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| Mark and Molly's beautiful home |
Sometimes writing scares the hell out of me. It's so hard to know where to begin. Even the most mundane scene in the most anti-climatic part of a narrative can begin a thousand different ways. Yet, it matters how one starts. Openings set the mood.
It was a warm, muggy morning, the sky low and gray, the song of cicadas heavy in the trees, droplets of rain on our car. I noticed the beautiful brick suburban homes. Across the street was a orange brick one with bay windows, the type I used to call a "North Dallas three-story attic house" because of the high-pitched hipped roofs on one-story homes. I loved those houses when I first moved to Dallas as a teenager. Looking across the street, I realized I loved them still. Homes in Texas just look so much more substantial than homes out west, both their exteriors and interiors. For one thing, they're usually clad in brick rather than cheap siding.
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| A typical suburban Dallas home-type that I dubbed "The North Dallas Three-story Attic House" |
Turning around, I noticed how beautiful Mark and Molly's home is, and I took a picture. In college, living in apartment complexes, and feeling that I was going nowhere, I longed to live in something substantial. When Marci and I arrived the previous night and I commented on how beautiful Mark and Molly's home was, Molly said, "Remember when you said you thought you'd never have a home, and now we both have one."
I'd forgotten that, but when she said it, I remembered. I'm not sure Marci and I would have one now if not for my parents. Ours, along with the property, is basically a present from my stepfather. We have a wonderful home on 90 acres of family land with an oak and maple filled canyon with a creek, and so envy wasn't logical. Still, looking back at their smart 1960s modern home set back on a lush green lot under big, leafy green trees, I was a little jealous.
What was clear was just how beautiful suburban Dallas is. Sure, the main roads with shopping centers on each corner are kind of ugly. But those quiet, narrow suburban streets themselves are quite wonderful--neat, tidy brick houses set back from the street on immaculate green lawns; big, leaf-heavy trees casting deep shadows on hot summer days. Those houses beat the hell out of the two story pressed-siding atrocities sitting on lots with parched, yellow lawn that inhabit every city west of the Rockies.
It truly surprised me to find Mark and Molly living in such a respectable place. I would not have guessed that from our college years.
Molly, along with my friend Phil, were my roommates in college. We shared a two bedroom apartment. Phil and I shared a room, and Molly had her own--until Mark moved in. There is no polite way to put this, so I'll use a metaphor. Molly was to cleanliness then, what Trump is to environmentalism now. As she has always been a good friend, I'll just leave it at that, and note that her home now is spotless. Furthermore, because my own home is constantly a mess, and Marci and I perform agonizing two-day rush scrub and tidy extravaganzas before company comes, I could tell with absolutely certainty that Mark and Molly's clean house was not the product of that same type of frantic fronting because it was all too orderly. You can quickly vacuum carpets and sweep floors before guests arrive, but when there's not a lot of extra papers, pens, bills and crap on the book shelves and end tables, you know it's clean for real.
What changed between when she was my roommate and the present time, I'm not sure. It just goes to prove, despite what adults tell their children, high school and college years do not determine who we ultimately become. Probably, parents do. Most of us are just so damn determined in our youth to prove otherwise that for a while we succeed at being everything that makes our parents stay up late and worry themselves gray. Usually, however, their influence wins in the end.
Molly, the college drop-out, is now a well-loved science teacher living the suburban dream with Mark, her college-years sweetheart and continual love. Amazing and beautiful.
In college, I would have predicted that future Molly would live under a bridge, a needle stuck in her arm, as she stared up at a bit of light coming through a small hole in her cardboard box bungalow. "Wow!" she'd say, amazed by the light, "That looks just like a rose, a beautiful yellow and purple rose, all vibrating, with little orange army men sticking out like the peddles of a sunflower rose Yes, not a rose-rose, but a sunflower rose!"
That, of course, is distorted and unfair. All predictions of people's futures are. Molly was always brilliant. She ate books like Doritos, one book after another. At the time I was the literature major, but it would take me a couple of weeks to read a book she could finish in a single day. But, at the time, she definitely was not interested in education, nor was she interested in cleaning house.
I remember one night Phil, she, and I decided to get drunk. The two of them had had some experience at it. I hadn't, and I didn't like the taste of beer. So, she and Phil opened a couple of beers, and I opened a bottle of NyQuil. She thought it was hilarious. But, she also thought it just wasn't right. She started off laughing, then started whining (as the beer took effect, of course), and then finally filled with righteous indignation: "Nobody get's drunk off NyQuil! There's a right and wrong way to do things. It is as simple as that. See?" (swig).
Phil, always the moderator, tried to see things from both sides. "I don't know, Molly, if your aim is to get drunk, then I don't see that it matters how you approach it. Drunk is drunk."
"It does matter. It does. I'm telling you, it matters. Nobody, I mean nobody, takes NyQuil shots to get drunk."
And so it went on. I personally don't remember getting drunk that night. I probably just fell asleep and slobbered all over the table, the side of my head resting on a dirty plate of half-dried spaghetti that Molly failed to clean up.
Thinking back with a smile, I shut the trunk and walked back to Mark and Molly's most respectable home, and opened the door and entered the quiet, dimly lit interior of dark wood floors. Marci and I ate some cereal Molly had set out for us. We enjoyed the quiet, spacious house, and the cat, who ran around doing acrobatics off the furniture. Water dripped off the back roof, hit the concrete step, and splashed against the sliding glass door. It was wonderful.
There was a time I made fun of the suburbs. In college, I felt obliged. The poets I liked, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound, aimed so much of their sharp wit against middle-class suburbia. I remember Marsh's mom, a journalist, a suburbanite herself, and a republican, tried to give me other mentors, and once shared an article about a Dallas poet who loved the suburbia, hoping I'd come back home (and not influence her son with all my crazy downtown liberal ideas).
No change on my part with regards to my politics. But the suburbs--well, they're not so bad. Besides, as the Beto (O'Rourk) sign outside Mark and Molly's home indicates, you can be a suburbanite and democrat also.
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