Postcards from the Funny Farm

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I grew up in a medium sized suburban city called “Mission Viejo.” In Spanish that means “Old Mission.” We lived in a total of three houses between my ages of 3-24 that all were not one mile from one another. They looked so different to me growing up as we lived from one to the other. Yesterday, however, driving by each at age 38 now with my wife and 3 kids, they all looked about the same.

Via Matador was the house of my early childhood. It still has the cement steps my dad put in. I remember when he let me try the spreading tool.

The job seemed so big, solid, and secure to me as a child. As a grownup, the steps looked small like in front of a doll-house and the cement was broken in places. The small red bricks that I recall being varely able to pick up were stacked back in place as though they had fallen off and no one since then had cared enough to hire a mason, or to repair it himself. The cul-de-sac street where neighbors once scurried is now deathly quiet. All the trees and shrubbery have now grown to giant heights and separate adressess. A house’s fence now makes its ongoings opaque.Durazno was much the same. The house where I went through my early High School track and cross country years was barely visible from the street through all the shrubbery. The balcony was jutting out and I recalled all the times my brother and I would go out there to shoot water guns at our sisters or play music or watch the night stars. After a few boring stories, like the one about how I jumped off the 2-story roof into the pool at age 13 and a neighbor saw me and tattled to my furious mother, my family was ready to end the tour. But alas, one more house awaited!

Via San Pedro. This has has really gone downhill. The stucco is falling off revealing drywall and chickenwire. The rod iron on the balcony has been taken off. It looks like the Giving Tree after the boy has taken all he wants. A car sits in the driveway with an alumni sticker from my university. I wonder who lives here now? It makes me think about how all our lives are so meaningless, and the same. “Most men live lives of quiet desperation and go the grave with the song still in us.” -Thoreau

Driving away from these three houses of my youth, I realize I am not going home but simply going elsewhere. I’m driving to a place where my kids call home and get to feel warm inside about. We will get a Christmas tree in a few weeks and make memories of a kind marked 2007 which will fade and one day vanish. And one day in the distant future, maybe when I have passed through to the next place, my children, still here, will drive down the streets I’ve lived in with them. They’ll remember, I trust, the good times the of tickling and not the tension. I hope they don’t shed a tear at that moment, but that they find glee and encouragement. I hope they blog about it. Driving past the houses of my youth yesterday, I eschewed the sadness of lost time and chose to use it as fuel. Fuel to live my life now, for my wife and kids, while it’s here. After all, we are all but the same set of characters in a similar story living lives of quiet desperation in houses that only live slightly longer.
Note to self: Make every moment count.