Places We’ve Lived

Can someone help me identify this house?

Baltimore

• Collecting thousands of rubber bands from the alley behind Mommom and Granddad’s house.
• Sweltering hot summers, trying to fall asleep with the windows open and all the noises from the street coming in.
• Scary, huge, bloody crucifixes.  (I have the best one hanging in my hallway. —Anne)
• Miss Elizabeth and Miss Marie, the next-door neighbors.
• Snowballs! (Chocolate, my favorite.) 
• Not being allowed to climb over the tiny concrete walls that separated rowhouse front porches from one another. —Anne
• Beautiful pots of geraniums that I always worried would fall on some passerby's head. —Anne
• Watching Johnny Carson with Granddad and wondering why adults found it so funny (now I know better!) —Anne

Fort Wayne

Snow that was over our heads! Clobbering Anne with a croquet mallet (on Christmas, perhaps?). Tornadoes. The woods behind our house where some high school or college students filmed an amateur movie. It might have been about vampires, but my imagination might have made that up. 

Here's what I remember about Fort Wayne: -- All four kids with chicken pox at the same time. It started on Christmas Day and went on for what seemed like forever. -- The funny little stove in an old fire training tower. I used to walk the kids up there, pushing the stroller over rough ground. Anything to get out of the house. -- When we saw "The Wizard of Oz" for the first time in color on the Davises' TV. - Mom (via Beth)

Broomall, Pennsylvania

Remember sycamore balls? We used to collect them by the hundreds and use them as projectile weapons. 

The Candy Tree—Someone in our neighborhood used to periodically stick a bunch of lollipops and other hard candy to a small tree with Scotch tape. I don’t think we ever knew who it was, but maybe Mom and Dad did. You couldn’t do that these days, could you? 

Mommom in the kitchen of the Broomall house.

The quarry across the street which as far as I can recall was HUGE and full of cliffs and woods and critters and kids up to no good. We always had some animal we had "rescued" from the wild, often found in the quarry, or in the woods behind the house. I also remember a clearing behind the house that had one big evergreen tree. 

…which we called the Great Pine. It was huge, and the lower branches were 10 or 12 feet off the ground, but drooped near the ground far out from the tree, so there was a room-like open space under there, carpeted by pine needles a foot thick. 

The Franklin Institute, the first place that Dad worked in Philadelphia, had a giant model heart that you could walk through. (It’s still there and has recently been renovated.) Going to museums and historic sites in and around Philadelphia is one of my favorite memories of living in Broomall. 

Houston

I remember fondly the July 4th block parties the Frisbies would host. I remember the egg toss, Jane's legendary flag cake, and general neighborhood fun.  

Doing the "roach dance" any time we entered the house at night to scare off would-be intruders, stomping around before opening the door. Yucko. We have those palmetto bugs or tree roaches or whatever you want to call them here in Tennessee, but not in the numbers they are down in the tropics. It also helps to have cats who enjoy using them as toys. I also remember how FREAKED Mom got over them, her bonafide phobia of them that would make her scratch her head like they were crawling on her and run around in a panic. Ah, good times. 

Sunday afternoon lunch (after church): Ham sandwiches (Dad liked his with butter.) and chicken noodle soup. 

Rollerskating-- lots and lots of rollerskating on Houston's FLAT sidewalks and our big flat driveway, exploring the bayous on foot, on bikes, on skates. I remember thinking all the time, "what if you fell in that water.... That would be SO AWFUL!" Like the worst thing that could even happen to you. 

Oak Ridge

Oak Ridge is where I had the most heartbreakingly dull and discouraging job of my entire life. (And that’s saying a lot, considering that I worked for five years in JCPenney’s catalog department.) The summer we moved to Oak Ridge, between my junior and senior years in college, I worked as a temp at the Ridgeview Psychiatric Hospital conducting an accounts-receivable audit. In spite of the fact that I knew nothing about health insurance or psychiatric treatment, they had me reviewing patients’ payment records to try to figure out whether the hospital had received all the payment they could expect from Medicaid, Medicare, and private insurance.

No one made any effort to give serious answers to the questions I asked in the first few days. All I was ever told was, “Just do the best you can,” or “Take your best guess,” or “Set that chart aside for now.” Eventually, I quit asking questions and muddled through, never more than about 60 percent sure that I was doing what they wanted done. Looking back, I suspect that someone had required the audit as a condition of Ridgeview’s transition from a state facility to a private hospital, and that no one really cared what the results were. The only good thing that came out of that job is that ever since, I’ve been very sensitive to the difference between “real work” and “busy work.” 

Wichita

The perfect house

Although we never lived there, our family loved the house in Wichita. Bob and I wanted to pick it up and move it to Houston. Joan still talks about the little attic where the old toys were. She also remembers building the anatomically correct snow-woman and a little snow-dog with Aunt Beth when we visited one Christmas. Dad had the train set up in the basement and although Kenneth doesn't remember (too little), he had a great time watching Gan-Gan run the train. The little den with the fireplace was so cozy. The house had a wonderful "feeling." We had lots of happy visits there. -Anne

I enjoy retelling the story of the time Dad and I came home to the Wichita house after a visit to Houston (Mom was still down in Houston--maybe it was when Joan was born?) to find that hail had done significant damage to the paint and other aspects of the house, including a skylight that was in the little attic toy room. Dad was scurrying around with Bee-in-Bonnet Syndrome (see Gumnictionary), trying to repair things. He climbed up onto the roof of the garage and was surveying the damage, and I was on the driveway. He was concerned about rain getting in the skylight. He wanted me then to pass the ladder up to him so he could set it up on the gabled roof of the garage and climb up to the third floor roof so he could repair (duct tape) the skylight. I refused. He kept arguing with me, and it probably looked pretty funny to a passerby, this college kid yelling up to her father, "No! I won't let you! It's not that important, and I am not going to let you set the ladder up there!" He finally gave up and came down. He then put his creative mind to work and decided to put an umbrella up the skylight from the inside. Brilliant. It worked like a charm, and he thanked me for not letting him do what his Bee-in-Bonnet Syndrome was telling him to do. I like to think I am partly responsible for his being alive today. 

Chattanooga

The Tennessee River as seen from Baylor School (right?).

Some favorite things for me about Gumnicks in/and Chattanooga is that I was here for college and afterwards on my own, and then Mom and Dad joined me and then Jane came too. Now I have family in town with me and I am so glad that I have my parents and at least one sister close by. I have really enjoyed the last 5 or so years especially, being able to relate to Mom and Dad as an adult and appreciate them in a new way compared to when I was younger. I know it's not a specific memory, but it's just a good feeling, being able to be in the same town as Mom and Dad and Jane, get together for dinner or whatever, have them attend events that are important to me and vice versa without having to get on a airplane or drive 500 miles. It's been nice.