This house, situated about two blocks from the one in which I grew up, is for sale. I noticed this during my last visit home. Once, my girlfriend lived there. Once, we made an agreement to rendezvous at 1 a.m. on her back porch. Naturally, I overslept. I woke at 3 a.m., cursed myself, and ran, in my pajamas, to her house. Naturally, she was not on her back porch. So I climbed onto the tiny roof over the front door of her house and leaned over to the leftmost of those second story windows – the one that opened on her room – and quietly called her name. (It was summer, so the window was open.) Her house fronts, on a diagonal, onto a rather busy street in my hometown, such that, even at 3 a.m., the occasional car would bathe me with its headlights. The comic quality of my predicament did not escape me. My girlfriend did not wake up. After about an hour of quietly calling her name, I walked home and went back to sleep.
I am old. The asking price for the house is $129,000.
The only time I ever tried to rendezvous with a girlfriend that late at night, it was because her father was a Muslim who most certainly would’ve blown a gasket if he’d found out about us.
What was your excuse, Matthew? ; )
Oh, the sweet reminiscence of youth.
Just last week, while doing some legit work, I was sidetracked by doing some Google street views of places where I had lived. I was overcome with a sense of poignant nostalgia that of which I thought I had become incapable. I was snapped out of my reverie by the thought of my father, who died in ’93, – how he would have loved this technology – harrumphing about the house we moved out of in 1965 not having been repainted in all the ensuing years.
PS – Where is the house in the picture? You can’t get a cemetery plot in our part of the world for $129,000.
You sounded pretty agile for a writer. I only hope pajamas did not have footies.
Where is this, indeed? For $129,000, I might leave the South.
Upstate New York. I had no excuse other than love and maybe a taste for melodrama.
Lickona –
Don’t forget the part where you stood outside her window with a boombox playing “In Your Eyes.”