House Sisters

A HOUSE WHERE ALL'S ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

Newspaper caption: "Three - year - old Ben McCartney
descends the newly painted staircase of his family's home,
a four - story Queen Anne - style twin that dates to 1890."
In January 1993, Gerry and I flew out to Philadelphia to preview the real estate market. We looked at three fine houses in the suburbs and three more in the city, just to get an idea of what was available. I still remember walking through the door of "814" for the first time and thinking to myself, "We could live here!" It was the kind of house that I was used to seeing in magazines or touring as historical landmarks. But, apparently, here in University City (West Philadelphia), a normal everyday citizen could buy a house like this and live in it! In February, we saw a second round of houses, a dozen at least; but at the end of the day, there was one that we just couldn't forget! We asked our realtor, "What about that one we saw last time: '814.' "

Back in Indiana,our house sold quickly, and on Easter weekend, we arrived in Philadelphia, ready to renovate and learn about urban living. The house closing was utterly chaotic, but our beautiful old city house was worth all the stress. We loved it at first glance (and still do, even though we've been gone so many years). Gerry began immediately with the necessary renovation projects: exterior and interior painting, re - sanding the floors, and re - building the main staircase -- baluster by baluster!

BEFORE

AFTER

About a year later, we were honored to have our house, and Gerry's handiwork, featured in the local paper. Here's the bulk of the article, if you care to decipher (click on text to enlarge):

and the smaller photo that acccompanied the head - liner above:

Within a week of our house appearing in the paper, we received the most amazing letter:

March 28, 1994

Dear Mr. and Mrs. McCartney,

Hello, how are you today? You do not know me personally but we have a few things in common, and I just had to write and tell you. On Sunday I read the article about you in the Inquirer and looked at the pictures of your present home. Disregard this letter if I am wrong, but my family and I are convinced that you now live in the home that all of us grew up in at 814 So. 48th St. You stated that this is probably the nicest house you will ever live in, and I am writing to you today to tell you that I completely agree! You never will find another like it!

We moved into "814" when I was 12 yrs old, and I lived there for 8 more years until my marriage in April of 1971. They were truly some of the best and worst years of my life; but I'll tell you that from the day I left until today, I have not stopped missing that house. It is just such a beautiful home, so much charm, so many beautiful rooms and hallways and those elegant stairs! Luckily I am able to remember every inch of it, although I understand some changes have been made over these past 20 years since we left. In those years, I have raised 4 children and still come into Benny's Barbershop, around the corner on Baltimore Ave. and when I do, I always go by to say hello to my old home.

Friends of mine were friends of the previous owners, and we actually met in Benny's one day and meant to get together again, but unfortunately we never had the chance before they moved. My children have grown up hearing stories of our life at "814." It was a wonderful home and one of the nicest neighborhoods to live in. Our neighbors were more than friends; they were more like family to us than some of our own family were. When we first moved in, my father - in - law, whose family lived right across the street on Beaumont Ave. organized a block party every summer. They would close the street and we would have all kinds of games and food and fun. Every family on the block participated. It was such a great day for all.

Over the years, we had family members live in the apartment on the third floor. We always had the kind of extended family environment that you only hear about nowadays. It was a wonderful experience for all of us who were fortunate to be a part of it.

Anyway, I just couldn't let the opportunity to contact the new owners of our old home pass me by. Hopefully you and your family will be lucky enough to make for yourselves as many happy memories in that grand old house as we did. Good luck & maybe someday we will have the opportunity to meet face to face and swap stories. If you are ever in need of a good haircut, please go around and visit my friend Benny, you won't be disappointed I'm sure. Maybe it will even be a day when my children and I will also decide we need to make a trip into Benny's ourselves.

VICKY & BENNY

Please take care of that gem which you are fortunate to be in possession of at this time because there's someone out here who loves it and will never forget the years spent within its walls. Take care and bye for now!

Cordially, Vicky Duffy McLaughlin

****************************
Well, you can imagine how thrilled I was to receive that letter and how anxious to respond! Certainly in my life, there are a couple of old houses that I would like to re-visit, to be greeted with open arms by the current resident and welcomed inside to relive my past. Houses that come back to me in dreams:

Love After Love
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

by Derek Walcott, b. 1930
Saint Lucian poet and playwright; professor at the University of Essex
1992 Nobel Prize Recipient

Needless to say, I invited Vicky over at the earliest opportunity and she paid us a number of visits during the reminder of our time at "814" (April 1993 - August 2001). We were privileged to meet her dear father, Mr. John Duffy, who shared with us many details about his purchase and upkeep of the property. Another time she brought her sister along and some of the children, nieces and nephews. She showed us a hidden spot in the living room where her brothers had signed their names one year after re-painting the woodwork. She met my British in - laws on one of their annual visits to Philadelphia and became one of their favorite American pen pals. And my sons grew up just as Vicky's did, getting their haircuts from our mutual friend Benny.

As for the two of us, Vicky and I have been "house sisters" ever since, united for all time in our adoration of "814." As American poet, playwright and professor Kenneth Koch (1925 - 2002; see also) writes in one of the best old house poems ever:

To My Old Addresses
. . . O
My old addresses! O my addresses! Are you addresses still?
Or has the hand of Time roughed over you
And buffered and stuffed you with peels of lemons, limes, and shells
From old institutes? If I address you
It is mostly to know if you are well.
I am all right but I think I will never find
Sustenance as I found in you, oh old addresses
Numbers that sink into my soul
Forty-eight, nineteen, twenty-three, O worlds in which I was alive!

814
HOUSE SISTERS FOREVER: VICKY & KITTI

P.S. HAPPY BIRTHDAY VICKY!
SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Friday, March 28th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com

Dream House

The Syntax of Love

ACCUSTOMED, CEREMONIOUS

"your homecoming will be my homecoming --
my selves go with you . . .
dreaming their eyes have opened to your morning
feeling their stars have risen through your skies"
E. E. Cummings
The following four poems have come into my life over the years -- "since feeling is first" in high school, "Permanently" in college, "The Cool Web" in grad school; and most recently "Because She Would Ask Me Why I Loved Her," when my son Ben called it to my attention a few months ago. I used to enjoy pairing up Cummings and Koch, or Koch and Graves for my students to analyze in their Comparison and Contrast essays. These poems are connected by the certainty that love cannot be diagrammed like a sentence or broken down into component parts. Sentence structure . . . word order . . . never mind!

In "since feeling is first," E. E. Cummings advises against paying too much "attention / to the syntax of things . . . for life's not a paragraph." When it comes to life and love, there isn't always a thesis statement or five points of logical development. Cummings concludes with a couple of negative metaphors: life, whatever it may resemble, is not a paragraph; death is not parenthesis -- it can neither be contained nor bracketed off from the whole:

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

E. E. Cummings, 1894 - 1962
Popular, unconventional American poet

"lady i swear by all flowers"
As in "since feeling is first," the setting for "Permanently" is also Spring -- fresh flowers, grassy lawns, carefree antics. Kenneth Koch's playful personification makes this one of my favorite poems ever. The impressionable Nouns, the busy Verbs, the dark beautiful Adjectives, and a few lonely Conjunctions ("And! But!") are outside enjoying the fine weather:

Permanently

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing -- for example,

"Although it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective walked by,
I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face
until the day I perish from the green, effective earth."

Or, "Will you please close the window, Andrew?"

Or, for example, "Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on
the window sill has changed color recently to a light
yellow, due to the heat from the boiler factory which
exists nearby."

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, "And! But!"
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat --
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

by Kenneth Koch, 1925 - 2002 [pronounced "coke"]
American poet, playwright, professor

"Will you please close the window, Andrew?"Still Life #30 (Museum of Modern Art)
by Tom Wesselmann, 1931 - 2004
American collage artist, painter, sculptor

[Something about this picture reminds me of Koch's poem.
I think it must be the window and the green grass, where
perhaps the Sentences and Nouns are lying silently. And
I suspect that the pot of flowers on the window sill might
be on the verge of changing color due to some kind of
factory or other, not far off there in the distance.]
In "Permanently," it seems unlikely that the enchantment of a single kiss will ever succumb to "the destruction of language," whereas for Robert Graves in "The Cool Web," such dispossession takes on the proportion of a serious threat. He describes a harsh world made palatable by a different kind of enchantment: the cool web of language. We need speech to take the edge off, to tame reality with a spell -- the magic of the ABCs!

The Cool Web

Children are dumb to say how the day is hot,
How hot the scent is of the summer rose;
How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,
How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by.

But we have speech, to chill the angry day,
And speech, to dull the rose's cruel scent.
We spell away the overhanging night,
We spell away the soldiers and the fright.

There's a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear;
We grow sea - green at last and coldly die
in brininess and volubility.

But if we let our tongues lose self - possession,
Throwing off language and its watery clasp
Before our death, instead of when death comes,
Facing the wide glare of the children's day,
Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,
We shall go mad no doubt and die that way.

by Robert Graves, 1895 - 1985
English poet, novelist, scholar, translator, writer of antiquity

"We spell away the overhanging night"
In "Because She Would Ask Me Why I Loved Her," Christopher Brennan writes of another web, the "mesh" of our mortality that governs our experience of love. Unlike Graves, Brennan is not convinced that "all our tale [is] told in speech." For him, knowledge is not all; questioning doesn't always make us wise. His view, that the way to understand love's secret is to gaze into another's eyes, is consistent with Cummings conclusion that "kisses are a better fate / than wisdom . . . the best gesture of my brain is less than / your eyelids' flutter."

Because She Would Ask Me Why I Loved Her

If questioning would make us wise
No eyes would ever gaze in eyes;
If all our tale were told in speech
No mouths would wander each to each.

Were spirits free from mortal mesh
And love not bound in hearts of flesh
No aching breasts would yearn to meet
And find their ecstasy complete.

For who is there that lives and knows
The secret powers by which he grows?
Were knowledge all, what were our need
To thrill and faint and sweetly bleed?

Then seek not, sweet, the "If" and "Why"
I love you now until I die.
For I must love because I live
And life in me is what you give.

Christopher Brennan, 1870 - 1932
Australian poet, scholar, librarian

If. Why.

And! But!

Don't cry!

These four poems are perfect for the early days of Spring. The images are so vivid: fluttering flowers and eyelashes, "the green, effective earth," the roses and the sky, hearts of flesh sweetly bleeding. Language, life and love, inextricably woven into a cool, enchanting web that can never be undone.


SEE YOU IN TWO WEEKS FOR MY
Next Fortnightly Post
Saturday, April 14th

Between now and then, read
THE QUOTIDIAN KIT
my shorter, almost daily blog posts
www.dailykitticarriker.blogspot.com

Looking for a good book? Try
KITTI'S LIST
my running list of recent reading
www.kittislist.blogspot.com