FROM THE PORCH
It was a room in the house somewhere close to the heart of who we were as a family. Could memories lurking there give me the guidance I yearned for?
Many years ago, I found myself troubled on the final night of a long holiday visit home. The warm embracing envelope of family had been intoxicating. But now, with family all quietly ensconsed in their bedrooms, I was grappling with a decision — should I return to Los Angeles where I had lived since college, or move back to the comfort and safety of my hometown? As a popular song puts it: “do I stay or do I go?”
A Hallmark Channel cliche to be sure, but no less perplexing to the young man I was at the time. As I wandered through the dark house pondering my dilemma, I came to another nexus of sorts — a room which sits more or less at the center of the house. I was immediately awash in childhood memories…
It was called simply “the Porch.” Its wobbly brick floor belied its humble beginnings as a slab for barbecues and butterfly chairs. After it became enclosed, it was a room that I grew up in and crawled around as a toddler on my hands and knees.
It was a room that defied geometry. There was never a straight path through it. No matter which way you entered, you were forced to sidestep a sideboard, or nudge a captains chair in order to get through at all. And, oh, those captains chairs! Fitting, because the porch was the bow of our ship. And its maidenhead.
The Porch’s furnishings were as eclectic and hodge-podge as the room itself — a couch that, as Jimmy Webb sang once about a front lawn, “went on forever”; an antique “piesafe” that, due to unrestrained aromas, my father referred to as the “pie un-safe”; a cupboard that inexplicably held only plates; and an expansive round dining table with a lazy Susan, which always elicited in my child’s mind the question: “Who is this Susan, and why are they saying these terrible things about her?”
It wasn’t the stateliest room in the house. The Porch must’ve watched in envy as year after year the choice plums, and plum puddings, were regularly accorded to other rooms — the living room got the Christmas tree; the breakfast room was the arena for hard-hitting discussions on the fundamental nature of reality. An entire wall of the Porch consisted of trendy-at-the-time jalousie windows which offered zero resistance to summer heat or winter chill. Energy efficient the Porch was not. But other kinds of energy that it returned to us were priceless. For it was on the Porch, on those shiny bricks, that transpired our lives. The Sunday dinners, the birthdays, the holiday gatherings, the conflicts and reconciliations — the measuring sticks by which a family charts its existence.
It was where, of a Sunday afternoon, my Dad could be found in his big green recliner reading, by which I mean “sleeping.” It was the room in which my parents had their only known disagreement in 65 years of marriage (see Guinness Book of World Records, page 361).
Some logistics. The Porch was bounded on the south by the living room and on the east by the kitchen. On the west was the hallway to my parents’ room, and on the north? Well, the Porch wasn’t bounded on the north at all. It was “unbounded,” by something called “outdoors.”
It’s fair to say that as adults, we see outdoors in a distinctly grownup way, that is to say, falsely. Outdoors is not, as grownups would have you believe, simply a place to traverse from the house to the car and vice versa. A child knows this instinctively. They intuit that outdoors is a transcendent space in the universe where treehouses reign; crabapples are put into orbit; mud resides outdoors though it can be transmitted indoors through the magic of a child. And imagination, which can hardly be fettered by walls or windows.
Just say the word: “Outdoors.” Even now that I’m a grownup, the word holds a magical combination of darkness and freedom that evokes mystical thoughts for the child within. If the Porch had one primary purpose in the world it was to be the portal to that realm.
It was outdoors at age nine that, after climbing up on the roof to retrieve a tossed Frisbee, I decided to jump from the Porch to avoid laborious shimmying down the tree. The fall resulted in a minor ankle sprain and something else, a feeling of exhileration that I still feel to this day. My sister insists that, like my heroes, Superman and Captain Midnight, I was actually trying to “fly”.
One summer, my brother found a chickadee with a broken wing and placed the little fellow in a box on the Porch, feeding it milk through an eyedropper. As it healed and relearned to fly, the Porch became an makeshift aviary. My brother was distraught when Mom insisted that the chickadee be freed, beckoned by its mother calling from outside.
When my elderly Grandfather came to live with us, my mother and father moved their bedroom lock, stock and headboard onto the Porch. And so for a few years, my parents lived there at the hub of three generations, with the Porch somehow stationary in the family universe. Or did it revolve around, guarding us?
I once witnessed a murder there. Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald in the underground parking garage of the Dallas Police Station —you probably can guess that the Porch was where the TV lived. As I watched aghast, I recall running to call for my parents, a sister. Anyone! For consolation; to share the horror and sadness. Only to discover that like little McCauley Culkin, I was “home alone.” And so I sat powerless on the Porch, out of place but somehow in the right place.
And now, on this last night at home, I was in the right place once again. This room had given me the answer I had been seeking all night — yes, I would be returning to Los Angeles. The porch that had once introduced me to the “outdoors” and ushered me to fly off its rooftop would expect nothing less from me than to return to my own life in that long-revered outdoors that beckoned me through those jalousied windows so long ago.
Like my brother’s little chickadee I, too, would finally fly from the Porch.
