These are two pictures of the house where I grew up.  On the left is how I remember it: the grass patchy and brown, the trees dead, the shabby basketball hoop above the garage; on the right is how it looks now.  The insides look different too, and I wonder if the walls still remember all that happened there between 1989 and 2013.

...there is a house hidden in the Midwest, tucked away behind a broken cement driveway and a long garage.  Once a group of young men, teenagers I guess (they were double my size then and I was around eight) came to my house while I was playing Banshee on the driveway and asked to use the basketball hoop.  I told them yes and I played basketball with them.  

Eventually my mother came out with glasses of water for everyone.  I thought that was nice of her but now, looking back, she probably should have been worried about me playing basketball with these strangers twice my age.  But I've always depended on the kindness of strangers...twice my age.

Or maybe she was just glad I was finally using the driveway to play sports and not scream like an Irish demon/my father's side.  Her people were Jewish.

 

Send me a note.  I'll be here.