On a personal note, I'd like to mention here that it was twenty-five years ago today that Donna and I moved into our white house high in the Cincinnati suburbs.
Built in 1907, it was the seventh house we were shown by our realtor and we knew it was for us right away -- we loved its woodwork, its staircase, its tiled fireplaces, its apartment-sized attic, but, being two not-very-handy people, its most attractive feature may have been that the walls didn't need repainting nor repapering. Believe it or not, all these years later, the walls remain as they were on the day we moved in. It's not that we can't bear to have them painted or repapered; we just can't get at them anymore.
Before coming here, we were being driven mad by downstairs neighbors in a four-apartment building in an area slipping down the steep slope to disaster. We both remember clearly the day when we took the bus from that apartment here to our future house, with broom and mop and bucket in tow, and prepared the empty three-level place for our occupancy. We kept our two cats, Godot and Kaboodle, shut inside the bathroom of our apartment as the movers emptied its other three rooms of furniture; when I let them out, they dug their claws into the finished wooden floor as if thinking that the law of gravity had been repealed and sent all our furniture skyward, with them to follow presently. I got them into a pet carrier and brought them here by taxi, while Donna traveled here with the movers. Opening the pet carrier, Godot and Kaboodle stepped out hesitantly... but then a wonderful expression seemed to bloom on their faces as they understood how much their territory had been enlarged. That day we met neighbors who remain our dear friends, though they have since moved away, and we attended the weddings of their 7-year-old girl and 2-year-old boy. As a kid, with the exception of one family I lived with for a year, I lived only in apartments and it was a wonderment to discover the pleasures of living in a house. After so many years of being harrassed by neighbors' high drama and overloud and inconsiderate music, it became a source of great pleasure simply to sit in my own yard and listen to the sounds of nature, church bells, or people working on their cars a block away. Our back yard remains our special retreat, weather permitting, the closest thing your hardworking Watchdog team ever gets to vacation time.
Our once-empty house is far more cluttered and disorderly these days, and we groan to ourselves a good deal about the lack of wall space to display our art, posters and books, not to mention the absence of an actual shower. (Funnily enough, the possibility of wake-up and before-bed showers every day has always been one of Wonderfest's many attractions for us.) In the past few years, we've been able to make a number of needed improvements to the property (we're now talking about having a shower built in our basement), but we've accumulated so much stuff in the past quarter-century, our large walls have become covered and our once-spacious attic is cluttered with boxed books and movies. We're outgrowing the place and don't anticipate living here another twenty-five years; we do anticipate that, when Moving Day comes (probably moving days), it (or they) will loom large among days of infamy.
We've been blessed with good neighbors over the years -- some of whom remain, but many of whom have either moved or passed on. We've known and loved their pets, as well. Aside from Pat, who lives on the other side of us and has lived in her house for all but one of her 70+ years, Donna and I are bemused to find ourselves now the elders of our immediate area. Having married in our teens, we have obviously lived here longer than we ever before lived in any one place, and I personally leave this house so seldom that it sometimes seems like my space station, my submarine, my dream-within-a-dream. We've had no children, but it was here that VIDEO WATCHDOG was conceived in 1989; since moving here, we've given birth to 140+ magazine projects, numerous books (four in 1985 alone) and novels and screenplays and comics scripts, assorted unpublished novels and non-fiction, a calendar, and 664 blog entries -- 664 being the inversion of our house number, as serendipity would sweetly have it. This is a good house for entrepreneurs: the couple that lived here before us not only raised a family here, they ran a dental lab from the basement. We once found some false teeth inside a basement wall, reminding me of a scene in Roman Polanski's THE TENANT.
Anyway, the silver anniversary of one's home and hearth is a sentimantal occasion, and one probably not often achieved in today's transient world. "Home is a name, a word," Charles Dickens wrote in MARTIN CHUZZLEWIT; "it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration." Like Dickens, I had an unsteady childhood, fraught with constant moving from place to place, so I share his fondness for the almost mythic conceptual stature of a constant home and hearth. "Home" is much more than the skin that covers our own skin -- that much is a house. "Home" is what we call the walls and roof that give oneness to all that we hold most dear and close to ourselves; it's where we externalize our interior selves in the form of décor and furnishings and comforts; it's the walls of muscle we erect between the outside world and the atria and ventricles of our true selves. We invite friends in.
Absolutely, it's where the heart is.
