If Walls Could Talk

204 Howard Street in 1984

As moving day approached there was a great deal of sadness on my part as I had come to love living on the East Coast, had made many friends and could have easily stayed there forever as it really had become home.  That in itself was surprising after how much I did not want to move there in the first place. I can think of a lot of reasons I grew to love it there but I really feel most of it was due to us buying the "Adams" house.  That was what the brass door knocker said and how everyone in town referred to it.

Back when I was a senior in high school my Mother got on one of her usual tangents and thought she would like to become a writer. She dragged me off to a writer's conference in Tahlequah one weekend to explore the possibilities.  I don't remember much about the weekend except I came home with a book that told the story of an old house from the perspective of the house. It was as if the walls could talk.

For centuries some cultures believe that you truly do leave an aura on things that you touch and places you live. Too often the use of the word ghost only conjures up bad images.  Ever hear people say you shouldn't by a house in which the previous owners got a divorce  or went broke?
I had heard those stories through the years but except for a few rent houses all the others had been brand new when I moved in. Do you remember or notice a house that when you walked in the door you had the feeling you could kick your shoes off a stay forever?  Could that be the walls talking or the aura the house had from previous owners?

When I had gone to New Jersey for my three days to find a house I got the typical realtor who showed me houses we could not afford, ones close to great shopping or great schools or in uppity neighborhoods or Archie Bunker neighborhoods.  I found an ad for the one in Riverton which I demanded to see very much against her wishes. It was strange but the moment I stepped in the front door it was like all the anger and frustration over the last few days melted away.  Was the house talking to me?

The Adams were pillars of the community.  He was a past Governor of The New Jersey Rotary Club and owned a business in Philadelphia.  She was a member of the Porch Club, gardened in a denim shirt, hat and gloves.  Both were very active in all the communities affairs and very well respected. There was no wrangling on the price of the house as they listed the items that needed to be repaired and said they would hire a Quaker to fix them as they were honest and did the best work. Hmm...these might be big shoes to fill.

When we arrived at the house on moving in day it was immaculate although the decor looked a little faded on a cold rainy day.  Wally knew that there were ghosts in the house and Dennis lamented about how small the vintage one car garage was.  What I felt that day and for the rest of the time we lived in the house was a big difference in how I felt about things and did things.  It seemed for the first couple of years that I sort of lost the desire to go into another business and all of a sudden I became very good at volunteering for things. I spent much more time with the boys not being so busy.

Once the neighbors checked us out and decided we were going to be around for awhile they became more friendly.  I had always heard that people in the North or East were not very friendly but that really isn't true.  It takes them longer to warm up to warm up to newcomers but are just as nice as people anywhere else in the country.


On the day we moved out, after the house was empty, I wandered through the house and checked out each room.  What was my double checking to make sure it was as immaculate for the new owners as Mrs. Adams had left it for me turned  into a flood of memories over the last four years of living in that wonderful house. There was the cozy first remolded kitchen in town with cabinets by the Murphy Door Bed Co. and the old Chambers stove with it's particular squeaky door.  There was the time our new kitten Sylvester ran up the leg of my jeans and stuck his head over the burner the same time I turned it on.  He did look funny with his whiskers singed off.  How Sis down the street could tell I was up by the light in the kitchen window so we could plan our day.  The fuse box with the old fashioned screw in fuses we blew quite often.

There was a swinging door between the kitchen and the dining room. That room had had the extra vintage upright piano that I gave to the young couple behind us.  I had to laugh when I thought about how the piano got moved to it's new home.  I stood on the curb at 6:00 in the morning with homemade chocolate chip cookies and the garbage men gladly rolled it down the street and around the corner to their house. Also had to laugh about the Thanksgiving dinner we ate in the dining room that I was sure had a lot of plaster in it since while I was cooking Dennis was putting up the tin ceiling with dust flying every where.

How many panes of glass did I have to replace in the panels on each side of the front door.  Wes and Wally always swore they got broken on accident or the newspaper boy just delighted in throwing the paper through one of them. Fall always brought a parade of mice looking for a place to live through the winter.  French Fry, the king of the hunter cats, would chase them to death and present them to Wes.  Sometimes in his bed at night or just bring them to him as we watched television. He was the same cat that caught squirrels and deposited them in the basement window wells and ate the neighbors prized nest of baby cardinals.

The house was always alive with Wes, Wally and all their friends.  Wes had all his buddies over for lunch a lot of days, there were birthday parties and the television went non stop as well as a roaring fire in the fireplace all winter.  The kids had free range all over town on their bicycles and sledding up at the Country Club in the winter. I learned hardwood floors were a lot easier to keep clean than carpet with all the leaves and mud that got tracked in everyday.  Wes got into the first and only fist fight that I knew he had.  He would have been unscaved if he hadn't fallen down on the ice and broken his nose.  The mean lady next door came charging over to our house one day wanting to know who fell onto one of her scraggly shrubs.  Little Wally was hanging his head and he confessed to doing it.  A little while later we found out his friend Jimmy was the one who fell on the shrub.  When we asked him why he said he did it he just said he didn't want Jimmy to get into trouble.  My proudest moment had to be at a school dance when Wes asked a girl to dance who could only walk with braces and crutches.   

There were not only happy times that embedded themselves into the walls of the house.  Life is filled with the bad as well as the good but my hope is that those times were very small in comparison to the happy ones.   My hope for all the future owners was that they can will add many more layers of happiness and love to to the walls of that house.  

204 Howard Street in 2015

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

Too Many Decisions

Any person in their right mind would have spent the day before a big test staring at notes and equations and chemical formulas. I, on the other hand, went to work at the Library and did not think much about any of it.  The Library Board was getting a little impatient with me over the fact that their were three applications on my desk that they wanted me to look over and pick the person I thought should replace me. But that would have to wait until next week when I had time to think about whether I wanted to be replaced or not.

Dennis arrived home that night after what sounded like two miserable weeks in Detroit, tired of living in a motel, slow progress on the house, airline complaints and of course, a long list of things I should have gotten done.  Nothing unusual about that but there was nothing he could do or say that was going to cause me to get upset.  I nodded my head at the appropriate times and let it all just fly on by me.  

The next morning I was up and out of the house a good hour and a half before time for the test.  That was after Dennis needed instructions on how to take care of the boys for the day.  I told him to get butter cakes from Klipples for breakfast and meatball sandwiches from the Deli for lunch since making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich might be too difficult. My excuse for leaving early was that I needed to find Temple University and the test room - left out the part that I had already done that and just wanted to get away.

Arriving at the university I ran into a couple of the people who had taken the Kaplan refresher course with me.  They were madly comparing notes on formulas and chemistry equations with looks on their faces that the end of the world was only a few hours away. There was the fleeting thought that perhaps I should be doing the same thing but that quickly vanished as I strolled around the beautiful campus and let memories of the day with Barney float through my mind. There was a definite calming effect to think about how it felt to hold his hand as we walked on the beach or how safe I felt when he would stand behind me, put his arms around me and kiss the top of my head.

Seated in the test room, pencils and calculator in hand waiting for the test person to click the stopwatch and say "go" I knew I was ready.
There were three parts to the test, Biology, Chemistry and Physics with a fifteen minute break in between each section. When I had taken the test six years before Physics was my low score which should not have been a surprise since I had dropped out of the class after the first test. Lucky for me the Physics test was the first part.  I was a little worried because I flew through it and actually got done fifteen minutes before the buzzer went off. Thank you, Dr. Grey! The Biology and Chemistry both seemed like grade school stuff.

As soon as I was done with the test I dashed out of the building to go find a pay phone.  Actually I had no desire to rehash the test with anyone as most looked like they had been run over by a truck or that their dreams had all been smashed. I called Barney and he picked up the phone on the first ring. I said "Thank you" as soon as he said hello. He must have been surprised at that comment and could not imagine why I would thank him.  I explained that his giving me all the moral support on Thursday made me not nervous or apprehensive in anyway.  That I either aced the whole thing or didn't get anything right.  We'd know in four to six weeks when the scores arrived but I felt like I had done well. 

I arrived home to find we had a contract on the house for the asking price.  That was good news since I would not have to listen to Dennis complain about no one wanting to live in Riverton or how awful the house was.  Instead I got to listen to all the things I needed to take care of since the boys would be out of school in a couple of weeks and we could move then.  Aaah....the house is currently barely in studs and we are going to go ahead and move....where?  Oh, a motel but it would only be for a few weeks.  Ford Motor Company would cover all our living expenses and for one month we could have two rooms.  Wow! He had been complaining about living in a motel for two months and he wants all of us to live in one for God knows how long? 

Divorce.  That was a word you only heard in Riverton with very bad connotations.  Almost everyone I knew had been married for decades through good and bad times. Divorced people just seemed to disappear from town and were not thought well of. My only workable idea to stay in Riverton and let Dennis move on was to try to keep my job at the library and live for free in the upstairs.  The Library had a young college type girl who lived upstairs and cleaned the Library for her rent. I had myself convinced that it was a possibility but the real problem was how was I going to approach the board with it.  

I had put off talking to the President of the Library Board because she was sort of an example of what I wanted to be like when I grew up.  She was cute, preppy and very caring about the Library as well as the town itself.  She lived in one of the mansions along the river with huge gardens and a stainless steel sink in the Butler's Pantry.  She had a nice looking husband and a couple of perfect college age children.  Even on my worst days it was impossible for me to talk to her or anyone in town about my problems.  It was just better to go around pretending everything about my life was perfect.  So, I never presented my plan to stay maybe partially because it would be hard to admit since I had done a pretty good job in the four years we had been there to appear happy.
Then there was always that nagging thought that perhaps after being told most of my life I was dumb or stupid I really could not make it on my own.

I finally told the Board that a young man who had applied for the Librarian's position would be an excellent choice.  He was a Riverton native, knew everyone in town and was a avid reader.  Sis would carry on with the small children's activities and I was sure he would think of things for the bigger kids to do. All of the volunteers liked him so I guessed he would do well.  Michael worked with me for a couple of days and I realized that he knew more about the Library than I did since he had grown up hanging out there.  I sadly bid my farewell to the place.  It had really been a fun job and did a lot to make me feel at home in the community.

School was finally out the first part of June.  Wes got all dressed up for his eighth grade graduation ceremony.  I hardly recognized him in clothes other than the popular black rock star shirts that were the current fad. Both boys had come to realize that moving was just part of the routine and perhaps a bit of an adventure.  They were pretty lucky in that they got to go to places a lot of kids never got to see and have the experience of doing a lot of different things.  By the time we left New Jersey Wes, age 13 and Wally, age 9 had touched the Liberty Bell and wandered through Independence Hall, been to New York, spent a week in a beach house on the Atlantic Ocean. been to Block Island and learned to snow ski.  Wes learned to sail and Wally learned he was not an much of a sports person but he had a plethora of friends.

All-in-all the boys were doing well with the thought of moving. I kept up my usual happy front for them but was not doing well at all.

The One In A Million Day

Driving over to Atlantic City that day to meet Barney the thought that this was the last thing I needed to be doing was foremost on my mind.
With the endless phone calls from Dennis with orders on things that needed to be done, building the new stupid house and trying to stay busy so I did not have to think had left me pretty well an emotional wreck.  Some how I had to manage to keep it together.

Walking down the Boardwalk towards the Golden Nugget and listening to the waves gently rolling in on the beach actually started to make me forget all that had been going on in the last few months.  Seeing Barney sitting on the bench on front of the hotel/casino with that smile I knew so well, made every care seem to float away.  I should not have been surprised as he had had that effect on me since the day I met him nineteen years before.

We sat on the bench much in the same way we used to curl up together like the way we did when we would study together back in college.  Not really talking a lot but just enjoying being together, watching the other people strolling on the boardwalk and taking in all the sights and the sounds of the ocean.  He was going to have a busy two days in Atlantic City and finally said he wanted to see everything. Both of us were probably thinking we better go for a long walk instead of a short ride up to his room.

The boardwalk was sixty feet wide and four miles long making it the longest in the world. It had changed at lot in the four years I had been going there and was much different from the way it was back in it's heyday.  The advent of the casinos in the late seventies had changed it from the quaint beach front town into the glitz and glamour of casino gambling.  Some of the original seaside attractions were gone but there were enough left so that you could still get an idea of the way it had been.  There was still a lot of cute places making salt-water taffy and shops that sold everything made from seashells.  

My favorite were the boardwalk games, much like a carnival or fair.  I introduced Barney to his first time to play Skee Ball which I beat him at and the fortune telling machine which was too close to reality for both of us.  Maybe we were too old for the Merry-Go-Round on the Steel Pier but who cares. We popped in and out of the glitzy casinos as we walked by them.  Each had it's own catchy theme and maybe my favorite was the one with the Playboy Bunnies.  Barney got a real laugh when I told him I was fascinated by the women walking around in those costumes. Not only the bunnies but female impersonators and strippers were also fascinating because I could never understand how they could do that.  He bent over in laughter when I said that and told me I was intrigued by them as that was so not like me.  What could I say?

When he asked me if I was hungry I gave him his choice of the over priced food in the hotels, New York dogs on the boardwalk or a quiet Italian place that had been around for fifty years.  He made a good choice in the Italian place a block off of the boardwalk. New York was good for Jewish Deli's but New Jersey was the best place for Italian.

We slid into a booth at the restaurant where the waiter barely spoke English.  It wasn't easy to pick out something on the menu which was all in Italian but we decided to take our chances and just guess at something.  After we ordered Barney took my hand and asked me if it was the test on Saturday I was so upset about.  I was a little surprised and asked him why he thought I was upset.  Maybe I was not as good as I thought I was in staying upbeat during our phone calls as he told me he could tell from my voice for the last few months something was wrong. 

Maybe I knew it was time to tell him about the upcoming move but did not know how to start until he asked.  Fighting back the tears I told him the whole story about Dennis being transferred to Detroit, the horrible house he decided to build, how I loved Riverton and had made it a home, how I wanted to go to school there and raise the boys there. I did not tell him before now because I wanted to tell him in person but I did leave out the part about thinking I might not make the move myself.

He kissed away the one tear that managed to fall and was silent for a few minutes.  The he said he would always regret not marrying me in 1966 and that he had loved me since the day we met and would love me until the day he died.  That I was the most beautiful person he had ever met as well as the smartest and the most talented. Where I lived did not matter but the only thing that mattered was that I did not stop loving him.  When things were not going well in his life he would pick up the phone just to hear my voice or just think about me.  

I think when he said all that my heart stopped beating or I stopped breathing or both happened at the same time. People only say things like that in movies or in a song. Maybe guys said things like that to get a girl to have sex with them but in our complicated situation and early sixties values it didn't wasn't one of those things we did.  Do I just tell him that I feel the same way about him or that no one in my life had ever done anything but put me down until he came along? I mumbled something about that was the way I had always felt about him about the same time the waiter showed up and broke the moment.

Whatever it was we ordered for lunch was wonderful and Barney gave me a lecture on putting everything out of my mind for the medical school test on Saturday.  After lunch we took off our shoes and walked back up the beach to where I had parked the car. The beach was pretty much deserted since it was the middle of the week and the busy season would not really start for another month.  As we walked I caught him up on Cathie and Pam from college.  He loved the crazy stories about Cathie and her antics.  I told him she was the only one who knew we were still seeing each other and that she highly approved.
Pam was still single and the world traveler.  He thought it was interesting that the three of us, each so different, had managed to stay friends all these years. I admitted that I had the same thought but somehow we had connected for life that year at Stephens.

When we got to my car he gave me a pep talk about the test, told me he would be thinking about me all day on Saturday and to find a phone as soon as the test was over so I could call him collect and let him know how it went.  His arranging to come to New Jersey to bolster my confidence before taking the test certainly worked.  The last thing he said to me before I left was that he meant everything he said to me at lunch and nothing would ever change that.

For some reason everything looked brighter and more beautiful on the drive home.  There would be many times in the next few years when what that beautiful human being said to me that gave me the strength to keep going. 

As Time Flies By

It seems like time is flying by much too quickly.  It is interesting that it always seems like days go by faster when you really wish time would stand still. I knew I needed to make some decision as to move or not to move but somehow it seemed much better to stay so busy I didn't have time to think about it.

I actually had a plan that sounded logical some days and then the next day it did not sound so good. On my worst days I thought about just getting on a bus and disappearing thinking that the boys would be better off with their Dad.  Luckily that was in no way an option and would be discarded almost instantly.  I managed to keep going by knowing I had a Talent Show at the school to put together and the medical school test to take.  Major decisions had to wait.

The Riverton School had not had a talent show or plays for many years.  The Library plays got the children interested in performing so sending a call out for the Talent Show auditions brought many happy little faces.
I did worry some about too many children showing up as auditions was not really the right word to use.  After all, how could you tell those sweet little faces they were not good enough to participate.  Especially when my  five year old star softball catcher wanted to play a piano solo.

Forty-five children showed up to participate in the show.  Forty-five out of three hundred was pretty astounding considering some were not even sure what they were doing.  The most popular thing for the boys to do was break dancing.  I often wondered if break dancing was as popular every where as it was in Philadelphia.  Any evening of the week every corner on South Street in Philly was crowded with young boys and a few brave girls break dancing.

I tried to be very diplomatic about who would be the Master of Ceremonies.  I did hold an audition for that and three boys tried out.  Much to my slight dismay dear Wes got up there and wowed all the participants and they decided he needed to be the one.  Actually he was the best but then he was the biggest ham in the school. The only problem I had was with Wally.  All the other children came prepared even if they needed a little more practice.  All Wally said was that he was going to do a comedy routine.

The program was the second Thursday evening in May, naturally Dennis was not home.  I did my favorite pass time of typing up the program on the mimeograph machine and managed to get all twenty-two acts on one sheet of paper. There were five break dance groups with four boys in each, eight piano solos,  five dance routines, one guitar solo, two lip sync since this was long before karaoke and one comedy routine. 

Wes manged to be in one of the lip sync groups and they made guitars out of plywood and painted them up.  Then there was Wally.  I still had no idea of whether he was really going to do a comedy routine or not much less if he was even going to appear on the stage.  When it was his turn he appeared on stage in nice pants, a shirt and a vest and proceeded to do a five minute Bill Cosby routine he had memorized from an album.  Not too bad for a nine year old as it was absolutely flawless and he manged to do all the voices perfectly.  He did not just amaze the audience but me too.  After the show I asked him how he learned all that and he just shrugged his shoulders and said he listened to the record a bunch of times.  

The whole show was a nice success as everyone did very well.  The nice thing about Riverton was that almost everyone in town turned out for every event especially when it concerned the children.  With charging a dollar for admission to the show the Home and School Association had some money to begin the next school year with.

The next week I thought would be a quiet one before I had to take the MCAT test on Saturday.  It would pretty well consume eight hours on Saturday but Dennis would be home that weekend to take care of the boys.  There was not a lot that I hadn't studied between my Physics class and the Kaplan review course.  Too my surprise Barney called on Tuesday to say he was going to be giving a seminar in Atlantic City Thursday through Saturday and could I come meet him in Atlantic City on Thursday.  I asked why he didn't tell me before he was coming and he laughed and said he liked to surprise me and figured I would need some moral support before the test.  I still had not told him about the possible move to Michigan so that took a little of the excitement away from being able to spend the day with him.

Barney had never been to Atlantic City and I figured he would be in for a big surprise.  He was pleased that the seminar was fully booked with attendees but if he was expecting a Las Vegas it would not meet his expectations.  New Jersey  had voted in casino gambling in 1976 with the first casino opening in 1978.  To build a casino you also had to build a five hundred room hotel.  The thinking was that casino gambling would bring in more tourists and money to the once beautiful shore-side town.

Maybe it sounded logical, too bad it did not end up that way.  As more and more casinos were built lining the shore line two blocks behind the casinos ended up looking like Berlin after the war.  All the buildings were torn down as the land became too valuable for the businesses that once occupied the space.  It was rumored at one time the land was worth a million dollars a square foot.  Too bad there were no takers and it just  turned into a huge parking lot for the hundreds of buses that poured into the city everyday. By 1984 there were ten casinos lining the boardwalk and Atlantic City strip was doing well with all the bright lights and entertainment even if the rest of the city looked awful.

The only way to get to Atlantic City at that time was a two-lane road through the farmland of New Jersey - after all, it is called the Garden State.  Sis always said that south Jersey, from Trenton down to Maryland, was like a patch of the mid-west and there was always talk about seceding from the northern half. In a few months the roadside would be filled with little stands selling huge tomatoes, strawberries. blueberries, corn, cranberries, asparagus and almost everything else which had just been picked that morning.  As you got closer to the shore you came to what was known as the Pine Barrens. 

The Pine Barrens consists of  a heavily forested area that stretches across seven counties of New Jersey of sandy, acidic, nutrient-poor soil.
It covers 1.1 million acres and has hundred foot pine trees.  In 1978 it was designated as the Pinelands National Reserve to preserve the ecology as it sits on the 17 trillion gallon Kirkwood-Cohansey aquifer containing some of the purest water in the United States. It is just one of those beautiful secrets of New Jersey most people do not know about.

I tried very hard to just enjoy the drive on that beautiful spring morning. It was hard not to keep wondering if I should tell him we got transferred to Detroit.  Do I actually need to tell him I may not go and just wait and see what happens?  Do I just put on the old happy face and skip telling him anything about the move or is that unfair as he has always been honest and open about everything with me?

By the time I got the car parked and walked down the Boardwalk to Caesar's Palace I was a nervous wreck. As I approached Caesar's I had to stop and laugh.  The huge marquee had his name and seminar emblazoned on it and there he sat on a bench in front of it with a huge smile like the cat that ate the canary.