisfaction, “Everything else has changed from my earliest memories of this neighborhood, but at least they’re still there, offering a small window into the past – theirs and mine.”
All of the original homeowners on the street were cut out of the same cloth. They moved out to the sticks from Akron in the early to mid-1950s.
It was part of the great urban migration spurred by the attraction of land, land and more wide-open land.
They scraped together every nickel they had and built their homes, not knowing how in the name of going broke they were going to pay for it.
But they worked hard – sometimes several jobs – diligently saved their money and did without a lot of things, and made it. Having a new home to raise a family was well worth it.
I spent a good portion of my youth at their house, hanging out with their youngest son. I was there so much that if they had taken a family photo, I would have been in it.
We played so much baseball in their back yard that mom and dad probably could have gotten a minor league team if they had applied for it.
We broke the living room window so many times with errant shots at the basketball hoop in their driveway that dad finally installed one made of Plexiglass. And I think we somehow even shattered that.
We sat out on his back porch a lot one summer, listened to all the greatest hits of 1966 and discussed how hard it was to understand girls.
Gee, he and I could have that conversation now.
We drank so much of his mother’s iced tea that … well, we couldn’t drink that much now.
We watched so many football, basketball and baseball games on their TV that I got blurry-eyed and wore a seat in their couch to the exact dimensions of my posterior. We rooted so hard for the Los Angeles Lakers and Jerry West, and the Philadelphia 76ers and Wilt Chamberlain, to beat Bill Russell and the Boston Celtics that my parents could probably hear us four doors up the street at our own house.
Now the house where it all took place has moved on as well to become the place of memories for a new family, and their new neighbors.
I’ve got news for those people. They’ll never love it as much as the former owners.
Or me.
And they won’t stay five-and-a-half decades, either.
