It started with a discussion with Steve about all the useless crap from decades ago that still resides in one's head. I can't remember what I'm supposed to pick up at the grocery store, but I can remember all the lyrics of "Itsy Bitsy Teeney Weeney Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" from half a century ago. One other example for me is knowing the address I lived at in Tigard, Ore., when I was in first grade.
On a whim, I put the address into Google maps and, bam, there's the house, as old as the lyrics I remember so easily. The neighborhood around it is vastly different from my mental map of childhood, and the shed next to the house where we used to keep chickens is torn down, but I could clearly envision the interior spaces behind those domicile walls. I even recognized the house across the street (though many new ones have been added). I lived in this house when America sent its first astronaut into space, and it's the place we lived when my sister Kittie was born. Here's a picture of me taking brownies out of the oven in that house and one of dad cooking (check out the push-button cooktop controls).This success got me going on a quest for more pictures of houses we'd lived in and what they look like today. The house in Tigard was the only one I remembered by address, but others I felt I could locate just by looking at the maps and satellite views of the various communities.
So I started with the first house I could really remember, which was when I was four. It was the projects we lived in on Clyborne Avenue in Chicago when dad was going to med school at Northwestern. It took some doing, but I found the projects and even the building (we were in the two-story unit on the right, second or third unit down). The place looks just as pleasant as I remember it. This is where my older brother and I had our pictures taken on a pony (an expense that sent my father through the roof at the time). Here's my pony picture and one of dad with my brother David (you can guess by now mom was the picture-taker in our family).
The next house was in Lake Oswego, Ore., and I located it because I remembered the park across the street. The entire block of bungalow houses was torn down and replaced with apartments. The houses used to back onto a dirt alley, and I remember my brother David (about three at the time) would get up early on Sunday mornings and go door to door down the alley, bare-ass naked, asking for cookies. He was the hit of the neighborhood and all the housewives and little old ladies loved him. Here are shots of David and a Christmas tree we had in that house.
The next house was near Lloyd's Center, which had just opened in Portland, Ore. This house, too, is gone, along with the entire neighborhood. It's now a parking lot amid lots of hotels, high-rises and the convention center. It was an old neighborhood with big houses and bigger trees. I remember that was where I first became aware of politics, having heated debates with my first-grade companions about the Kennedy-Nixon contest. Nixon fans said the pope would run the country if a Catholic was elected. It was on Wasco Street, and we lived there about a year and then moved to Tigard, which you've already seen.
From Tigard we moved to San Bernardino, Calif., where dad took his psychiatric residency. Our first house was a rental on Argyle Street, and it's still there. I can remember being fascinated by the fact that the entire back yard was cultivated with cactus. It was kind of like living on Mars. This is where my brother Jim inadvertently put a dart in my brother David's back, and where David almost got sucked into a storm control drain during a summer flash flood.
After a few months, we moved into the house on 18th Street. It was part of a brand new tract home development (in fact, about a third of the homes weren't even completed yet). Our back yard butted up against an abandoned orange grove and, again, it was other worldly to wander back among the trees and just pluck oranges off and eat them right there for free. The place looks kind of worn out and run down now, doesn't it? All those big trees were barely six feet tall during our residency there.
When Dad finished his residency, we moved to Morro Bay and he started work at Atascadero State Hospital. It was amazing living just up the hill from the beach, and every night we fell asleep hearing the surf in the distance. I remember once we were evacuated from school because of a tsunami warning (the high school is on the beach and actually below sea level), and everybody came up to our house on high ground to watch the town get washed away: it didn't happen.
From Morro Bay we moved into San Luis Obispo on Johnson Ave. It was a very nice house. Now the front yard has a wall and terracing that hides the spanish colonial look of the place, but here's a shot of what it looked like when we moved in. Below that is an antiquated Polaroid print of one of our Christmas trees there.We spent several years in this house (you may have guessed by now we moved around a lot), except for one year when dad took a job in Reedley in the California Central Valley, and we lived in a huge house on Ward's River Ranch (a thoroughbred horse breeding and training farm). I couldn't get a street shot of it, since the house sits in the middle of the ranch, which is probably about 50 acres. We all loathed the Central Valley, so we moved back to San Luis Obispo the next year.
From San Luis Obispo, the family moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, because my dad got a job as chief of mental health services for the Gateway Borough. The house we lived in there was being completely remodeled when Google passed by with its cameras, so who knows what it looks like now.
Dad came down with triple pneumonia in Ketchikan (he was always an overachiever), and when he recovered the family moved back down to San Luis Obispo, they bought a house up Johnson Avenue from the old one, and that was home for a good 30 years. You can barely see the house in this photo. Since it was on a busy street, we planted hedges that grew up to block the traffic noise. They also blocked the view of the house, and people often commented they didn't know there was a house there until they got out of their cars.This is the house I lived in when I went to college, and from there, I've moved on to many places of my own. But it seems just amazing to me that, here in the 21st Century, I can take such an extensive walk down memory lane and visit so many places I called home. Perhaps in an upcoming entry I'll do all the places that I've lived since graduating from college. Or maybe not. Weigh in on the idea and I'll see if on it's worth up following. Well, you know what I mean.
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