I am spending this Thursday tooling around Tuscaloosa doing my annual last minute shopping and visiting. Pictured here, Christmas of 1958. I am three and a quarter years old. Its the living room of the four-square house on Spring Street. That is the house I call my reading house. When I read something that invokes a house for a setting, this is the house I think of, my default imagination house. As I continue reading and as details are added by the author in the text, the house gets renovated in my mind. Do you do that? Have a house that is the reading default house? I wondered why of all the houses I lived in in my life that this one is my reading default house. And then I understood. 1730 Spring Street in Fort Wayne, Indiana was where I learned to read. I know it is 1958 because the photo print has that date stamped in the right margin. I loved and still love the photos produced by the single reflex Argus 75 as this one was. The print was square!. One would look down into the deep well of the camera to see the subject. I loved the little hinged hood that folded down over the viewfinder once the picture was taken. That painting in the picture was painted by my Great Aunt Grace. She was an artist in all ways--a painter in the modern cubist and abstract manner, a dancer, a musician playing the double bass and xylophone. She was and still is my artistic guardian angle. She and Uncle Pooch lived in Indianapolis near Geist Reservoir where they founded a theater company. They had a trampoline out back of the house near the Christmas tree farm. They had a Christmas tree farm! I remember Aunt Grace, barefoot, in petal-pushers and bright blouse, her hair pulled into a tight balletic bun there floating over the pine and fur and cedar, singing out to me, Mickey, Mickey, give it a try.
Posted on: Thu, 18 Dec 2014 17:03:58 +0000
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