I recently traveled to Nashville to the eye doctor (yes, I hate change so most docs are still in Nashville) and got to see my son's new residence, a brand-spanking new 3 bedroom house that the parents of a brother of his bought for him! So he is living in the more "yuppie" section of Murfreesboro now. I looked around and it was a nice house, complete with bonus/game room loft. Brand new furniture and such. Very nice. And I thought about where I lived when I was 20 years old, like my son. It was a 2 bedroom upstairs apartment in a wooden house that is still (barely) standing today, right next to Fire Engine House No. 9 in Knoxville, TN (I was a undergrad at UT). It had no air-conditioning. It had a furnace and coal heat and I swear....a little old man lived in the dirt-floor basement and his only job was to make sure we had heat during the winter. Otherwise, he would have been a homeless man. It was owned by Mrs. Easterday and I remember once interviewing her of what life was like during the Great Depression for a history class. I'm told that Ms. Easterday lives today in a nursing home in town. I used to climb out my bedroom window and sit on the roof while on the phone. Many nights I stayed up all night studying. Many bags of Wendy's and McDonald's were consumed at the kitchen table. I had roommates I didn't know and roommates who were life-long friends. In the mornings, I would grab my clothes and literally run down the hall to the bathroom at the back of the house and immediately turn on the hot water in the shower (no tub, just a cheap fiberglass stand-up shower). I'd wash my face and brush my teeth and then into the shower as the steam was filling the room. This way I could dress in warmth after the shower. When you opened the door and the steam met the cold air of the house, it looked like you were emerging from a burning room! I loved living in this old house. The kitchen was full of cockroaches, both big and itsy, bitsy (which is always a bad sign), and we baited and caught more than just a couple of mice! But what fun was had there! I met my son's father while living in that house. The first time I received delivered flowers was while living in that house. Much personal insight was gained in that house, sitting at my desk, writing in my journal. Friends visited. Relatives dropped by on their way to Gatlinburg. It was the residence of some experimentation in my then-young life. I was working so much during the summer of the 1982 (World's Fair secretary for the FedEx pavilion, waitress at the Stroh Haus, waitress at Robbie's Pancake House on Kingston Pike) that I got mononucleosis and ended up in Baptist Hospital for a week. When I was released I could barely make it up that rickety old staircase to get to my door! Which reminds me of the little joke I played on my dear girlfriend. As she was walking up the outside staircase in front of me with a paper bag full of groceries in her arms, I pulled down her jogging pants, just below her butt. Yes, she had on underwear! But the firemen next door were sitting outside and died laughing, while my girlfriend whooped and hollered very quickly up the stairs so she could set down the groceries and pull up her pants! ha Okay, it was pretty funny back then and we actually still laugh about it today. Now.....over 20 years later, I still like to walk by that house, look up at the windows and think about those days. My 20 year old son lives in a brand new house. Something just ain't right.
