(Written in 2017)
On Tuesday, I dropped the key to my childhood home into an envelope and slipped it into my sister’s mail slot. She was signing the final papers to close the sale, and by the end of the week, our parents’ house in the Richmond District would belong to someone else.
Without my parents, we told ourselves, it was just a house, and should have a family living in it, loving it. My dad had moved his family of six into it in 1961, about a week after JFK’s inauguration. With four bedrooms and a sunroom, it was his castle.
Our previous home was a single-story, two-bedroom house; my three sisters shared one bedroom, and I, the youngest, shared my parents’ bedroom (effectively putting a cap on the size of our family). Before that, until I was a year old, our family of six lived with my grandparents, aunt and uncle in a Victorian flat on Pine Street in Japantown. My mother and her family had lived there before the war, and had an unusually good relationship with their landlord, Tom Spilios, who had welcomed them back when they got out of camp and returned to San Francisco in 1945. It was a big flat, but it proved too small to harmoniously house my aunt Kiyo and my dad.
In our new house, my mom and dad had their own bedroom. Joan and Kathy each had their own room as well. Susan and I shared the second-biggest bedroom.
The sunroom was our playroom. Susan and I hung out there during summer vacations. One year we started up a shoe-polishing business, going around the house collecting everyone’s shoes, polishing them, and then painstakingly writing out invoices. The shoe-polishing shop was only a front for UNCLE Headquarters (The Man from UNCLE was one of our favorite shows). Susan also taught me how to knit, so we each worked on sweaters. (Susan’s, pink mohair, came out beautifully, while mine, a sickly yellowish green with the occasional dropped stitch, was never finished). When we ran out of shoes to polish, we would knit in the sunroom with the Giants’ game on the radio.
The stairway between the first and second floors was our favorite place to read. Even on foggy San Francisco days, the textured glass window at the bend in the stairway provided enough natural amber light for reading. I sometimes slung one leg over the end of the bannister, which curved to level at the bottom of the stairway, pretending that it was a horse, and read on “horseback.”
The stairway was also a favorite staging area for family photos throughout the years — with as many people as possible packed in, at every Thanksgiving and New Years.
The garage was big enough (not wide, but deep) that, when my dad’s car was not in it, Susan and I could ride our bicycle/tricycle, madly zooming around posts and under the stairway in opposite directions, working off the excess energy that children never seem to run down. We played badminton, catch (sharing two baseball mitts that my dad brought home from a trip) and hula hoops in the large back yard that had two towering palm trees until my mom got tired of constantly having to pick up palm fronds and my dad had them cut down. He gradually transformed the windswept yard into a sheltered Japanese garden, with maple trees, irises, and ornamental red bridge with crane.
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When the realtor cleared, painted, and staged the house, updating the 1960s light fixtures in the process, I walked through it, marveling at what a difference new, modern, coordinated furniture made; it was no longer our house.
There was no piano in the living room; no antique White’s sewing machine in the dining room. The entryway suddenly looked like the reception area of a corporate office. The antique dining table and chairs that our neighbors the Freemans had given us in the 1960s when they moved to the Sunset District were gone. All the shelves and tables that my Dad had constructed from wood remnants in his basement workshop were gone. His workshop was cleared of all fishing tackle, nuts, bolts, tools, nails, and other paraphernalia.
(This is where I get it, I thought; nothing in my own small house matches or is part of a set. For my parents, it was the result of having to start from scratch with nothing after the war and wartime incarceration; of making do with used things given by relatives or friends, the occasional purchase, and things my dad could fashion in his workshop in the basement. For me, it was the comfort of familiar things, an indifference to interior decoration, a focus on functionality. When realtors discussed how the kitchen might be updated, I had to ask what a “backsplash” was.) I still use the dresser that my dad made for my sister Kathy, a bookshelf he made for my mom’s magazines, and a couple of stools, one unfinished wood that could use a good sanding, but no one ever got around to it.
In that way, our lovely Edwardian home in San Francisco was decorated in a style that might be called “hodgepodge” — an eclectic mixture of a few Asian pieces (often acquired from a customer in lieu of an unpaid debt) and items that stressed function over form. A family of six lived there. REALLY lived. My mom’s fold-out ironing board was a regular fixture in our dining room, moved only when guests were expected. (And before the ironing board, an actual General Electric pressing machine, which she used to iron five sets of sheets each week, graced one corner of the breakfast room where we ate all our meals.)
I remember seeing my dad coming home to that house. It was the way he came home to it. I must have been just topping the hill from Anza to Geary on 38th Avenue, about to cross Geary, when his car or truck came west on Geary, pausing briefly at the intersection and making a swift right turn, then gliding halfway up the block and turning into the garage as if drawn by a magnet. He would go upstairs to the master bedroom, empty his pockets of keys and change (I can still hear the clatter of keys and coins on the dresser top), and change into a flannel shirt and khakis. He loved being home.
When my dad died, my mother made the unusual request of having the funeral cortege take a slight detour and drive slowly by The House so he could “see” it one last time.
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I dreamed about The House that night, of course (after turning over my key). In my dream, I had left my car there while I did something in the city, thinking that, if it went late, I could stay over and have breakfast with my mom before driving back to the East Bay the next morning. Except, I realized, as I walked up the hill toward it, not only was my mom not there, there was no longer any furniture in the house, including my bed. In fact, the new owners might already have taken possession. It would be awkward to get there and feel like I was trespassing.
But they hadn’t moved in yet. In fact, my sister Joan was there (and others as well). I was standing in the empty entryway, and suddenly, my dad was there. I gave him a big, long hug, and said the words I’m not sure I ever said when he was alive: “Thank you, Daddy, for this house.”
Images (c) R. A. Sasaki
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