A house comprises a lot more than just walls and windows

JOSEPH N. BELL

The white wooden lawn chairs were the last artifacts to go. They sat

forlornly in the front yard, stacked and lonely, the final reminders

of the celebrations that took place there. The appearance of the

chairs each spring was always the first harbinger of the summer to

come. We would see them and drift over, one-by-one, usually with a

drink in hand, but if not, one was always poured for us. There might

be a little chill still in the air, but we knew there would be many

months ahead when the chairs would beckon at the cocktail hour and

traffic to them would ebb and flow until it became, once again, too

cold to sit there.

Last week, the chairs were lonely sentinels of what once was. The

house behind them was empty and abandoned. The garage doors were

open, revealing piles of litter and empty paint cans and rusted

tools. The front porch seemed to sag in expectation of the change

that was soon to take place.

I had never watched a house being destroyed, nor will I again.

Because I couldn’t help projecting it to my own home, the process was

a constant reminder to me that there is so much more than walls and

roofs and windows coming down. Rich memories across a spectrum of

feelings, on deposit in each of those rooms, are suddenly turned out,

homeless for the moment, until they can find a new and -- at first --

less comfortable place to put down.

This had been the home of Jim and Pat Altobelli and their family

for more than three decades. A home of Italian generosity and Irish

feistiness. Of pasta on the stove and a card room for our monthly

poker games. Of the Chicago Cubs on the TV for six months out of

every year. A home overflowing with grandchildren at holiday time and

playing host regularly to an odd assortment of strangers and friends

of friends Jim encountered in the outer world and brought home. The

family seat of our neighborhood godfather, and thus a place in which

all of us who convened there regularly had an emotional stake.

I wondered if any of these thoughts ever occurred to the workmen

who methodically tore it down. The process took three days. The house

was all wood, rather like most of the houses I knew so well in rural

Indiana, and the first day was devoted to salvaging the wood. A swarm

of workers took the house apart, piece by piece, and deposited a huge

pile of lumber from roof and siding and beams in the front yard.

The second day, while trucks were carrying away the lumber, a

bulldozer appeared to attack what was left of the house -- the

expendable parts. I watched the poker room go down. By the end of the

day, there were enormous piles of rubble, the detritus of what was

once a house. No prisoners were taken. I couldn’t watch when a

magnificent, symmetrically shaped shade tree in the front yard was

masticated in the jaws of the bulldozer.

On the third day, the rubble was scooped up and dumped into

waiting trucks. That took all day. By day’s end, where there had once

been a house, there was a vacant lot, a blank blackboard, awaiting a

new message to be written on it. That and the memories hovering

about, waiting to reattach themselves to the Altobellis, who will

return one day to a different house in a familiar setting.

The Altobelli house had long been a fixture in our neighborhood,

associated with dependable and predictable and comfortable

expectations. When a piece of comfort is removed from our lives,

there is inevitably regret. Familiarity breeds content, even when it

isn’t satisfying -- and this assuredly was.

Change can challenge our comfort zone by requiring us to adjust to

the unfamiliar, which is the only way growth can take place. But

that’s usually a lot easier to say than it is to embrace, especially

when you’re very young or very old.

By sometime next year, there will be a new and splendid home that

will probably enhance all of our property values built on the empty

lot where the Altobellis have lived for so many years. The new home

will include not only Pat and Jim, but their son, John, and his

family. There will be new children on the block and new energy from

the extended family.

There might even be new lawn chairs for socializing in the front

yard and a spiffy poker room. We’ll see.

But it seems especially appropriate on this Thanksgiving Day to

offer up special thanks to the house that just disappeared and the

people who lived there for serving as such warm and delightful

symbols of all the best connotations of neighborliness.

Besides running a perpetual summer watering place, they were at

the center of our Easter egg hunt and packing sandbags with candles

to light our streets on Christmas Eve. Whenever help was needed --

whether early morning runs to the airport or special Italian dishes

-- it was always available. This is not to suggest that it won’t be

again -- just as good and as generous -- when the new house appears.

This, rather, is simply to send off the old house with a proper

thanksgiving.

Sherry and I have lived in this Santa Ana Heights neighborhood for

22 years, raised a son and put down deep roots here. We have been

forever blessed by a community in which people can be as social or as

reclusive as they like, and no one passes judgment. Where there is a

remarkable mix of old and young, of fields of work and interests, of

political and philosophical views.

But in every direction I look, there are people I would call on

instantly in any sort of crisis, and they would respond without

question, as I would to them. In this day and age, that’s a whole lot

to be thankful for.

So if those homeless memories can’t find Jim and Pat in their

temporary Newport Beach rental, they’re welcome to hang out in my

backyard till the people who lived them come back. The food won’t be

as good, and I like to watch the Angels instead of the Cubs, but they

can surely put up with that for a year.

* JOSEPH N. BELL is a resident of Santa Ana Heights. His column

appears Thursdays.