I came home from the then Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia to a duplex decorated with a Wissahickon schist veneer and faux Tudor faux wattle and daub upper stories, some brown planks set in white stucco. I have a vague memory of the living room walls being a very dark green, something like a cobalt chromite green, and my father happily spraying something that looked like white, fluffy snow on the street side windows, Merry Xmas, only to discover that one of the virtues of this fine product was near indestructibility, the holiday salutation finally succumbing to some hours of patient application of razor blades in the spring. My dad had enjoyed model trains when he was a boy, and he shared the torch with me and my older brother, the setting up of the trains starting Thanksgiving weekend and their taking down along with the Christmas tree sometime on or after Epiphany. We lived in this little house for about five years, the train set slowly growing year by year, and I don’t recall our moving out sometime in 1959 or 1960, although I do remember there being more space for the trains, in season, at the new house. Sometime either late in the house #1 period or early in the house #2 period I took a keen interest in adding buildings and landscaping to the train set, and an artifact that has stayed with me, and, to be plain, the only artifact that has stayed with me is a little plastic house I built. Trying to describe my youthful zeal seems only possible by producing some pictures of this little house I crafted with my own two chubby hands, and, similar in magnitude to my zeal for making this little home was my ineptitude in so doing. The kit was a number of injection molded parts in three lovely colors tossed in a small cardboard box with a printed color rendering of the finished waking reality, sans instructions for assembly or finishing. I had the kit, and a tube of Testors model cement, and access to my older brother’s model paints, which were mostly for cars, so there were limited choices, including whatever sort of fire apple youthful American red and green metallic flake something or other. As offered, the model house would have had walls of something of a Naples yellow, suggesting stucco, a cadmium red roof, brown trim, and white windows. Faced with the pieces, my tiny mind reeled, as they didn’t quite go together. The picture of the bottom side hints at the incongruity of the pieces, which I solved neatly by realizing that one model home kit would need one tube of glue for its assembly and so it came to pass, the excess glue forming large fillets as well as partially dissolving some of the smaller details such as the window mullions. The painting is inspired, the details of the black soot on the top of the chimney and the contrasting roof vent always personal favorites. And here it is, some 60 years later, plastic having frozen the moment.
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