How to Cure an Obsessive Neurosis

Having just completed the blog I posted on the topic of “My Memorial to Me”, I was taken with the urge to drive the 90 miles or so to the old neighborhood and to recharge my batteries with the feel and aura of the old homestead, or at least the neighborhood. What I found there was life-changing. At least, many of my family and friends probably hope so.

In an effort to prolong the enjoyment of my visit, I elected not to drive directly to the house, as I have often done in the past, but rather to stop first at the shopping center down the road a bit. This was a miraculous place as I was growing up. The little short brick wall around it housed the first cocoons I had ever seen – those of the plentiful Monarch butterflies that inhabited the area. I got my first library card in the library at that shopping center, for ten cents, and there’s an excellent chance that the dime I used to pay for it was 100% silver. The library card itself was printed on pale orange paper with a metal number plate fixed to it. No plastic wallet cards in those days. Toward the end of the school year, we could buy (for $4.00) a strip of ten tickets to movies at the Fox Theatre that was located in this shopping center. They played kids films all summer long, changing every Wednesday. The manager was a real nice, completely bald guy with horn-rimmed glasses and always in a tuxedo, and the theatre had ushers and sold Ghirardelli Flicks candy. The Union Bank in the parking lot had a very tall cylindrical sign, and from right near there they shot off fireworks on the Fourth of July. The very first Kentucky Fried Chicken and Baskin-Robbins stores I ever saw shared a small outbuilding next to a Chevron station where my brother had one of his first jobs. I remember spending a lot of time watching the mechanized robot cobbler in the window of the shoe repair store. I remember buying little things at the Holiday Hardware store that we would need for a third grade project. I remember the smell of both the library and the dry cleaners. I remember Swede’s Barber Shop, and Smitty who used to cut my hair there after I rode on the crossbar of my brother’s bike to get there. Smitty used to promise me that he “would not use the sharp scissors” after one time when he pulled my hair a little to hard and hurt me a bit. That was another place my brother had worked. I remember the bakery and that my sister used to always get sugar cookies, even though the rest of us would vary what we got. I remember any time I wanted something I would go through the planters looking for discarded glass soda bottles, which I could redeem at the Food Giant store for 2 or 3 cents each, and maybe get enough for a large grape-ade for 17 cents (including tax) or possibly a plate of fries at the bowling alley for 26 cents (including tax). I got real excited last year when I got to show my family a glimpse of that bowling alley on a TV commercial. I remember one summer morning when my mom let me ride my bike by myself to the Kress store and have breakfast at their lunch counter for something like 40 cents. That’s the same Kress store where I bought literally hundreds of Matchbox cars for 55 cents each. Right across from Martin’s Card and Party shop, the Kandy Kane dress shop, the Boston Store (which I found excruciatingly boring to go through with my mom except for the illuminated Swank Belts display in the men’s section near the east doors. And I remember my parents finally yielding to my pleas to try the Parasol restaurant, and their decision that the quality wasn’t good and the prices too high.

Most of it is gone now. My little brick wall is now an apartment complex. The library moved into a bigger building immediately adjacent to where it used to be, and the old library building is now one of several community centers in the neighborhood. The Fox Theatre is now a bank. The box office is an exterior teller window. The Union Bank and its sign have both yielded to the largest real estate office I have ever seen. The Chevron station and KFC are actually still there, but the dry cleaner has moved into what used to be Baskin-Robbins. Holiday Hardware is now a golf shop. What was the Food Giant is now the warehouse behind an enormous Albertson’s store. The Boston Store is now a Stat’s, the Parasol is being converted into a Mel’s Diner, and everything else is just plain gone.

From what I read, the newer shopping center across the street put a lot of pressure on the old one. Most of the changes I have just described have occurred since my last visit there about 2 years ago, and I’m not even sure the new shopping center was there yet at that time. So more change has occurred in that place in the past two years than in the preceding 40 years.

This set a really bad tone for the rest of my day. Seeing all of these places razed and being replaced with modern buildings that, to be honest, don’t seem all that different from what was there. It feels like destruction for the sake of destruction.

Went by the house and took the picture that accompanied “My Memorial to Me”. Again, more changes in two years than in the previous forty. New windows. Fewer plants in the yard. One walkway completely removed and another rebuilt. New garage door. Saw it open at one point – revealing that the inside of the garage has been wall-boarded and a door put in to the master suite. Dad’s built-in workbench is gone. Just dragged me down further.

Went by the old elementary schools – all of them. I was in a kindergarten class in one school for half a year, and the whole class (including the teacher) was moved to another school to finish the year. Then a third school for first grade. The first and last schools have changed the least. They really look as if they have progressed through evolution rather than the revolution that troubles me with all of these other sites. The second school is no longer a school, though, but rather another community center (how many does a town of 10,000 need?).

The biggest changes at my last elementary school were different colors of paint, a fence around it, renumbering all the classrooms, and moving some playground equipment around while replacing some others with the plastic kind that don’t get so hot in the sun. They did add a kindergarten, but they did so without destroying anything but open grass.

Since KFC survived all of this, I thought about having lunch there. But to be honest, all of what I saw just demoralized me to the point where I wasn’t hungry.

I think I have experienced what my family and friends would consider a cure for the neurosis that I detailed ad-nauseam in “My Memorial to Me”. Personally, I don’t think that lost hope is a cure for anything.

My Memorial to Me

My wife and children are humiliated by my dream. My parents just shake their heads, as they were raised to be too polite to say anything if they have nothing nice to say. My siblings don’t even want to deal with it. But why should they? It’s my dream – not theirs - albeit an elusive one. One that becomes geometrically further out of reach with every passing moment. One that I should have started working on 25 years ago, when there might have been a prayer of completing it.

My dream is based upon my fundamental appreciation for history and nostalgia. I guess that it’s relatively common and normal to have certain nostalgic feelings about things that remind you of your childhood. For a lot of us, childhood was a wonderful and free time, with little or no responsibilities and thousands of delightful memories. Mine certainly was like that. I grew up in a family setting that mimicked the old TV shows. Dad had a steady job, we lived in a middle-class suburb in Orange County where it was sunny and warm all the time. Movies didn’t need ratings, the most controversial song lyrics on the radio were the Beach Boys singing “God Only Knows”, and my parents didn’t need to know where I was until my father whistled for me to come home about when the streetlights came on. Life was really good there for a while, and I loved it all so.

Things always have to change, though, and they started changing for me rather all at once. Within a year or so, my brother went into the air force, my sister got married, and we moved halfway across the country to a place with much different climates, both meteorologically and culturally. I found my new situation hostile, not only because we subsequently moved very often, and I never really integrated in any of the new places, but also because every place we moved had a radically different culture, and I felt so out of place in all of them. To add to this, my extended family had been fairly close back in California, getting together at least every other weekend and definitely on every holiday. But, save for most Christmases and for a few weeks in the summers, we seldom saw them anymore. As a result, a part of my heart was buried back there in Orange County, and I consider it my real home to this day (even though I am on my 19th residence).

So that explains the nostalgia component, but I’m not sure that I can explain my fascination with historical places so much. It’s just the excitement and feeling I get being in a place where something notable happened, or seeing the actual objects owned and used by notable people doing notable things. I can’t be alone in this, or there would be no historical places to visit and no museums. I must confess, however, at getting a little bit perturbed at so many of the historical locations that are not furnished with the original pieces of furniture or other objects belonging to those who made the place famous, or even exact replicas, reproductions or period copies of those objects. I always felt as if it is worth the effort to go the extra mile, do the extra research, go to the extra expense and do anything and everything that is necessary to duplicate the historical place in as much exacting detail as possible, and then some.

History and nostalgia tend to run together in my mind. One manifestation of this is that places and articles of family history are dear to me too. And so, my dream has always been, and continues to be, to purchase back the home I lived in, and to refurnish it as exactly as possible to the way it existed at the time.

This started out just being a joke. I thought of it as a monument to me, and I could treat it as a museum. A museum dedicated to someone that no one had ever heard of, because he had not done anything noteworthy other than completing this museum. Think Watts Towers.

I sort of love that kind of twisted humor. I think the seed for this was planted when we lived in rural Illinois, and there was an historical place in town known as the David Davis Mansion. Now, as an adult, and with the aid of the internet, I can understand that David Davis was a judge, and his home stayed in the family for many generations, and is now a museum to show off Victorian style and splendor. But when I lived there, no one had any idea who David Davis was, or why his home was an attraction. But people went there. School field trips; ladies garden clubs; tour buses, for all I know. They paid admission and looked at what my grandma would have called “the pretty things” and never knew or cared who David Davis was.

I had this image in my mind of creating the most perfect possible walk-in diorama of 1960s life, but with the twist that it was actually a faithful reproduction of my life – not anyone else’s. It could still be useful to bring back memories to others nostalgic for 1960s stuff, but mostly it would be a monument to me. I just love the thought of people paying to tour the place and asking each other (and the tour guides): “Who was this guy, anyway?”.

Over the years, my dream grew from being just a twisted joke to a quest. In my mind, this place needed to be acquired and restored to absolute perfection. As much as possible would be original. Anything that couldn’t be would be replicated as exactly as possible. I wanted to make this place so perfect that it would give my parents and siblings the creeps to walk through it. Literally.

But the dream grew over time. This could be so much more than an elaborate hoax or a 1960s middle-class museum. It could be a life’s work – a masterpiece of sorts. I am the only person on Earth that could do this. I have an exceptional memory and an acute eye for detail. My parents and siblings might be able to add value with some occasional consultation, but overall, they don’t have either the recall nor the interest to make this project what it could be.

For example, I envision removing layers of paint and wallpaper with nearly archaeological care to find small shreds of 1966 wallpaper or 1959 mural or tiny samples of a paint color that I can reproduce. Recently, while watching a television program about the old hotels on what’s left of Route 66, I saw one of those places where the rooms are concrete teepees, and the bedspreads and curtains were the ones my brother and I had in our room. My first inclination was to drive there and buy a set from the owner for my project. I look at old family photos and home movies, and I see clues and images of furniture or murals or wall hangings that I could reproduce. I see myself commissioning custom manufactured orders for what are now old-fashioned carpets and draperies and such.

The playhouse in the back yard and the garage are the only two deviations from exact perfection that I will allow myself. The original playhouse my father built with his own hands, and did a magnificent job. It was a wooden structure with sheetrock walls inside. It had windows, doors, and child-size furniture, even a rug. It was great. But my plans dictate a need to make a change, as what I shall need for my monument will be a structure that looks exactly like our old playhouse from the outside, but which houses tombs for myself and my oh so patient and tolerant wife on the inside. No historical site would be complete without a crypt or two. The other deviation I will allow is for the sake of practicality – the garage will need to be converted into a gift shop for the patrons, where they can pick up postcards and souvenir spoons and copies of my memoirs (working title: “An Autobiography of Nobody in Particular”).

With every passing moment, my dream becomes more elusive. Over the years, my parents, my siblings and even I have sold or given away many of the original furnishings. Even more were destroyed in a fire at my brother’s house in 2003. Precious little remains, but there are some original things, and my mother even thinks that she may still have one of those bedspreads from my old room.

Other things may be replaceable. To be honest, some of our stuff was common enough that it can occasionally be found in an antique shop or garage sale. However, I was horrified one day when we lived in rural North Carolina (actually, I was horrified on most days we lived in rural North Carolina), but on this particular day we went to Greensboro, and there is a nationally known company there that stocks new and used china and silverware for people who need replacement pieces, or who want to add to their sets of patterns. While strolling through their showroom with my wife and parents, there were glass cases here and there with examples of particularly valuable china patterns. These were on display more for show than for sale, I think, as the prices on them could be really extreme. Then, I saw in one of these cases, our old family pattern. At first I was thrilled that I could get it – then intimidated by the fact that it was in one of these cases and the implications of the price. Finally, my heart sunk as I realized just how far out of reach this china pattern would be – the price tag simply read: “Priceless”. That’s my mom. She has always had excellent taste. Some limited run and very rare china pattern that evolved over the years into priceless art. And we probably sold it at a garage sale for 50 cents. Now I’ll never get it back into those cupboards.

What’s worse, is that even though the house appears (at least from the outside) to be the most original one left in the neighborhood (after nearly 50 years), the place that my dad bought for $25,000 in 1959 and sold for $29,900 in 1968 sold in 2004 for $650,000. It’s in an area that now sells on average for $1,400,000. Pretty far out of my league for a hobby project. Especially when you stop to think that I might need to buy some other close-to-original houses in the neighborhood, at least temporarily, for parts!

The thought of building this memorial to me is in my mind all the time. Last autumn, we took a few days to retreat to a rented cabin in the mountains, and my most vivid memory of those few days of quiet solitude was that the kitchen cupboards had the same pull-handles on them that I would need for my project; my obsession; my reason to exist; my very own personal neurosis; my monument to me.