Uncle Roger's Notebooks of Daily Life |
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Monday, February 06, 2006 Sometimes, I call our house Paloma Loca -- Crazy Dove. Mostly because my whole family is insane. It wasn't always like that. That is, we didn't always live here. When I was seven, my parents decided that our small two bedroom house wasn't big enough for two parents, three boys (twelve, seven, and three), a daughter (one), and one more on the way. So they started looking around. We spent our weekends looking at open houses and it was loads of fun. My brothers and I would run through the houses declaring "this could be my room!" and searching out those critical special features that made each house desirable. We came very close to buying a house a mere two blocks over from our then current house. I don't remember the inside much, but I do remember that it got bonus points for being the same neighborhood -- basically, it was just on the other side of my school. I don't know what happened, but we didn't buy that house. We bought Paloma Loca instead. This house was further away, but still within walking distance. It meant different schools, though. That wasn't much of a problem; I was being switched around a lot anyway due to desegregation, my older brother got beat up where ever he went, and my younger siblings hadn't started school yet. The big problem was that I would be moving away from my friends and the neighborhood I knew. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, that wasn't reason enough not to move. So move we did. We spent a summer painting the attic and getting things ready for five kids, including a newborn (born that fall). I also spent the summer exploring the new neighborhood, with its rare-for-San-Francisco alleys, pocket parks, and other features of interest to young boys and girls. And, of course, I made friends. New friends, different from those back in the old neighborhood. I spent a lot of time as part of the local gang, shooting each other with BB guns while playing cops-and-robbers (or other variations of us-versus-them), riding bikes, falling off skateboards... much the same thing as I would have done had we not moved, or had we moved to the house nearer our old place. The crucial difference was that I did it all with a different set of friends, most importantly, a guy named (and I'm certainly misspelling this) Onessmus. As to exactly why he was so important, that's a topic for another post. Suffice it to say, however, that moving where we did put me on a very different path from where I was headed before. |
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