Looking Into You

Well I looked into a house I once lived in
Round the time I first went on my own
When the roads were as many as the places I had dreamed of
And my friends and I were one

You never know when something strange will decide to happen to you. The other week, I was jack hammering up a section of my floor in the basement to clear the way for the installation of new drain lines for a bathroom I am adding in the basement. I decided to take a coffee break from the hard work and soak in a bit of the day’s news from the ink spread across the Star Tribune and noticed a black Toyota pulling up to park outside my window. A short, happy-looking woman with closely cropped hair, somewhere in her late fifties or early sixties, emerged from the vehicle and started to walk up my steps and front walkway, distractedly looking at the landscaping and neighboring houses. I greeted her at the door as anyone would in this sort of situation, with a hesitant “Umm, can I help you?”

“Hi,” she replied, “my name is Joanne and I grew up in this house.”

Now the distance is done
And the search has begun
I’ve come to see where my beginnings have gone

Joanne came inside and looked around the room. She asked if I was renting the place (the previous owners had rented to college aged kids during the last few years they owned the place) and I told her no, that I had purchased the property in late 2006 and was working on fixing up the place. Joanne informed me that she was in town from Dallas for a class reunion at Holy Angeles and couldn’t resist stopping by to see the place. She talked about how much she loved the dark woodwork in the living room, how her brother had sunk himself for weeks on end into fixing up the place after her father had died in 2001, how expensive it was to replace the foundation after they had discovered it was in poor structural shape.

As we wandered about the room, Joanne remarked how her father had watched his tools like a hawk. She talked about how painful her father’s death had been and how hard it hit her family.

All the walls and the windows were still standing
And the music could be heard at the door
Where the people who kindly endured my odd questions
Asked if I came very far

I took Joanne downstairs and showed her the projects I had been working on, how I was updating the basement to add a bedroom, bathroom and media room. She was impressed and laughed that her family had always joked about her father adding a bathroom out on the porch, something that is even more laughable given the current state of my porch (not good). Joanne said that even more than the house, what she missed was the neighborhood; that she remembered a happy childhood with good friends, running through the yards of the houses up and down the block, each one filled with people that cared about and supported each other.

She talked about the flower and vegetable competitions her father would have with the neighbors, how she and her friends would take their bikes down to Lake Nokomis to go swimming in the summer time, and how cold she remembered it being waiting for the bus to take her to school. As she was walking out the door, Joanne turned to me and said “I’m not sure if this sort of thing is important to you or not, the vibe of a place. But if it is, you should know that you are living in a place with great memories, where people loved each other very much for a long time.”

Well we spoke the changes that would find us farther on
And it left me so warm and so high
But as I stepped back outside to the grey morning sun
I heard that highway whisper and sigh
Are you ready to fly?

It seems to me that people seek out their origins for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it’s to see that the things they remember still exist, that the world as they knew it is still reality in some small way. Sometimes it’s to remember something that it seems the rest of the world has moved on from with little or no care, something lost that cannot be replaced. And still others some sort of smeary in-between, less defined, but no less powerful.

Nothing lasts forever – that seems to be the lesson of looking back, of revisiting where you come from. We are doomed with the knowledge that eventually the people we love will die, the things we have accomplished will be forgotten, and the places we have lived will crumble. I guess in the face of such hopelessness, sometimes it’s good to see that some part of who, what, and where you have been is still standing.

And I looked into the faces all passing by
It’s an ocean that will never be filled
And a house the grows older
And finally crumbles
That even love cannot rebuild