GHOST OF A HOME

Here’s an essay I wrote following the death of my mom back in 2015. I sent it around to a couple of competitions, but it didn’t seem to tickle any fancies.

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During the summer of my mother’s fatal cancer ordeal, on the sixth of August—Hiroshima Day, a hell-on-earth milestone after which all of human history would change—I conducted a personal ritual, another in a series of explicit farewells to my childhood: I paid a visit to the home in which my late grandparents lived, and where I spent much of my prepubescence while my parents worked.

I hadn’t gone back for fifteen years, not since the day of my grandmother’s death. My grandfather passed a few years before, and their absence left a vacuum in my heart. And without the presence of the loving family who transformed a structure of brick and wood into what we think of as home, it had felt pointless to return.

Now, though, I received specific warnings from family members to stay away.

“If I was you, I wouldn’t go,” my aunt said. “Before they took off for who knows where, the people that bought it ran it into the ground.”

“It’s sitting empty?”

She couldn’t meet my eyes. “It’s foreclosed. Nobody lives there now. Don’t go.”

I wasn’t sure which part felt worse—that the subsequent homeowners treated the house with disrespect, or that it now sat empty and deteriorating.

I had to see. “Be that as it may.”

As I drove over to a neighborhood once called Mayfield Acres, a flood of memories washed over me: Christmas mornings full of fellowship, toys and joy. Being taught by my grandmother how to fry sausage and scramble my own eggs on the gas stove. Sitting cross-legged on an oval, woven throw rug in front of the console television, my mind imprinted by iconic, cheesy television shows. Playing out on the Astroturf-covered carport, or else reading or drawing away afternoons that seemed to last forever. Wandering amidst oaks that towered over me, amid clusters of azaleas that bloomed every spring in bold colors. Dogs barking and running. Butterflies. The troubles of the adult world, far away.

Had I dwelled in earthbound Heaven, there in that yard?

Perhaps.

But life wasn’t all puppy-dogs and fluttering orange monarch butterflies. On many days I experienced pangs of loneliness, even what an adult might call depression. While I wasn’t friendless at school, and it wasn’t the case across town in my parents’ neighborhood, I was the only kid on the block. Alone for hours at a time, I often suffered feelings of emptiness and isolation.

Unpersuaded of a greater world existing elsewhere, except for what I viewed on the television, I turned to my imagination for comfort. I guess that’s one reason I became a writer of stories and novels.

I spent my days at that house, a nine-hundred-eighty square foot ranch with a small screened-in porch on the back they would later convert into a sunroom, because my mom and dad commuted, day-in day-out, thirty miles down the green corridor of I-20 to Columbia. As they toiled and served and sought to light the way forward to a more secure existence than their own sets of Depression-era progenitors had experienced, my working class Baby Boomer folks utilized the most reliable and tribal daycare humankind has ever known: the extended family. Unlike so many modern children who often find themselves in the care of strangers, I found myself attended by the kind of affection and attention that only another family member can bestow upon a child.

How lucky I was. My loneliness, only a figment, a mental construct. I wanted for nothing and no one—they all loved me.

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As we sat beside my mother’s sickbed debating my visit to the house on Oak Street, my aunt reminisced about how impoverished the family had been during their own childhood. She related how their better-off schoolmates in Camden, a town older than the capital city itself and still populated by quite a few Old-South, monied families, never let hardscrabble kids like them forget their lot in life.

I had always thought of our family as lower middle class, but never poor. “Was it that bad?”

“We didn’t ever have nice new clothes like the other children.”

My heart went out to her, my mom, and my uncle. Overweight until my adolescence, I knew from brutal personal experience how alienating the harsh words of the bullies, the rude shoves, the rocks thrown across a crowded playground and glancing off a tender skull. “They picked on y’all?” 

Her lips pressed into a tight line across her face, my aunt lowered her eyes. “Now you understand why your mother was always so picky about making sure your clothes looked good, and the house and yard were always clean and pretty. She was like Scarlet O’Hara about never being hungry again.”

My mother, languishing in a fog of morphine, groaned from the bed. Maybe she didn’t want to remember those impoverished times. Who could blame her?

Needless to say, neither of my grandparents had any of that “old money”—strapping, robust James came from a line of linthead textile workers, while Aylene, a tall, big-shouldered and raven-haired beauty, hailed from a farm outside Dallas, Texas, where she spent her youth working the fields. No columned, antebellum front porches or affected, aristocratic Carolina brogues for either. Dirt poor—literally.

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After my grandfather’s service in World War 2, which included landing on Omaha Beach in the third wave on D-Day and fighting through the freezing European winter forest later in 1944 and 1945, he suffered from what they now term PTSD.

Troubled and existentially rootless, Pa-paw moved the family back and forth from South Carolina to Texas, seeking and searching for a modicum of peace in his heart—or simply trying to escape the awful pictures in his head. By the mid-50s they found themselves with three children to rear, and never much money in the bank. Changing jobs so often didn’t help.

While reminiscing, my mother had often lamented pulling up stakes, the difficulty of maintaining friendships, her loneliness. “I hated moving,” she told me before she became too ill to communicate. “I had to keep starting over. It made me feel lost.”

The more I pondered her childhood, contrasting it with the happiness and stability of my own, the more I wept for her. And she wasn’t even gone yet.

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Thanks to commitment, discipline and abstemiousness, my folks would more than make up for my mother’s poor childhood. Through decades of diligent toil they carved out a solid, middle-class American Dream, one straight out of the playbook by which they’d been conditioned: comfort and relative plenty coming as reward for keeping noses pressed close to grindstones.

My dad, for example, worked his way from an HVAC service tech to dispatcher to supervisor to general manager, and my mother from secretary to cashier to credit manager at a legacy, major car dealership near downtown Columbia. We sat down to full meals every night; she always ironed my clothes, clean and all-but new. Every other week my dad worked on-call, would often have to suit up in the middle of the night like a superhero dispatched to go restore another family’s domicile to air-conditioned or heated comfort. Steadily saving money, by the time I went off to college in the 80s—the first of my family to do so—my parents were able to write checks for my tuition out of that precious savings. A family could do that back then, when college tuition wasn’t yet another mortgage on a person’s future earnings. You tell that to one of today’s young parents, and they look at you like you’re either  dishonest, or perhaps crazy.

Years before, though, even my grandparents seemed to prosper: besides the small ranch house in which I all-but lived, they acquired a mobile home on a nearby Lake Wateree cove, as well as a pleasure boat behind which my dad and uncles water-skied. Now we could go to the lake every weekend and enjoy lazy afternoons fishing from the dock, fried chicken and potato salad suppers, or cruising around the turbid body of water that represented the terminus of the Catawba River.

Twilight whippoorwill calls signaled when it was time to pack up and drive the ten miles home to prepare for the week ahead, which for me entailed staying at my grandparents’ house, a routine we followed all summer long.

Only nine or ten at the time, I couldn’t wait to be old enough to drive the boat.

But the next thing I knew, the lake house and the boat were gone. My grandfather, always getting in and out of businesses deals. Always starting over. All I knew was that he had worked at the Buick dealership for years. Had awards on the wall at home as Salesman of the Year. Now I understand a few good seasons gave them the money for the lake house.

But next thing you knew, he had started his own used car lot. Also dealt for a while in used mobile homes. Later, he ran a gas station for a year or two—I recall standing underneath the canopy above the pumps on a winter’s day in which a rare South Carolina snow shower began to fall, the flakes drifting large and lazy. After that, back to the dealership until he retired. Never out of work, but also never quite satisfied. Who knew what really happened with the lake house, other than they could no longer afford it.

I never understood why Pa-paw wouldn’t talk about his war experiences, which my grandmother explained gave him galloping night-terrors. For years, she said, he woke up screaming. Later I would come to understand that men like him, with the greatest war in human history under their belts, didn’t share much of themselves, even with family. Their subconscious, roiling with the pain and horror of war; his nightmares, an expression of anguish kept secreted by the cloak and privacy of night.

Suppression of pain, however, offers a dangerous gambit. Pa-paw died eaten up by cancer, a similar condition from which his daughter now suffered and approached her mortal end.

I may not have known the man well—other than feeling his love for me—but my grandfather’s house? That I knew, every nook and cranny, inside and out. It loomed large in my memory. And when I turned onto a street so familiar I swore I recognized individual stones in the macadam. I felt the warm wash of familiarity bathing my soul like sunlight on bare skin.

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The second I saw the yard, however, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Actually, I could. But I only preferred to see the after-image of the past rather than the reality of now:

Shutters hanging off at a skewed angle. None of the bright flowers and colorful azaleas like I remembered. Not only did the house look so small as to seem unfamiliar, but a long oak limb had fallen across the fenced-in back yard. Trash blown into the corners of the rusting cyclone fencing. The birds didn’t even seem to sing from the treetops. Signs of abandonment.

Alone again not unlike those long summer afternoons forty years before, I held my arms tight around my midsection and strolled the yard. Peered into dirty windows, seeing the rooms in which I had come of age. Noted the broken AC unit, stripped for its copper. Stood sighing on the cracked concrete of an old patio where many steaks and burgers and dogs were grilled and enjoyed, where homemade ice cream with fresh South Carolina peaches was churned first by hand, and later by an electric model, so the menfolk wouldn’t have to take turns until their arms got tired. For years, every Sunday afternoon the family would gather in this backyard to commune. A ritual. Flickering Super8 movies tell the tale, even now.

But no one dwelled here now.

No picnic suppers to enjoy.

No new memories made.

No family.

No people.

I tried not to get sick to my stomach.

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As I gathered myself and searched for the courage to leave, I forged a positive spin on the condition of the property—someone would buy the house at auction. Make a new home here. Give another kid, maybe one like I had been, a happy, normal childhood, one like I had experienced here.

An idea gripped me: I shall own the house of my grandparents, this ghost of a home.

Fix it up.

Rent it out myself.

Or even live here again.

Ridiculous.

No, my conscious and present mind, as well as my intuition, felt certain this visit constituted goodbye, farewell, and amen to Oak Street.

Realizing my aunt, like Thomas Wolfe, had been right about trying to go back home, I took a deep breath and closed the gate of the broken chain-link fence. Took a last look at the fallen limb from the mighty oak tree under which I had played and read. Swore to hold onto only the good memories, not this vision of a brittle and desiccated husk of that which I used to experience as Home.

Raising a lazy wave to a passing motorist—in the South, it’s what you do—I signaled to turn onto the highway out of the neighborhood. My eyes were dry, but my mind reeled: Who knew so close to my fiftieth birthday my childhood would still be ending?

Maybe childhood is always ending, even from the moment we’re born.

Without so much as a glance back in the rearview mirror, I went back to work on the task at hand: seeing my mother through her transition out of this life, to a place where no one would ever bully or make fun of her for not having the finest of clothes. Where nothing else would ever matter, certainly not some forgotten, crumbling old house turning to dust, its image in my memory now more real than the physical shell left behind to decay. To rest alone and forgotten. To remain unloved, save for the spirit of a lonely boy, forever wandering that beloved acre with his grandparents, and his mother, to either side.

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Arriving back at my parents’ house, I saw my aunt standing in the open garage door, beside the lawn chairs where we would sit to discuss my mother’s condition.

As I put my champagne-colored F-150 into park, her swollen eyes, a common condition over the last two months, found mine.

I hugged my mother’s sister. “She any better this afternoon?”

Avoiding the question. “Did you go?”

“Where?” I asked, pretending. “Oh—the house? Nah. I skipped it.”

She dabbed at her eyes. “You don’t want to see it. None of us do.”

I smiled the best I could. “I know. You were right. Now let’s go check on mom.”