We moved to our house on the south side of Chicago when I was eleven years old. By the time my parents relocated twenty-four years later, my two sisters, two brothers and I had all moved on to begin our independent "adult" lives. Recently one of my brothers dug out a video of the house that he made the week before the house was sold. The film is very cinema verite - "a style of filmmaking characterized by realistic, typically documentary motion pictures that avoid artificiality and artistic effect and are generally made with simple equipment." And I mean there is NO artistic effect to the frames my brother shot as he slowly walked through the basically empty house with his simple narration. And although the rooms look bare and worn, I was flooded with memories.
I remember the day we all went to see the "new" house. It was magical! It had a large enclosed front porch, and a double living room with ornate wrought iron gates that swung open to reveal a huge dining room. That day my younger brother ran right into those gates and split his head open as we chased each other around.
We filled that house up! We were five kids so there was a lot of activity. I don't mean like today. Except for music lessons, we didn't really have any structured time outside of school. The only sports teams were school teams and not too many of those.
My mother and younger brother made news in 1964 when, after a huge rain, my mother discovered some little fish on our driveway. She called the Chicago Tribune and it must have been a slow news day because they sent a reporter and a photographer to the house. The story ran on the front page. In the photo my brother holds up one of the fish and my mother proudly stands to the side. A couple of days later, we discovered that our teenage neighbor had been feeding his turtle. When the turtle had had enough, he tossed the extra fish out the window and they landed on our driveway.
There were four bedrooms and a large bathroom on the second floor. My parents’ bedroom also had a room over the driveway. I shared a bedroom with my younger sister. It would have made more sense for me to share a room with my older sister since I was only one-and-a-half years her junior, but my parents thought she should have her own room because she was the oldest. Hence it was me with my other sister, seven years younger than me! I didn't pay any attention to my younger sister; she barely even entered my consciousness. Yet today I know that I was very influential in her life and now, although she lives halfway across the country, we are best friends.
When I started high school, I rebelled. There were two bedrooms and a bath with a marble shower on the third floor. Perfect! My father painted the front room dusty rose and I moved into it. Now I had some privacy and I made good use of it. I could crawl out the bathroom window onto a little roof and smoke cigarettes.
At Christmas time, my father would bring out the silver Christmas tree. This was truly a 1950's spectacle with projected color lights from a rotating disc. Another holiday decoration was a big gold plastic bell with a red bow. When you pulled the clapper, it played “Joy to the World.” There was room in our large attic under the eaves to store all kinds of useless stuff including this tree. The older we all got, the more bedraggled it looked. At some point we started demanding a real tree and the aluminum one was moved out onto the front porch. Today it would be a hot mid-century modern collector's item if we still had it.
By the time my parents moved, the neighborhood had changed. Although to this day the Highlands is filled with beautiful, well kept, distinctive homes, it is surrounded by a very impoverished part of the city. Toward the end, when they left for work in the morning, my parents would leave all the blinds closed and a radio playing on the front porch to deter thieves. One day, returning home, they were followed from the train station by a man with a gun. He took what cash my father had and left. My parents knew they couldn't stay there any longer. They sold the house and moved to a suburban condo a few months later.
My sister in Boston took the baby grand piano, my brother took a couple of ornate bedroom sets, and I took the dining room furniture. Today, most of these things have been dispersed again. We used to have a blind man come to the house to tune the piano, but it never stayed tuned for long. Eventually my sister paid someone to take it off her hands. My brother upgraded to new bedroom sets. But I still love and use the dining room furniture - the round table that expands with five leaves and can comfortably sit sixteen when fully open!
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