The Places I've Lived

Tracy spent a great deal of time yesterday putting the finishing touches on the house before the in-laws got into town. They're here for Kid2's ballet recital Wednesday night, and that spurs my wife on to finish up those projects that were all 80% completed and straighten up those areas that we're okay with leaving as is when it's just us.

And somehow I wound up thinking about all the places I've lived in my whole life.

The first house I lived in was in Fairfield, Alabama. A blue-collar community that housed a LOT of steelworkers who worked for U.S. Steel. Primarily, my memories are stirred by Super8 mm movies my parents took...but one really good memory was that you could ride Big Wheels at full-speed in the carport even if it was raining. I also remember my dad let me help him wash the Chevy II every Saturday.

My parents moved to the suburbs where, apparently, everybody who got promoted at U.S. Steel moved to. My dad and his friends met at Bill Taylor's gas station for coffee every morning and carpooled to work. It was a two story, three bedroom deal that my Mom lived in for nearly 35 years. The suburb was called Bluff Park, which was appropriate because it really was near a bluff that had a historical marker calling it Lover's Leap. I'm not sure I buy the story. It was a park, too, because there were plenty of "woods" near the house that allowed for shooting tin cans off the back fence with BB guns or playing army or large hills for top biking speed (or sledding or skateboarding). It was a land of little league and consistency. It was Alabama, and nobody moved in or out. My room was loaded with posters of Suzanne Sommers, Bo Derek, Loni Anderson and Kiss. I also had the same poster everyone else had with Terry Beasley and Pat Sullivan sitting together on the sideline (they were Auburn football legends). The music that came out of that room was a mixture of Van Halen, AC/DC, Ozzy, Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin.

My first place at Auburn was an apartment in the same complex my uncle lived in some 20 years earlier. We furnished it with the stuff that college kids scrounge up and all three of us moved out to move into various fraternity houses.

The fraternity house was everything you'd see in Animal House, except pledges kept the place looking somewhat respectable. Hollywood and I lived in room 12 at the end of the hall. Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon" album cover was poorly painted on the door and we had homemade bunk bed and desks. We put a ton of corkboard on the walls so we could put all the "zaps"--the pictures a photographer takes at your parties and sells them to you with the little blue writing on the bottom--we had on them. Our room had premium cable (rent was REALLY cheap as our house had been paid off years before) and we had community showers and you never knew when someone would have a couch throwing contest or throw a keg through a window. The place really came to life on Thursday nights and AU football game days. It was truly a zoo, and the music that came out of that room was after the heavy-metal/punk phase out of 1984 and into the college rock phase: Talking Heads, R.E.M., B-52's and stuff like that.

I did live in two different apartments in the summers. In both, me and roommates decorated the walls with magazine covers or newspaper photos that we'd fake autograph. You know, like boxer Ray "Boom-Boom" Mancini in the cover of GQ and it would say, "To Brent and Ron, You Guys Knock Me Out. Sincerely, Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini." We had easily 100 of these things. I made C's. Ron made A's.

Tracy and I have lived in an apartment complex for a year...

...the we bought our first home. It was back when you got a starter home and worked your way up. Folks these days start out better than where I am now, but we loved that little house. It had our first nursery...but no central air. Window units, man. We didn't have much to redecorate with but we did our best. And teenagers were over CONSTANTLY, which is why we bought the house. Most of my memories there are from kids coming over pretty much all the time. They even got into croquet, reading the rules and developing strategies. There were times when games would take two hours or so, and they'd come over right after school to play before it got dark.

We moved to a place we never saw in Mesquite to go to seminary. DTS recommended it and we snapped it up. It was nice, but the heater was a radiator in the hallway, which you've got to keep little kids away from that. What I remember most about that place were the neighbors, Rusty and Penny. They couldn't have been more sterotypical Texan, with old cowboy boots as planters on their porch and constant invitations to tractor pulls or dirt-track racing at Devil's Bowl and Rusty (a former employee of the cable company who left on sketchy details) pirating cable "for a birthday present, and you can't get caught because I stole a bunch of their own equipment when I left and they only detect Radio Shack filters to catch people." Rusty also put a golf ball in a sock to simulate hail damage so he could get his truck re-painted.

We then lived in a duplex in Rowlett with neighbors Jerry and Sally. That time in my life was a blur because of working at a sports memorabilia store, and a growing student ministry that was supposed to be 10 hours a week but evolved into 40 with no increase in pay, and going to DTS full-time. It was the first time we had a fireplace and, if memory serves correctly, a dishwasher.

We moved to Flower Mound and lived in a rental house for a year. It's where the CBC kids came over all the time and invented Full Contact Uno, a voracious appetite for Pop Ice and chocolate (a nice lady at our church was a grocery store rep for M&M Mars and would pull the candy off the shelf if it wasn't "fresh" but was still "edible" for another two months or so and gave me all that for free, which never lasted the two months) and post-Wednesday night Bible study hang-outs where parents called at 10PM to ask where their kids were. We were their first call, too, which is a great youth ministry tribute.

Finally, we moved into our current location and have lived here nearly 11 years...which may explain why it feels so cluttered at times. The yard is huge, but impractical (think three long, thin rectangles) for much of anything out there. We have a fireplace (real wood only, please) and a dishwasher. We've converted one of the bedrooms into a studio with mirrors we got from an area orthodontist who was putting them by his dumpster. It's great for ballet, but apparently the flooring we have there isn't up to standards anymore so it's pretty much evolved into a paint studio. Tracy has her photography office where a dining room used to be (who uses those anymore, anyway?). I have my favorite La-Z-Boy lounger which is nearly 25 years old and I read my paper at the breakfast table in the kitchen and the girls' rooms have morphed several times and we've decorated in early IKEA fashion--high function/minimal space/average quality/nice affordability--since the place opened in Frisco. It's got lots of original art on loan from Kid1's gallery. And, it's the kind of place that when something breaks and you need a repairman, he starts with, "Wow. I didn't know these things were still functioning. They don't make replacement parts for it anymore so you'll need an entirely new one." Doesn't matter what the "one" is. We replace it with the great advancements made in whatever it is over the last three decades.

I have no idea why I told you all about this. I guess I'll consider it personal record-keeping...