There’s No Place Like Home

Last September, it became necessary to move my ninety-three-year-old parents to a new home. The house where they had lived for seventy years, and where they raised me, my sister, and my two brothers, was not designed for the mobility and accessibility they needed in their last years. It was a comfortable and wonderful home, but the doorways, hallways, kitchen, and bathrooms were hardly navigable by walker or wheelchair. It had become evident to everyone that if they were going to live at “home” for the rest of their lives, it could not be this home.

We were blessed to find a house in town that fit their needs perfectly. We made an offer, it was accepted, and we were able to sell our old family home in a timely manner.

Then came the reality of moving. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. But I didn’t have a clue how hard it would be. There was plenty of help with the physical part of it. It was the emotional part that took nearly everything out of me.

I was there alone the day I carried the last precious items out the door of that house. I walked back in for one last look. I was so exhausted that I collapsed on the kitchen floor. After a moment, my eyes focused on the old linoleum, and I realized I was sitting in the spot where the kitchen table had stood for seven decades. The four marks of its feet were distinctly impressed in the linoleum around me. That was when it rushed over me like a warm wave… I was sitting in one of the most sacred places of my life.

After seventy years, that house sat empty, and there I sat, empty, on the empty floor where the kitchen table had stood—where Mom served us morning, noon, and night, and where, on special mornings, we turned the backs of our chairs to the table and knelt on that hard floor, pressing our elbows on the hard seats of the chairs, clasping our hands reverently beneath our chins while Mom or Dad prayed with gratitude and petitioned heaven for our needs before we pulled ourselves up to waffles or oatmeal.

Later in the day, we came back to that table for bologna sandwiches and carrots, and at day’s end, venison steaks with green Jello speckled with cottage cheese. All of it was comfort food, served with words of comfort, words of caution. We left that table full, and every day we returned to it again, empty. To be filled again.

From where I sat on the floor that day, it was just three or four steps to the bedroom where, as a little boy, I lay on the top bunk with my transistor radio tucked under my pillow. Up through the feathers came the pure, honeyed tones of Vin Scully’s voice, streaming warm and smooth across my dozing dreams. Then the crack of the bat sounded across the airwaves in the dark of that very room, now alive with the roar from Chavez Ravine because Sandy Koufax had just struck out one more batter. And maybe then I could go to sleep.

All those nights, I lay in bed, covertly listening to Mom and Dad talking softly at the kitchen table. One time they talked of moving, and I couldn’t bear the thought of it… moving from this house where I was safe and sheltered from any threat from the Russians, and just a hop, skip, and jump from my friends’ houses, where they too were safe and sheltered and ready to play at a knock on the door.

We never moved, and I always returned to that table. Empty. To be filled again with something to eat and with something to build my courage and confidence. I came home to that table from high school every day for lunch. I could see the TV from the kitchen table through the door into the front room. I was addicted to The Doctors, Mom’s favorite soap… and mine, too, though I never admitted it. Until now.

I would be back again after school, sometimes to the heavenly aroma—even before I opened the front door—of cinnamon rolls fresh from the oven. On the TV screen, the grainy face of Walter Cronkite flickered through the gray, buzzing haze as he delivered the week’s Vietnam death count.

After my first football game up the street at the Sun Bowl, I sat right here at the table across from Dad, my uniform grass-stained and reddened, and told him football was not for me—that if I was going to get busted up, I would rather ride broncs and bulls, because at least it was over in eight seconds, and you didn’t have to go back in again, play after play, and get pounded again and again. Right here at this table, I saw in his eyes he was proud of me, and he would go with me wherever I might dream of going.

There in the doorway to the front room is where Mom stood on a winter’s Sunday evening when I was eight years old. She could not step into the room but peered through the doorway, aghast. Dad was lying on the couch. My sister and I sat frozen on the floor in the middle of the room, stunned, spellbound by the fuzzy images of four mop-headed boys on the screen of our TV.

New, thrilling, and beguiling sounds filled that room and carried into this kitchen. The beat, the harmonies, and the enchanting words were completely and utterly fresh, as if those boys who needed a haircut had just landed from another planet. Mom, standing there in the doorway from the kitchen, could not allow herself to enter the room—could only gasp the words she often reverted to in these situations: “What is this world coming to?”

She could not come to terms with what was happening in that transformational moment: Oh, Ed Sullivan, what have you wrought upon this house? How could you unleash such as this into our hallowed front room? She was beside herself, and when I saw her standing there quaking in her house slippers, I wanted to hold her hand to let her know I was a bit aghast myself—hough, in truth, I was fully captivated to the point that, in coming years, their records would turn on our console stereo beneath the big picture window of that front room, opening the floodgates for the likes of Creedence Clearwater and Led Zeppelin to rattle and hum the walls of this humble house.

Once, a few years later, as that music blared from our stereo, I peeked into this kitchen and saw Mom secretly dancing on this linoleum floor and knew in that moment that whatever this world was coming to, it would be okay.

Nothing exceeded the glory of Christmas morning in this house. Having slept hardly a wink the night before, I passed through the hallway from my room to Mom and Dad’s long before dawn, the haze of sugar plums dancing in my head, only to be sent straight back to bed. Then, minutes later, with my brother and sister in alliance, we stormed their room with such purpose we could not be denied.

We waited there as Dad slipped into the front room to prepare, and we were not allowed to enter until he flipped on the magical rack of Bell & Howell lights: that atomic burst of light that showered our front room in celestial glory; a light that began growing in those f irst Christmases of my memory; a light that is still growing and will continue to grow brighter and brighter until the perfect day.

Then there was the clickety-click of Dad’s eight-millimeter movie camera—the magnificent sound that meant Christmas had finally come. In one sweep of the eyes, I saw the red Schwinn bike and the gleaming blue wagon and the sleek silver train racing around the track, and all the wonderful array of bright and shiny objects that miraculously appeared on that little front room floor every year.

Now this house belongs to someone else. I have finished emptying it, and I am tired. It is empty, and I’m empty and need to be refilled—but the kitchen table is gone.

Now I can only hope for a future place where love and laughter will flow as they once did around that kitchen table, its marks still etched in the floor where I sit—a place even brighter than our front room on Christmas morning.

I lifted my tired body up from the kitchen floor and walked out that sacred door for the last time.