944 Chautauqua
November 2012
© Adam Granger
In 1953, when I was three years old, my family moved to Norman, Oklahoma, where my father became a professor of English at the University of Oklahoma. On a 30-year mortgage, my parents bought a $19,000 single-story four-bedroom frame house at 944 Chautauqua Avenue, built in 1927. (Chautauqua, in the early years, marked the southwestern border of Norman, and was, eponymously, the site where early 20th century tent shows would set up.)
The house had a fireplace, which we used exactly once before my mother blocked it up. Mom was a splendid woman and we had a terrific relationship as adults but, by her own frequent declaration, she should never have been a mother or, for that matter, a wife. She hated housework, cooking and parenting, and she lived Thoreau's “life of quiet desperation.” Had she been born sixty years later, she would likely have been a happily-single bohemian artist. (I, my wife, my children, and at least several of my friends are glad it didn't work out that way, and so was she, ultimately.) So our fireplace only represented more work.
I never doubted that Mom loved me but, even as a small child, I sometimes took better care of her than she of me. She worked hard to overcome her unhappiness and the fatigue it wrought, and to integrate her time- and energy-consuming career as an artist with her home duties, and she often succeeded. She loved talking with me and reading to me in bed at night--The Pickwick Papers, The Bastable Children, Martin Chuzzlewit. We shared the same sense of humor and she possessed a blue-chip knowledge of art, music and literature.
Dad was right out of Academic Central Casting—neurologically and physically cloistered—but he had a sense of what fatherhood entailed, and on weekends he dutifully took us to Frontier City, or to powwows at Anadarko, or swimming at Turner's Falls. Otherwise, he was at the University, or in his home study, or playing tennis. I was generally the recipient of his benign neglect—not at all uncommon for father-child relationships in that era.
For our parts, my older brother and I were incapable of calm and quiet, and infested our house with the kind of constant din and havoc that one doesn't miss until it's no longer there, and maybe not even then. One memorable fight climaxed with a smashed living room table and a broken nose (mine), but we were essentially good kids whose parents never had to bail them out of jail on Saturday night.
In sum, my parents did the best they could with what they had, and my brother and I weren't nearly as bad as we could have been, and my memories of growing up on Chautauqua are a dichotomous mix of happiness and sadness, of security and instability, of well-being and ill-boding.
Over the decades, Dad retreated deeper into himself, and Mom became increasingly debilitated and dispirited by her fatigue and unhappiness. A house which had been in good nick when we moved in saw no paint, fixtures, or new furniture for 35 years.
After Mom died in 1988, Dad became engaged to a woman who lived in Michigan, and I flew down from Minnesota to help him pack and to drive the rental truck containing his belongings to East Lansing. Before I started packing, I shot a video of the house. It captured a shabby, worn-out structure whose walls were dirty, whose floors needed refinishing and whose curtains were hanging in tatters on their rods. The neighborhood, too, which in my youth had brimmed with kids, dogs and bicycles, seemed moribund that day: old, tired and childless, rife with trash and rundown rental property.
Before we pulled out of town for the last time, Dad and I emptied out his safe deposit box, and there was their mortgage, paid off in 1983. It's a fine document, ceremonious and celebratory in appearance, printed on parchment. The $63.51 monthly house payments are duly entered by the same clerk using the same fountain pen and the same ink for the first twenty-three years, and then that clerk retired and, for the last seven years, the entries are made in a different hand using a different pen and ink.
The words house and home have, in recent years, become interchangeable, with realtors and builders preferring the latter as being more, well, homey. But if we go by more traditional definitions, a house is a structure and home is what the occupants make of that structure.
This distinction begs questions: When and how does a house become a home? And once a house becomes a home, does it ever, through neglect and decrepitude, stop being one? And how do I distill the admixture of happiness and sadness that suffused my house and my home?
The house had a fireplace, which we used exactly once before my mother blocked it up. Mom was a splendid woman and we had a terrific relationship as adults but, by her own frequent declaration, she should never have been a mother or, for that matter, a wife. She hated housework, cooking and parenting, and she lived Thoreau's “life of quiet desperation.” Had she been born sixty years later, she would likely have been a happily-single bohemian artist. (I, my wife, my children, and at least several of my friends are glad it didn't work out that way, and so was she, ultimately.) So our fireplace only represented more work.
I never doubted that Mom loved me but, even as a small child, I sometimes took better care of her than she of me. She worked hard to overcome her unhappiness and the fatigue it wrought, and to integrate her time- and energy-consuming career as an artist with her home duties, and she often succeeded. She loved talking with me and reading to me in bed at night--The Pickwick Papers, The Bastable Children, Martin Chuzzlewit. We shared the same sense of humor and she possessed a blue-chip knowledge of art, music and literature.
Dad was right out of Academic Central Casting—neurologically and physically cloistered—but he had a sense of what fatherhood entailed, and on weekends he dutifully took us to Frontier City, or to powwows at Anadarko, or swimming at Turner's Falls. Otherwise, he was at the University, or in his home study, or playing tennis. I was generally the recipient of his benign neglect—not at all uncommon for father-child relationships in that era.
For our parts, my older brother and I were incapable of calm and quiet, and infested our house with the kind of constant din and havoc that one doesn't miss until it's no longer there, and maybe not even then. One memorable fight climaxed with a smashed living room table and a broken nose (mine), but we were essentially good kids whose parents never had to bail them out of jail on Saturday night.
In sum, my parents did the best they could with what they had, and my brother and I weren't nearly as bad as we could have been, and my memories of growing up on Chautauqua are a dichotomous mix of happiness and sadness, of security and instability, of well-being and ill-boding.
Over the decades, Dad retreated deeper into himself, and Mom became increasingly debilitated and dispirited by her fatigue and unhappiness. A house which had been in good nick when we moved in saw no paint, fixtures, or new furniture for 35 years.
After Mom died in 1988, Dad became engaged to a woman who lived in Michigan, and I flew down from Minnesota to help him pack and to drive the rental truck containing his belongings to East Lansing. Before I started packing, I shot a video of the house. It captured a shabby, worn-out structure whose walls were dirty, whose floors needed refinishing and whose curtains were hanging in tatters on their rods. The neighborhood, too, which in my youth had brimmed with kids, dogs and bicycles, seemed moribund that day: old, tired and childless, rife with trash and rundown rental property.
Before we pulled out of town for the last time, Dad and I emptied out his safe deposit box, and there was their mortgage, paid off in 1983. It's a fine document, ceremonious and celebratory in appearance, printed on parchment. The $63.51 monthly house payments are duly entered by the same clerk using the same fountain pen and the same ink for the first twenty-three years, and then that clerk retired and, for the last seven years, the entries are made in a different hand using a different pen and ink.
The words house and home have, in recent years, become interchangeable, with realtors and builders preferring the latter as being more, well, homey. But if we go by more traditional definitions, a house is a structure and home is what the occupants make of that structure.
This distinction begs questions: When and how does a house become a home? And once a house becomes a home, does it ever, through neglect and decrepitude, stop being one? And how do I distill the admixture of happiness and sadness that suffused my house and my home?
