NEWS & VIEWS

notes left on the door on the house on 46^th street, PART ONE

I.

Henry- when are you coming home?

Department of Water and Power 48 hour notice: please do not mail your bill. Your service at 926 W. 46^th Street may be turned off if payment of 196.74 is not made to our office by Friday, May 25^th.

Jessie: do you have any more lemons? Pie goes well with shame, sweetheart.

Henry- please come home. We all miss you. All is forgiven. P.

48 hour notice….

It’s 2:00 am, Henry. Do you know where your daughters are?

Department of Water and Power…

Dear Daddy: when are you coming home?

This house is condemned.

One night, my father dreamt of his father, snoring loudly in the basement in their house on 46^th Street. “Pop,” my father said to his father, “why are you here?”

“I just walked all the way from Sawtelle,” my grandfather said, “and I can’t find anyone home.”

The Veteran’s Cemetery, on Sawtelle Avenue in West Los Angeles, is the cemetery where my grandfather is buried. Both of my grandfathers are buried there; both are World War I veterans.

Years later, when my father’s spirit lies snoring in empty spaces of the house that was once his, I’m reminded of this dream, except I’m the one lost and searching for someone to be home. But no one is here. The empty shell that my mother once lived in no longer gives the comfort I would like to lay my head in, wishing for rain. She’s checked out instead, following my father back across the dirt and concrete and jimson and alata and palm trees lining the streets all the way from here to house on 46^th Street.

There’s a photo of my aunt, heavily pregnant, trying to avoid her image being caught for prosperity, desperately trying to dodge behind the pillar on the porch on the house on 46^th Street. She’s young, beautiful, laughing…so much the 1950’s housewife caught in that moment. Years later she would waste away as cancer ate at her brain. Still beautiful, still vibrant to the end, unable to speak or make words that were her gift. She looked exactly the same as she did that day on the porch on the house on 46^th Street.

I lost my front teeth at the age of three to the house on 46^th Street. My sister, 6 years my senior, was swinging on the porch railing and I had to join her. “Be careful,” my mother admonished.

“I will!” I cried, as I fell face first to the concrete. My mother was nowhere to be found as my grandmother wiped blood, tears, and bone from my face. I remember swallowing my tooth. “Look at all the pretty blood,” Grandmother cooed, trying to calm me.

My mother is still nowhere to be seen. Grief has gotten the best of her. Her retreat has been silent, painful. Like most leavings usually are.

What is the imprint of our presence upon those we leave behind? The house where my aunt hid her extended belly – that became my cousin Kim- and the place where I swallowed my own bones was claimed by fire years ago. Yet I drive by this place and feel its pull from in my blood and I cannot resist it. Sacred places do not exist in cathedrals of glass or stone and wax but in the space of time and the souls who inhabit, whose footprints are still etched on dirt and concrete and urban blood.

When my grandmother was in her later years, she sold the house on 46^th Street, and my grandfather’s ghost tried to return there in their son’s dreams. “Pop,” my father said to his father, “where are you going?”

“I walked all the way from Sawtelle,” my grandfather said, “and couldn’t get into the house.” So he found his way into the basement and went to sleep, where my father followed the sounds of his father’s snores and found him. We follow scents and sounds all the time. That is who we are as animal people in this desert. Following scents and sounds on concrete and ash isn’t what the ancestors had in mind, but it is what’s left of them. Sand, glass, stone, earth. Bricks and mortar and blood and tears. What stories does the land of sparkling sidewalks, genocide, eternal sunshine and smoke and fire tell? Look to the wild tobacco sprouting in cracks of pavement along the ribbons of freeways. Look to the hawks sitting on telephone lines after the rain, gaze fixed not on the SUVs and signs of extravagance but smaller things we tend to ignore. The smaller things are sustenance. In a wold of opposites people have lost sight of the smaller things. But hawks, traditional messengers. see the hidden. They filter out noise and SUVs and density and look to the world of smaller spaces for their sustenance.

© Carolyn Dunn 2008

Labels: global footprint, Los Angeles, survivng Alzheimer's