Tuesday – The House that Sam Built
Dec. 2nd, 2008 04:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninanevermore.
.
.
I spent the afternoon before Thanksgiving this year at a funeral, which is not such an unpleasant way to spend an afternoon, depending on why you are there. There are two reasons people attend funerals. The first is because you have just lost someone near and dear to you and you need the rituals and comradely to help you wrap your mind around what has happened and help you find closure. I've been to my share of funerals for that reason. The second reason you go to a funeral is to provide comfort and show respect to those people who are there for the first reason. This was one of those funerals for me. These funerals are bittersweet, but not devastating. It was for a neighbor in the corner house of the street I grew up on.
"Oh, by the way, Sam Young died last night," my stepmother told me after discussing the plans for the quasi-disastrous Thanksgiving dinner that was to come. She waited until the phone call was almost over and all the essential details had been hatched out before breaking this to me.
"Oh, no!" When I was a child learning to read, characters in books said this all the time, but I thought that no one ever said this in real life. As an adult, I find myself saying it quite a lot, especially now that I am a parent and trying to make a point not to swear so much. "What happened?"
It turns out that his youngest son, Stuart, found him on the bathroom floor at 2 A.M. last Monday with his hand on a bottle of Mylanta. One quirky thing about heart attacks is that they often feel like heartburn. Stuart is in his mid twenties and still lives at home. He called an ambulance and tried resuscitate his father, but Sam was declared dead on arrival when he reached the hospital.
It seems almost no one ever moves away from the on the east end of the street I grew up on, except for the kids who grow up and leave. Everyone else lives there until they die. On the west end of the street, starting about midway, people have come and gone over the years and I have no idea who lives down there now. From the time my parents moved into that house when I was 3 and the neighborhood was new, the cast of characters hasn't changed much. I grew up with the same people year after year. As little kids we played and waited for the bus together. As teenagers, we made mischief together. As adults, we've gone to each others weddings and occasionally to the funerals of each others parents.
The Young house is a legend on that end of the street. It's been a work in progress for the last 40 years. It's still not finished. They bought the property in the early 70's, but it sat undeveloped for most of the next decade. It is on a huge double lot, and the neighborhood kids used to ride our bikes on it in a big circle. When I was about 9, they finally built the foundation to a house on it. A year later, the supports for walls went up. Eventually, the garage was completed with an apartment over it, and the family moved into that. Sam was a plumber and building the house from scratch. Everything on it was to be top quality, with no compromise on anything. If he didn't have the money for the top shelf materials, he waited until he did. There are millionaires who live in less impressive houses that this plumber would own.
Russ Young was my younger brother's age. He was seven or 8 when his parents moved to our street. His little brother was born when he was 14. When he was 16, the four of them all still lived over the garage. As a teenager he spent more time at my house than he did his own. At our house he could relax stretch out his legs. After my mother died and my father's job began requiring him to travel a lot, our place was the one where the kids hung out. Russ Young didn't even bother to knock before he came in, and we never told him he needed to. Some mornings I would wake up and find him in the family room watching TV before any of us who lived in the house were awake. He'd beat me home from school and I'd find him in the kitchen helping himself to a snack. He ate dinner with his own family and slept over the garage with them, but that was it. I considered him and his best friend Mark to be auxiliary kid brothers. Mark lived next door and spent almost as much time at my place as Russ did.
When Russ was almost out of college his father finally finished the bedrooms and Russ had a room of his own. This was good, because about that time my father remarried and my stepmother is the sort who keeps the doors locked all the time. She did not appreciate the neighbor kid walking in unannounced, and put a stop to that pretty quick.
After the funeral, Mrs. Young was showing me to the door and I noticed that the front rooms of the house - the formal dining and sitting rooms - were still unfinished.
"We never got around to these parts," she said, "the boys were in baseball, and that was more important. Then Sam got sick and we didn't do much for a year or so. He was just starting to work on things again when this happened." I looked up at the trim made of stained and varnished hardwood and the imported tiles in the entry way. I looked at the stone mantle and the custom cabinets in the kitchen. The house, what is finished of it, is gorgeous.
"I'll finish it," Mrs. Young said. She is 60ish, and this year had celebrated her 40th wedding anniversary with Sam. "It won't be with the same craftsmanship that Sam would have done, but I can paint a wall and screw in a light switch plate. I can do that."
My father always shook his head at Sam Young and his dream house. My father is a pragmatist, and built his own house in less than a year (also from the ground up and also by himself). When he and my mother ran out of money, they cut corners. It wasn't a dream house, but at least it was finished.
Sam always bragged that 200 years from now, his house would still be standing. My own father has never understood the rational behind this.
"There's no reason to build a house that will last 200 years if you're only going to live it for 50," he said.
Looking at Sam's house and all the little handcrafted details, I realized that the dream for Sam wasn't living in a perfect house, but the joy of creating one with his own hands. It didn't matter that his visiting grandsons would spend more nights sleeping in the room that Sam built for their father than Russ ever got to (he being grown and out of the house by the time the room was ready for occupancy). It didn't matter that his wife cooked for two decades in a tiny cramped galley kitchen over the garage while he worked her spacious, top-of-the-line kitchen whenever he had the time and money. The point was that he spent all those decades creating something he loved creating.
Finishing the house was never the point; the point for Sam was the act of building it.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * # * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
.
.
I spent the afternoon before Thanksgiving this year at a funeral, which is not such an unpleasant way to spend an afternoon, depending on why you are there. There are two reasons people attend funerals. The first is because you have just lost someone near and dear to you and you need the rituals and comradely to help you wrap your mind around what has happened and help you find closure. I've been to my share of funerals for that reason. The second reason you go to a funeral is to provide comfort and show respect to those people who are there for the first reason. This was one of those funerals for me. These funerals are bittersweet, but not devastating. It was for a neighbor in the corner house of the street I grew up on.
"Oh, by the way, Sam Young died last night," my stepmother told me after discussing the plans for the quasi-disastrous Thanksgiving dinner that was to come. She waited until the phone call was almost over and all the essential details had been hatched out before breaking this to me.
"Oh, no!" When I was a child learning to read, characters in books said this all the time, but I thought that no one ever said this in real life. As an adult, I find myself saying it quite a lot, especially now that I am a parent and trying to make a point not to swear so much. "What happened?"
It turns out that his youngest son, Stuart, found him on the bathroom floor at 2 A.M. last Monday with his hand on a bottle of Mylanta. One quirky thing about heart attacks is that they often feel like heartburn. Stuart is in his mid twenties and still lives at home. He called an ambulance and tried resuscitate his father, but Sam was declared dead on arrival when he reached the hospital.
It seems almost no one ever moves away from the on the east end of the street I grew up on, except for the kids who grow up and leave. Everyone else lives there until they die. On the west end of the street, starting about midway, people have come and gone over the years and I have no idea who lives down there now. From the time my parents moved into that house when I was 3 and the neighborhood was new, the cast of characters hasn't changed much. I grew up with the same people year after year. As little kids we played and waited for the bus together. As teenagers, we made mischief together. As adults, we've gone to each others weddings and occasionally to the funerals of each others parents.
The Young house is a legend on that end of the street. It's been a work in progress for the last 40 years. It's still not finished. They bought the property in the early 70's, but it sat undeveloped for most of the next decade. It is on a huge double lot, and the neighborhood kids used to ride our bikes on it in a big circle. When I was about 9, they finally built the foundation to a house on it. A year later, the supports for walls went up. Eventually, the garage was completed with an apartment over it, and the family moved into that. Sam was a plumber and building the house from scratch. Everything on it was to be top quality, with no compromise on anything. If he didn't have the money for the top shelf materials, he waited until he did. There are millionaires who live in less impressive houses that this plumber would own.
Russ Young was my younger brother's age. He was seven or 8 when his parents moved to our street. His little brother was born when he was 14. When he was 16, the four of them all still lived over the garage. As a teenager he spent more time at my house than he did his own. At our house he could relax stretch out his legs. After my mother died and my father's job began requiring him to travel a lot, our place was the one where the kids hung out. Russ Young didn't even bother to knock before he came in, and we never told him he needed to. Some mornings I would wake up and find him in the family room watching TV before any of us who lived in the house were awake. He'd beat me home from school and I'd find him in the kitchen helping himself to a snack. He ate dinner with his own family and slept over the garage with them, but that was it. I considered him and his best friend Mark to be auxiliary kid brothers. Mark lived next door and spent almost as much time at my place as Russ did.
When Russ was almost out of college his father finally finished the bedrooms and Russ had a room of his own. This was good, because about that time my father remarried and my stepmother is the sort who keeps the doors locked all the time. She did not appreciate the neighbor kid walking in unannounced, and put a stop to that pretty quick.
After the funeral, Mrs. Young was showing me to the door and I noticed that the front rooms of the house - the formal dining and sitting rooms - were still unfinished.
"We never got around to these parts," she said, "the boys were in baseball, and that was more important. Then Sam got sick and we didn't do much for a year or so. He was just starting to work on things again when this happened." I looked up at the trim made of stained and varnished hardwood and the imported tiles in the entry way. I looked at the stone mantle and the custom cabinets in the kitchen. The house, what is finished of it, is gorgeous.
"I'll finish it," Mrs. Young said. She is 60ish, and this year had celebrated her 40th wedding anniversary with Sam. "It won't be with the same craftsmanship that Sam would have done, but I can paint a wall and screw in a light switch plate. I can do that."
My father always shook his head at Sam Young and his dream house. My father is a pragmatist, and built his own house in less than a year (also from the ground up and also by himself). When he and my mother ran out of money, they cut corners. It wasn't a dream house, but at least it was finished.
Sam always bragged that 200 years from now, his house would still be standing. My own father has never understood the rational behind this.
"There's no reason to build a house that will last 200 years if you're only going to live it for 50," he said.
Looking at Sam's house and all the little handcrafted details, I realized that the dream for Sam wasn't living in a perfect house, but the joy of creating one with his own hands. It didn't matter that his visiting grandsons would spend more nights sleeping in the room that Sam built for their father than Russ ever got to (he being grown and out of the house by the time the room was ready for occupancy). It didn't matter that his wife cooked for two decades in a tiny cramped galley kitchen over the garage while he worked her spacious, top-of-the-line kitchen whenever he had the time and money. The point was that he spent all those decades creating something he loved creating.
Finishing the house was never the point; the point for Sam was the act of building it.
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-02 11:17 pm (UTC)I think more people would appreciate the homes they lived in if they had to dedicate even a small fraction of the sweat equity that you put into yours.
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Date: 2008-12-03 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 01:57 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 05:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 04:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-03 04:30 pm (UTC)