There is a house-still there-where a family struggled with itself, had battles and truces, dramas and days light and sweet as spring winds. When the patriarch of the house was elected president of the United States, reporters paid the neighbors for access to their trees so they could post photographers in the branches-aiming to get better shots of the president-elect.
There is a book of photographs out now, released this week, “Ronald Reagan: An American Hero-His Voice, His Values, His Vision” (DK Publishing, 272 pages) that includes many photos of our life on that short, dead-end street-before politics, before reporters in trees. “I’ve driven up there sometimes when I’m in town,” my brother told me recently. “You know, to see how the old neighborhood is doing.” “Really?” I said. “Me, too. Often, actually.” And then my mother told me that she went back there, memorizing what had changed, remembering what was there before. It was as if we were all following our own private trails of bread crumbs and ending up at the same place. I started to wonder if it’s more than a desire to check out one’s old neighborhood that makes so many of us do this-revisit the places of our past. We all end up sounding the same: “It seems so much smaller now, narrower. I remember it being much bigger. I remember what used to grow in that patch of soil-that garden, that strip along the street.” As I turn off of Sunset Boulevard I am immediately on familiar streets. I first pass the house that my brother does not remember-the one we lived in before he was born, until I was 6 years old. Except for flowers in front where ivy once was, it looks the same. Briefly, I consider stopping and ringing the bell. But I don’t. I’m heading up to the street where more memories linger, where decades of our lives were lived. I decide to park my car a short distance away and walk, retracing the steps of so long ago, when I was taken out as a young child and later, when I walked our dog in the afternoons after school. There is still a hedge of honeysuckle just before I turn onto the street where we lived. I remember my brother in a stroller beside me, the afternoon sun leaning on my shoulder, the Scottish babysitter telling me to pluck off a blossom and taste the nectar. For a moment, I am 8 years old, tasting the drop of honey on my tongue for the first time.
At the first curve on the street below, I can look up to the house that was once ours. I can see the roof and part of the plate-glass windows. A little farther up the road is the entrance to the steep, winding driveway, which now has a metal security gate across it. The gate is new, but the way sunlight and shadows dapple the driveway is not. Up above me, behind brush that has grown tall, is the deck and a huge tree that my father used to trim himself. (Media photographers got many shots of that.) There is the pool where we splashed through so many summers. All around me are memories, the brush of years, echoes that don’t die off with time.
And I think that’s why we do this-why we return to the places of our past. Places are always more than just locations. We find pieces of ourselves there. We meet again our loved ones, smoothed over by the kinder lens of softer judgments and diminishing years. We connect with the memories and experiences that helped form the people we have become. Maybe everything looks smaller when we return because the world yawned wider for us long ago, when we were too young to understand that life is full of harsh, tightened boundaries.
I used to spend all afternoon on this street, riding my bike and, later, skateboarding. The street seems so short now; I’m at the cul-de-sac in only a few minutes. What was once a single piece of property, belonging to our personal Boo Radley, is now two properties, with clean white driveways and modern houses. I stand trapped between past and present. Nothing has faded from my memory. I can still see the long, dark-wood gate, padlocked with a thick chain, and the deep shade of ancient eucalyptus trees. Inside-when we could get a glimpse of it-was a one-story ranch house where we were certain the mysterious owner sat by the window, peeking out, waiting to nab any child foolish enough to trespass. It was the house we never went to on Halloween.
I’m sorry that children who live on this street now won’t have that adventure. It’s a rite of passage-the spooky neighborhood house. Or it should be.
The eucalyptus trees are gone; the cul-de-sac is so bright now it hurts my eyes. But what my eyes see now is not the whole story of this place-this short dead-end street with FOR SALE signs on houses that were built when others were demolished. The stories of neighborhoods are folded into years, nestled in the recollections of those, like me, who come back to remember.
It might be that we return to anchor ourselves in time, in history-to remind ourselves that, behind the walls of shiny new houses are whispers of other times, other voices. I have been inside almost every house on this street. I remember the closet where a boy my age pushed me in and wanted to play “post office” with me. He laughed so hard when I didn’t know what he meant that I escaped and ran all the way home. I remember when a Spanish-style two-story house in the middle of the street was a one-story ’50s-style house-nothing special, really. Except that James Arness lived there, and I watched “Gunsmoke” all the time, and I developed a crush on his son who was the best skateboarder I ever saw.
Just at the start of the cul-de-sac, on a chilly autumn afternoon, I turned around on my bike without training wheels, ecstatic that I was keeping my balance, riding on two wheels. James Arness had come out to stand beside my father and chat with him. My day was complete. I still see them there-tall, smiling, talking easily with each other, looking proudly in my direction. The kid who just learned to ride a two-wheeler. I still feel the October wind sweeping past me, even though it’s June and hardly chilly.
This is why we come back-to close the gap between past and present. To see a glimpse of another time, when the streets seemed wider and the world stretched on forever.
