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Burning Down the House

#WhereILivedWednesday: Mrs. Black’s House

This is part of a series of entries about places you once called home, started by Ann Imig of Ann’s Rants. Check out the links on her site for more stories!

My mother started a new job in a small Maine town during the summer of 1983. Our house in New York was on the market but not generating much interest and the three of us still left at home needed to join my mother up in Maine by the start of the school year. When the first day of school rolled around, we were still living at a summer place an hour away, in the tiny beach town where we’d spent many summers of our childhood. After two weeks of making that drive with three reluctant passengers at 6am, my mother found someplace closer to school.

Our new temporary home was also a summer house, right down by the water, but in the same town as my mom’s new job and our school. It was owned by an old lady named Mrs. Black who cleared out after Labor Day and was happy to have some extra income by renting it to us. The reason she moved back into town then was because the house wasn’t winterized; a new term for me that I didn’t fully appreciate until later.

At first it was great. September in Maine is still beautiful, with the fall colors starting, and you could still look forward to warm afternoons. The house had a very large open room with a double fireplace smack in the middle. One corner was the dining area, the opposite corner had a big sofa and one of those lobster trap tables common in Maine summer houses. There were two bedrooms back behind the living room area of the open room, and one small bathroom. There was another bedroom tucked in behind the kitchen but it was a little creepy and we preferred to double up in the regular bedrooms.

Even though we were now in the same town as our school, it was about as far away as you could be and still be in the same district. We could have taken a school bus, and in fact my younger sister did start taking the bus home from school after a couple of weeks. But my older sister and I were New York snobs and absolutely refused to do anything so rural as ride a school bus. Besides, there was nothing to do at Mrs. Black’s house. It was lovely but remote. You could go for a walk past the deserted summer community and that was about it. My mother borrowed a black and white tv from a young guy in her office but again, being that far away from a broadcast center, you could get maybe two channels, no cable, no MTV.

September turned to October and the sun set earlier every day. Those crisp fall days everyone loves? Not so fun when your summer cabin has no heat or insulation. That big double fireplace didn’t really work. We tried once but just managed to smoke up the whole room. There actually was some kind of electric heat source, a grate in the floor blew hot air when you flipped a switch on the wall, but after my younger sister nearly set her sweater on fire by placing it on top of the grate to warm up one frosty morning, my mother declared it off limits. The bedroom my older sister and I shared had a little space heater that was basically like leaving the door open on a toaster oven. We were allowed to run it for a few minutes before going to bed to take the chill off the room so you could stand to change into pajamas. Under no circumstances were we allowed to let it run all night for fear of it shorting out and starting a fire. I think my mother was more afraid of us burning down the rental house than of our own personal safety but it was a pretty sketchy heater so we obeyed.

By November it was bad. Really bad. We now had no hot water either. It turns out that one night when it got really cold, the hot water pipe had cracked and every time we turned on the hot water, instead of coming out of the sink or shower head, it was dumped onto the rocks beneath the house and trickled down to the ocean. We wore long underwear, sweatpants, and flannel nightgowns, all at the same time, two pairs of socks, and mittens, when we went to bed. My mother and little sister started sharing a twin bed, for warmth, with the cat sleeping on top of them trying to get in on some of that body heat.

We lived out there until Thanksgiving. Our house in New York still hadn’t sold but we couldn’t stay in the non-winterized house any longer. A person my mother knew at work had built a new house and was having trouble selling his old one, just like we were. He agreed to rent it to us until he had a buyer or we managed to sell ours and finally really move up to Maine.

Hey, it’s my two-year blogiversary! I’ve got a tradition going now of posting Talking Heads songs on this day, this makes the third one. We listened to this album a lot that first year up in Maine, and the last song on the record is my favorite TH song, but that’s the song on my first post so I took this one instead. It seemed to fit better anyway.

Ages of You

R.E.M. – Ages of You

Today I found out about the Amtrak Residencies for writers. I can’t tell you how perfect that is. I might cry. Right now I am listening to the train tape I made in college (the digital edition on my iPod) and I can see the backyards of America in my head, obscured now and then by the blur of greenery; interrupted by the occasional overpass. I always thought that would make an excellent anthropology thesis, America’s Backyards as Seen from the Train. That’s where the truth hangs out. The discarded bicycles, rusted red wagons, trampolines, and clotheslines.

Close by the cities, the scenery is much more industrial. Warehouses. Graffiti covered brick buildings and cement walls. Trenton Makes The World Takes. The cities give way to the suburbs, where the backyards and cemeteries make up the scenery. Depending on what train you’re taking, you might get far enough away from the built up areas to see more traditionally scenic views. I always try to sit on the right side of the train in a window seat. If you always sit on the right, you’ll see what’s on the left on your way back.

I love everything about train travel. I love the big, beautiful, historic stations. I love the smells of the engine, some kind of weird mix of diesel and electric, hot and metallic. I love the rhythm of the train swaying gently as it clatters along the tracks. I love the tracks! I have two rusted and discarded old railroad spikes saved in a bin. I have several Amtrak train ticket stubs saved alongside concert tickets. I love leaning my head against the window and trying to find a spot to put your feet that gives you just the right amount of ‘please don’t talk to me’ body language or trying to sit in such a way as to invite a little conversation. I love watching my fellow passengers, listening to them chat with their seatmate or talk with their children about what’s passing by the window. I like to sneak a peak at the book they’re reading. Watching as people meet them when they get off the train, and others saying goodbye as someone gets on.

I have taken the train as far north as Montreal, as far south as Georgia. The Adirondack. Southern Crescent. Overnight trains. Commuter trains. Sightseeing trains. Subways. I’ve been to Zoo Station. Paddington Station. Two of my proudest foreign language moments were giving directions to Salzburg’s train station in German and confirming in Czech that someone was waiting for the correct subway train in Prague. The only Czech words I can still remember are the words for beer and ‘next stop’ which is what they would announce as the subway pulled into every station.

It is hands down my favorite mode of travel. It’s not the fastest, there are usually delays on the line somewhere, but when I take the train, at least half the reason is just being on the train. It’s not the most convenient, being at the mercy of someone else’s schedule. A few years ago, Amtrak started running a train up to Maine, the Downeaster. I am dying to take that train. In order to get the train from my house to my mother’s house up in Maine would involve me getting on a train when it’s still dark in the morning and switching stations in Boston. It would take more time than driving but I’m actually contemplating buying a used car up near my mother just so I have an excuse to make that trip.

There is just something about the train that brings up all kinds of emotions for me. It’s like I feel a tiny shred of what everyone else in my car is feeling. Some people are excited, some are sad, some are hopeful, some are worried, some are exhausted, some can’t sit still. I know all those feelings and have, at different times in my life, been one of those people sitting there. So now I look around and see me on my first solo train trip, me going to visit a sister or a friend, me with my best friend on an adventure, me trying to hold it together when things aren’t working out, me on my way to a job interview, me seeing new places and remembering all my old favorite haunts. I don’t get that from any other form of travel.

This is the fourth song on the train tape. My vinyl copy of this song has a longer finger-snapping intro. I really wanted to use this version but I couldn’t get it to only play the first part.

A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’

De La Soul – A Roller Skating Jam Named ‘Saturdays’

I am halfway through my downloads from De La Soul, who are giving away all their albums for free today. Happy Valentine’s Day!

I used to be a roller skating fiend when I was in junior high. My best friend lived up the street and we would get home from school and lace up our skates and hit the street. We took a boom box outside and made up skating routines to our favorite songs (I can still remember parts of the one that we did to Blondie’s The Tide is High). It was because of us that the local Gristede’s instituted a No Roller Skating policy inside the store.

My skates were the sneaker style, bright yellow with rainbow stripes on the side like a pair of fake Adidas with bright yellow wheels and a matching yellow stopper. I loved those skates. They were sitting in my mother’s basement until just a few years ago when I allowed her to give them to Goodwill.

There’s a roller rink still very much alive not far from me. Our schools have skating parties to raise money for the PTO and it’s a popular birthday party spot. My daughter was first invited to a roller rink party four years ago but she didn’t know how to skate. Luckily we had a lot of lead time so I took her to the rink every weekend before the party to teach her how to skate. Once she mastered it, she loved it. We had her birthday party there later that year and bought her a pair of roller skates for her birthday that year.

It’s such a time warp in there. They bust out the old disco tunes towards the end of the skate session so you could almost think you’re back in the day with the Village People and Michael Jackson playing on the sound system. Next time maybe I’ll put in a request for this song.

A Forest

The Cure – A Forest

For Throwback Thursday I went digging in one of my plastic bins for some old treasures. There was my banana sticker collection, lots of mail, newspaper clippings, magazines and fanzines, a few handmade toys, two railroad spikes, a bottle with some dirt, and concert tickets.

The Cure at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, Aug. 6, 1987, $14.50, which included the service charge.

The Cure at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, Aug. 6, 1987, $14.50, which included the service charge.

This was for the Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me tour, though I was more of a fan of their earlier stuff. There was a young woman in my office a few years ago who had discovered The Cure based on that album and thought it was great. I thought that was not a very accurate reflection of the band I knew. I liked it well enough but it felt weird for them to be almost mainstream.

In looking for a video I discovered that Rhino has put up all the old original Cure videos that you used to see if you waited up past midnight on a Sunday to see 120 Minutes on MTV. There’s the creepy video from Charlotte Sometimes! The goofy Love Cats video! There’s quite a few of them. It’s fun to see the different Robert Smith hair and makeup phases over the years.

Sabotage

Beastie Boys – Sabotage

My husband’s car has satellite radio, though we aren’t subscribers so usually it’s just a button we don’t push. However, right now we have a free trial and I was running errands over the weekend driving his car around flipping through the stations. At one point the dj mentioned that Green Day’s Dookie had been released twenty years ago. That reminded me of an article I read a month ago about 30 albums turning 20.

Some of those albums do you make you blink and say, really? It’s been 20 years? But some others I think, yeah, that sounds right. A couple I even think, oh, I would have thought that was older. I mean, Hootie and the Blowfish, that’s old, am I right?

Back in 2011 when all of 1991’s albums were turning 20, I felt it. I felt old and I felt how could that be? It can’t possibly have been that long ago! In the three years since then I have figured out why that is and why I’m not fazed by the twentieth anniversaries this year.

In 1991 I moved to Washington, DC, had my first “real” job, and was living the life of a young, single person in a city. I was sharing a house with other 20-somethings, went out to shows a lot and basically did whatever I wanted. Life was relatively carefree and I soaked it up. Music has a way of making little time capsules from distinct periods in our lives. The music you listened to in high school. The college years were huge for me. Those three years I lived in DC definitely have a strong association with certain bands and albums.

At the beginning of 1994 I was still working at my museum job in DC. I would quit that job in late February and go to Europe for a month. By the end of the year I was living up in Maine, I’d bought my first car and was working at LL Bean by day* and an insurance company at night. Life had done a 180° and once the daily grind settled in, the years became less identifiable. There was little to set 1995 apart from 1996. I wasn’t married, I wasn’t having children, there were no markers to note as the years rolled by. I don’t think it was just the fact that the insurance company job was soul-crushingly boring, I think that’s kind of just what happens when you’ve been out of college for a couple of years. There’s your whole adult life ahead and things aren’t parceled out in chunks the way they were in your younger years. Even getting married and having kids, for me at least, weren’t the sort of events that wrapped up stretches of time in the same way.

For people experiencing that “Whoa!” factor this year with the albums that are 20 years old, I can say, it gets easier. This album, Ill Communication by the Beastie Boys, feels 20 to me. It feels like it’s been around a long time, an old friend. It is my 25th college reunion this year (not that I’m going) and so 20 doesn’t seem that bad, really. Lately I’ve been thinking about an album that’s turning 30 this year and I’m not even freaking out about it. Yet.

* If you live within, oh, say, a 50-mile radius of the LL Bean headquarters, chances are high you or someone you know has worked at Bean’s for the holiday season. I did it twice; once as a packer, and the time mentioned above in returns. I can vouch for their guarantee policy. They really will take anything back.

She Divines Water

#WhereILivedWednesday: 4005 Pine St.

This post is part of #WhereILivedWednesday, started by Ann Imig of Ann’s Rants. It’s my second post in this series and I love it. Go read all the other bloggers posting about their past homes linked on her site.

4005 Pine St. the half on the right.

4005 Pine St. the half on the right.

Summer 1988. My best friend and I decided that rather than each of us go to our respective homes during the break between our junior and senior years of college, we would live in Philadelphia and get jobs. I took the train in from my college in the suburbs and found a sublet just on the edge of the University of Pennsylvania campus where lots of old row houses were shared by students. I managed to line up a job at the Penn bookstore for the summer and figured my mother couldn’t say no, just look how responsible I had been so far.

Thankfully she didn’t say no, probably because job opportunities at home were slim and didn’t pay well. The bookstore job didn’t pay all that well either but it was a respectable job and would more than cover my rent and expenses so I would still be able to save up money for the fall semester. My friend and I shared a huge room that was big enough to have two double beds in it. A real luxury for people used to cramming themselves into dorm rooms with their weirdly extra-long single beds. I think we paid $200 a month, together, for our room. The first floor had a living room that almost no one ever used, a dining room (the two of us seemed to be the only one ones who ever ate our meals there), and the kitchen.

The second floor had our room, two other bedrooms, and a bathroom. The third floor had a similar layout. I loved all the intricate carved wooden mouldings and details in the old house. Our room had louvered shutters on the windows to keep the midday sun out but let the air pass through. I was thrilled to be in the city with a bunch of other young people, no parents telling us to be in by a certain time. It was my first time not living at home or in a dorm room with your meals provided.

We would bump into our fellow housemates in the kitchen mostly and get to talking, like you do while waiting for your pasta water to boil. Sharing our floor were two other young women, one named Tracey who had a thing for Bryan Ferry, and walked with a crutch. The other woman smoked and pretty much stayed locked in her room except for when she came down to make herself a Lean Cuisine. Her mother had recently become a convert on some diet or other and ate nothing but Lean Cuisine and made sure her daughter was equally well-stocked in frozen foods. From the third floor there was the Penn student who actually lived in the house year-round, and there was William. A tall, lanky, curly-haired Wharton grad, who had graduated in 1987, gone to Wall St. for a job, and got laid off in the great stock market crash later that year. He wasn’t too upset about it because he really didn’t like finance and wanted to be in a band instead.

We loved the freedom of living on our own in the city. We even loved mundane things like grocery shopping. It was great to be able to have the city right outside your door at all hours. Just at the other end of the block was a late night place called Billy Bob’s where you could get a Frank’s Black Cherry Wishniak soda at 2:00a.m. if you wanted to, just because how great is it to buy something called Frank’s Black Cherry Wishniak soda at 2:00a.m. from a place called Billy Bob’s?! There was a record store just down the street from Billy Bob’s, an all night Kinko’s another block down, everything you could want. Of course, city living had its downsides too, as a homeless man named David more or less took up residence on our front porch for a number of weeks. We decided not to tell our moms about that.

As great as the house was, the jobs we’d lined up sucked. I’d been hired to prepare all the textbooks for the summer session at Penn, and then to rearrange all the books for the fall semester. What they thougt would take me all summer to do, I finished in three weeks. One day, as I was flipping through the free City Paper, I saw an ad for bike messengers wanted. Guaranteed weekly salary of more than I was making at the bookstore plus the possibility of bonuses if you busted your butt. My friend’s job had her walking door-to-door in some really bad neighborhoods. So we both traded jobs. She took a job in an office answering phones and I took the job outside on the streets.

Luckily my outdoor job was perfect for me. The place that needed bike messengers was a reprographics firm with dedicated clients, mostly architects and engineers who needed big rolls of plans copied in the pre-everything-digital days. We would be given a log with a couple of places listed, either pick-ups or drop-offs, and we would stop at pay phones and call in to see if we should make any other stops before bringing back our loads. When we got back, more would be waiting to go out. The plans usually fit perfectly resting on top of my red bike‘s drop handlebars, held in place by the brake cables. Though I considered myself to be pretty familiar with the city already, I developed a real knowledge of its streets, including lots of areas that I hadn’t ever bothered to go to before. I learned which streets were one way and in which direction. I memorized the grid and knew where all the streets with trolley tracks and cobblestones were (both dangerous to a bike). I knew where the bike shops were and which ones would help out a messenger quickly in a pinch.

At the end of the summer we all headed back to our usual places. A friend with a car helped me move almost all my stuff back to my campus but my bike wouldn’t fit. I left it with William, who’d moved down the block once the Penn students returned, promising to pick it up on the weekend. When I came back to get it, on the eve of turning 21, with a summer of independence under my belt, I felt older, more assured. William wondered how I would get my bike home and I told him I’d take it on the train. He wasn’t sure they’d allow it but I was sure. Even if I was wrong, I felt I could talk my way into anything.


This song comes from an album I bought that summer at the record store around the corner. *Everyone knows about divining…

Ex Lion Tamer

Wire – Ex Lion Tamer

Last week I went to see Lee Ranaldo and the Dust, which I highly recommend if they come to your area. It was a small place, tickets were only $15, can’t go wrong. Toward the end of the show they played Fragile off of Wire’s album Pink Flag. (It sounded about like this, if you’re curious.)

Pink Flag is such a great album. 21 tracks in just about 35 minutes. Hugely influential. Since I bought my copy when I was in college it’s a record, and although my turntable works just fine, you can only use it if you do not move. Not even a tiny bit. The house is more than 150 years old and the floors all creak and bend when you take a step so even someone walking in a different part of the house will cause the needle to skip. It’s not an album I can sit still while listening to.

A month or two ago I found a copy of the CD at the library. I listened to it just about every day of the three weeks I was allowed to have it out on loan. Especially in the car. It’s hard to pick a favorite track but I kept hitting repeat on Ex Lion Tamer. I just love the way he sings, “Fish fingers all in a line.”

Bicycle

Memory Tapes – Bicycle

I had a very bicycle-themed Christmas this year, which is a little strange since none of the people who gave me these bicycle items know that this fall I tried to resurrect my old red bike and get back into riding shape. It’s a pretty easy bet that I would like any bicycle related thing though, so I was happy and appreciative.

I got little metal bicycle earrings, a set of four small juice glasses with different bikes on them, a book, and a 500-piece puzzle with pictures of a dozen or so bicycles. It sort of feels like a sign. I guess I might just have to try a spin class.

I think I would really like spinning IF I could bring my own music and not have someone shout at me when I should pedal faster, or whatever it is they do that makes this a group activity. There’s that too. I would prefer to be by myself. Just me, the open road, the tunes in my ears. When I lived in DC, I often rode my bike to work. We had this intern from Germany at our office who was about my age and he’d bought a bike too. People thought we would make a cute couple, and we were good friends, but as he once said to someone who suggested it, “we can barely cycle together.”

I have never liked exercising but bike riding was never about the physical fitness aspect, it was always a much more elusive feeling that I’m not sure I can explain. It’s sort of being at one with the bike. You and this two-wheeled metal frame, rocketing through the landscape, it’s damn near close to flying. You have those slow sloggy moments too when you notice the little details of your surroundings while trying not to look too pathetic as a runner passes you on the uphill. That has only happened to me once but I remember it vividly and I’m pretty sure I could call upon that memory in a darkened spin room when I need a little motivation.

A good playlist is always essential. In college I made a tape synced for my bike route so I had just the right sort of beat and inspiration on different spots along the way. I have recreated it as best I could for my iPod, and it’s not bad, but it was made for that specific 17-mile stretch and it doesn’t work as well on my current streets. This song might be a good biking song. It has a certain lost-in-the-moment feeling to it. The fact that it echoes New Order at the 3:38 mark is ok, I love New Order. I can almost see the green leaves whizzing by now. I just have to wait a good five months for that to be a reality. If I hit the gym this winter, maybe I’ll actually be able to pull it off.