Take Me Home Again

This column originally appeared on Sunday, April 4, 2010

Some thoughts on old homes this Easter Sunday.

My mother spent the majority of her childhood in the house that her grandfather had built when he emigrated from Sweden. It was the sort of comfortable house with a screen-in porch on the second floor where you could take a pleasant nap on a summer day and smell the fresh cut grass from the lawns outside.

It had doors that looked like walls and led to dark closets that connected bedrooms from hallways, and which one could easily imagine as secret compartments when one was of an age to think of such things. It had a storage cellar where cans of vegetables and cans of fruit and other food were kept in a cool and dry place.

It was also a place that my mother returned to over and over again after she had grown up and moved away. Until a decade before her death, a member of her family lived in that house and she never had to ask permission to step inside. After everyone died, she never went back.

A woman I know in the Chester County Justice Center, Deb Randall, today will give her mother a special Easter present. She will take her mother to a house that her mother grew up in as a child, but which is now occupied by apartment dwellers on West Miner Street. The house happens to be a few doors from when I now live, and I would love to hear Deb's mother tell me what the neighborhood was like when she lived there. Were the neighbors friendly? Did the traffic jam up on weekday nights? It made me think how exciting and odd it can be to be returning to a place you called home but which had been taken away from you, in essence, by the presence of strangers.

One day a man who knew the baseball legend Dominic DiMaggio found himself in San Francisco with a mobile phone. By chance, he made his way to the home in the North Beach section of the city and found the address of the house where Dominic and his baseball playing brothers, including Hall of Famer Joe and not-so-Hall of Famer Vince, grew up, sharing bedrooms and cramped quarters.

The man, a Boston broadcaster named Dick Flavin, knocked on the door and invited himself in, then called Dominic at his home in Massachusetts and got a guided tour of the place. How strange it must have been for DiMaggio to describe a map of a home he had not lived in for decades to a friend who was walking through it. How odd for Flavin to have the immediacy of the home where his friend had grown up described over a telephone.

When I was 5, the Rellahan family spent a year in Dublin, Ireland, where my father had taken a fellowship to teach chemistry at Dublin College. The house we lived on was on a suburban street with the lovely name of Wasdale Grove, in the neighborhood of Terenure, near Bushy Park. The children had a little street gang that talked endlessly about righting other gangs from the streets nearby but which never did. My best friend and I would sometimes put our left arms inside our sweaters and knock on neighbors' doors, begging for coins because we had lost an arm in an accident.

When I was older, I visited the street and knocked on the front door of the house after finding the neighborhood on the Dublin bus route map. An older woman answered the door and looked at me quizzically for a moment as I handed her a business card and explained I was visiting from the United States and hoped to see the house where I celebrated my sixth birthday.

"Oh, you must be the American professor's son," the woman answered. She was the daughter of the couple who leased us the home as they travelled the world for the Irish diplomatic service. She lived there with her brother, and remembered our family. I was allowed to climb the stairs and see the bedroom where I awoke each day of our stay, to see the coal bin where we stored fuel that kept us warm, and to sit in the living room where I had my birthday party. She served me tea and biscuits.

I don't know if the folks who will hear a knock at their door today and see Deb Randall and her mother standing outside wanting a look at the place will do the same. But they should.