Second installment of the weird month series:

June 2, 2008

          I don’t really know how to explain Kansas City.  It has a mystic sort of significance understood, I have thought, by nobody in my family, except maybe by my dad.  But then, he has never been a particularly sentimental man.  So Kansas City has been for me a sort of private, almost magical place in the midst of my heart, the center of my sense of place, the home I once came from.

            My grandmother’s house, the house my grandfather – a man I never knew – built for his family in Waldo, on Gregory (the house in which my dad finished his childhood) was the one unchanging center of my universe during the whole of my childhood.  We went back there to visit from Los Angeles, from New York, from Texas, from Utah, and the house was always the same—the creak of the screen door, the deep wing backed chair, the glass dog on the shelf at the top of the stairs, the snow globe propping open the door to the bedroom that was always mine when we were there.

Sultan, the grand-dog, at home.

            It had been my Aunt Jeannie’s bedroom.  The triptych mirror that sat on the tiny dressing table had a small brown star stuck to it, way down at the bottom of one of the glass panels.  I always thought the star was made out of sand paper for some reason, and to this day, I wonder where it came from and why she mounted it there on the mirror—where it would stay in state for decades after she’d left the house for her own.  The ornate brush and hand mirror also left neatly behind were hers, as was the low white bed I slept in over and over through the years.

            I knew the particular sound of each floor in that house, the creak of the upstairs hall, the hollow crackle of the age old linoleum of the kitchen and the back hall.  The ice cream we ate there, sitting at the glass breakfast table, was always carefully cut into small cubes and drizzled with hot, thick fudge, and was served in small, clear etched glass bowls.

Gin’s house: within walking distance of one bead store and about five hundred antique shops.

            I lived in three houses in Kansas City – the one they brought me to when I was born, the one we rented after Los Angeles, the one my father built for us up by the airport when I was in sixth grade.  I was upstairs in my room in that house one day when I saw lighting come straight down out of the sky to skewer the earth, way out on the horizon.  Missouri is famous for its thunder storms.  And tornados. 

            One Easter when we were visiting, tornados came to the city. That night, the radio blared, weirdly loud in that sedate house, shouting reports as twisters touched down in the streets here and there—only to rise again and then touch down somewhere else.  It sounded to me like there were alien predators loose all over town, stalking us in the dark streets.  It’s the only time I can remember being truly terrified.  My father went around opening all the windows of the house in spite of the wind and rain—and that made no sense to me at all.

           “It’s time,” he finally said, and the awful seriousness and urgency in his voice absolutely chilled me.  We were herded down the wooden steps to the basement.  On our way down, there came a clap of thunder, louder than anything I’d ever heard in my life.  As if something had exploded.  As if the house had come down over our heads.  My five year old sister missed her footing and fell, screaming, down the last four or five steps, and that’s when I lost it too.

            I slept with my grandmother later that night, tucked up in her bed.  I remember getting up to peer out the window at the rain, wondering how they could be so sure that all of the tornados had left the city.  But Easter morning dawned, bright and blue and all innocence.  I think that experience left a shadow in my heart—the beginning of the dark understanding of adulthood.  That behind the light lurks a darkness we cannot afford to acknowledge.  Still – and still, that house still stands, undamaged through the years—no longer ours, but somebody’s.  And long safe from tornados.

Gin’s little neighborhood.  Very much the Kansas City I remember. It was big trash day – where you put all your major stuff out on the curb.  Before the city gets to it, people comb through each other’s stuff and carry away what they can use.

            To this day, I remember the sound of the rain on Gregory – I’d go to sleep at night lulled by the sounds of quick tires passing in the wet street below my window.

            So every time I go back to Kansas City, it’s a tour de force for me, a million smells and memories, mysteries and old-fashioned details.  Connection to a past I only knew through the rooms of that house.  To people even then long gone.

Max, beating me at Wii bowling.

            This last pilgrimage, me as a grown woman visiting her UMKC student daughter, was a little bitter sweet.  Gin had finished her MBA, and Kris his dental degree.  They were on the very edge of leaving Kansas City behind to do a pediatric specialty in Rhode Island.  And with the things the way they are going in the world, my few travel dollars having to carry me off to the eastern coast, when would I see my old home ever again?

            But my Aunt Jeannie still lives there.  And my four boy cousins, all shockingly grown-up. When I went off to college myself, almost forty years ago now, it was like my childhood had been somehow all sealed off, set on a shelf like a dear old book.  Closed and quiet.  My cousins lived for me, a program running in the background, as boys: the tall, grown up, teenaged handsome John.  Quick Jimmy.  My personal Clue partner, Jeff, and Tiger, cute but too young to suit me much.

          I went to school for a hundred years.  And then got married.  And then had kids.  We built our little business—not a car-ish sort of business, the kind you can start with a key—maybe even hire a driver—and it runs itself.  It’s not even a mo-ped kind, where you kick start your little motor, but you still have to sit up straight and keep the thing in balance as it propels itself. The studio has always been more like a bicycle; you have to sit in the seat, grip the handle bars and peddle it all the time, or the thing doesn’t go.  We have spent three decades selling off the hours of our lives, each minute worth so much—and if no minutes are bought, no money is made.

            When you live that way, you don’t get paid vacation.  And when you go on vacation, there is always the danger that there will be no business for you to get back to when you come home again.  So we’d drive down to Guy’s folks house in the summer and swim in the pool for a few days.  And once in a rare while drive all the way down to Texas.  But most of the time, we stayed home, peddling as hard as we could.  Which pretty much kept everything east of the Rockies into that cloudy status of memory.

            Then Gin and Kris chose Kansas City for dental school.  I tell you, it was weird the first time we visited there.  I called my father and demanded addresses for the old houses, map-quested them and made G drive me all over the city, finding my history.  What I learned was that, while I might have left Kansas City, it still kind of remembered me.

            There is even a street there named after my grandfather, the city engineer—we found it, and walked it, and took pictures of the street sign – my grandfather’s name in clear white letters on the green background.  And we finally found the right houses on Ward Parkway, built by my great grandfather.  And the farms in Shawnee Kansas, now swallowed up into a huge and gorgeous park.

My great aunt Lenore’s house. One of the two my great grandfather built, some time around the twenties, I think?  How odd that these houses are still here, and that people who know nothing about us live in them, as if the houses belong to them.

And the great-grandparents’ house.  It’s gorgeously kept inside by really nice people.  Still very arts and crafts.  The original rich wood work – french doors, hard wood floors, mission trims.  Both of these houses had sleeping porches for summer.  Sounds good, but i know something about Missouri mosquitoes.

Inside detail.  We didn’t have a lot of time; Max had to go to the bathroom.  Maybe I’ll go back there and take more.  Really, it was the most wonderful house.

And I had to stop and think that my great grandparents looked out through these very windows every day—I don’t know.  I just kind of don’t get “the past,” so I have to keep trying to figure it out.

       But more than all that, I got to embrace my beautiful aunt.  And to spend time with cousins who had taken in my daughter and her husband and her energetic son—who invited them for Thanksgiving and Easter, who babysat, and loved them and got to know them better than we, as cousins, had ever known each other.  By this, and because my brother had moved up to Utah nearby—after three decades of living without any of my family within a full day’s drive – of cobbling together a family feeling out of good friends and borrowed family – I suddenly had a real family of my own.  A real, living, breathing family.

Cousins.  When did we get so grown up?

Not naming names here.  Privacy and all that.

My Clue partner who, at least at one time, smoked a very mellow pipe.  He took after our grandfather in that – and his wife, who looked after my little girl and made a friend for life.

This one was the little kid, the youngest cousin.  His wife, and a glimpse of my classy, elegant, wonderful aunt.  I didn’t get a shot of her that could do her justice, sadly.  My godmother.  The woman who was once pinned in college by two boys at once (one who sang under her window, if I recall the story right).

            So this last visit to Missouri was not really to see Gin at all.  My purpose in going (and I don’t like flying at ALL anymore) was just to have dinner with my beautiful aunt and my cousins and their wives.  And it was wonderful.  Wonderful.  Oddly, as we sat there, talking over some fine fried chicken, I began to get it:  of all the people on the face of the earth, Jeff and John and Jim and Phil are the ONLY people, even excluding my own sibs, who have in the core of their hearts that same mystical center I have.  They know about the cast iron Boston terrier that stood by the fireplace downstairs in the basement.  And the rush rugs on the floor down there, and the car racing game.  They know about the rack of pipes under the deer head, and the ping pong table and the laundry shute.  They know about the milk door, and the sound of the floors, and the round things you had to use to pull down the shades.  They know about the ornate little metal grid that covered the place where the mail came into the vestibule and the silver salver onto which the mail was placed.

            They know about the rocking chair in the kitchen and the white wrought iron breakfast table with the glass top.  The mirrored dresser in the downstairs bathroom, and the horse head and hunting dogs hand painted on Daddy’s Jim’s after-shave bottles.  They know the sound of the clock pendulum in the living room, and the white milk glass chicken that used to hold jelly beans and peppermint lozenges.  The ivy in the glass globe on the rounded outside edge of the bottom step.  The Persian rugs and the prisms that hung on the lamps on the dining room sideboard. The toy bus and the jacks and the wonderful sound of the glider out in the screen porch.  The pine cones and the little red wagon.

            All of those things.  The smell of the cedars under the window and the key in the heater next to the toilet upstairs and the fern in front of our grandmother’s front bedroom window.  Nellie’s room.  The book shelves in the basement.  The shoe box that looked like it was wood and had all my dad’s marbles in it.  The Indian baskets full of fossils and rocks and potsherds. The wooden model train my grandfather had made by hand, the saluting private who stood on top of the piano, who was supposed to be looking back at a small statue of a girl – a statue some piano tuner had made off before I was born.  The little crystal door knobs.  The hidden little door on the far side of Jeannie’s bed.

            All of these things that were so strangely significant to me as a child – these four cousins know  all about them.  They come from my country.  They actually lived in it.  And there, at dinner, we talked about these very important things that no one else would ever understand.  And it was really, really wonderful.

The Ward Parkway neighborhood.

            I haven’t explained any of this well.  Maybe I have to bring it all down to this:

            You have one lifetime.  One childhood.  We forget, we grown-ups who worry about the economy and mortgages and church work and politics and money – we forget that the subtle tastes, the smallest hint of scent, the odd details become the color and mystery of a child’s seminal life.  Children hear what we have forgotten to listen to.  They remember in vivid detail things we have ceased to notice.  The world we have made in our homes is the mystery at the heart of our children and grandchildren.

            Maybe someday my Max, when he is fifty, will remember some little detail about my house with a strange little heart-pain.  Maybe he’ll wonder where this or that little thing ended up, and wish he could hold it in his hand again, just to remember that feeling of being little and loved and mystified by a house that somehow belongs to him, while he hadn’t really lived there at all.

            I’m sure there are secret doors in my house that I don’t even know about, but that my grandchildren will find.

            And I want to end with this: a message to my lovely Jeannie, and my tall, handsome grown up oldest cousin John, and to Jeff, who was always my favorite cousin, and to Tiger, who grew up to be Phil – and to Cathi, who has loved my Gin and Max, to Joyce, who has been kind to me – and to my other cousins by marriage, who made me feel at home:

            I love you.  And I treasure the time we’ve spent together and the connection between us.  Thank you – just, thank you.