the outlaw poetry network

Saturday, August 29th, 2009...11:04 am

ronald baatz | the river road house

THE RIVER ROAD HOUSE

I think it was Marquez who said that, because of nostalgia,
when you go back to where you lived as a child you face
the disappointment of everything looking smaller.
I found this to be true when one day I went back
to my childhood house on River Road, and I found
myself sitting in the car staring at
that house as though it were some mysterious bird’s
nest. I started to live there at the age of four
and remained for many years. The house did
look smaller, much smaller, far too small for a family
of five to live in. It amazes me, now, why
I ever bellyached over it being my chore to
cut the lawn. It couldn’t have taken me more
than ten minutes to cut that patch of grass.
If the front lawn had been a cemetery it would’ve
accommodated maybe three coffins, at most. True,
I always remembered the kitchen being small, and
it was until an addition was put on the back.
There’s a photo of us (I’m maybe six) sitting around
the kitchen table with relatives, and we are all
squashed together and laughing and just hamming
it up for the camera. In this picture the size of
the Formica table suggests it probably couldn’t have held
enough food to feed so many people. When
the addition was under construction my father took pictures
every week. These pictures kept a record of
the different stages of progress the workers were making.
After that, whenever friends or relatives visited,
we’d all have to view these pictures projected onto a screen.
With addition of a larger kitchen there wasn’t
very much lawn left in the backyard to speak of either.
And it was in that backyard that my father
had his first garden. It was a small one, naturally enough,
consisting basically of cucumbers and tomatoes.
Back then he was working a job so he didn’t have much time
for the garden. From my bedroom window I’d
watch him out there, toiling in dim evening light,
and I always thought he looked a bit like
George Raft, the movie star who usually played
a gangster in films. My father looked like
George Raft digging a grave in which he was
going to hide the body of a dead man, some
poor fool who had never learned to keep his
mouth shut. It wasn’t until he was in retirement,
when he moved to the mountains, that he had his
very impressive gardens. So yeah, when I sat
in my car that day, across the street from the house
of my childhood, it looked small and dreary and
squeezed in among other houses. I couldn’t imagine
anyone wanting to have a garden in that neighborhood.
And yes, of course, I know how fortunate I was
to have had that roof over my head as a child.
But still, my god, it did look small, that house,
as though it were a dwelling for creatures with
thin tails or small beaks.