We are here because our ancestors believed in us.
A house, too, has ancestors; bricks the mason gripped and mortared for these walls to rise two-and-a-half stories. The carpenter’s callused hands and blueprints coded the double helix that plumbed the framing true three floors high.
The old Irishman’s family wasn’t the first to live here as the bootlegger’s round barrel bottoms imprinted into the pinewood flooring attest. Then the house became home for the boy’s mom, her mom, his great-grandmother and the old Irishman.
I want to tell you, this wasn’t a dream!
The boy remembers the transformation he felt upon the sight of a mid-century Studebaker coupe rolling without a sound down a sidewalk of post-war Akron. The old Irishman saw it first, first noted the bullet nose ornament, “That’s a Studebaker” he said as he steered the youthful
hand toward the safety of the front door, the entrance to the house used only by the postman as he unloaded his daily route to the mailboxes near Buchtel High School. This front door was an ornament, too. It featured the street address, 1036, in stained glass prisms that magically projected spectrums of light from the morning sun onto the porch floor inside.
On summer nights the boy sat with the Irishman, on a wicker couch, attentively tuned to the AM static broadcast on the Emerson radio in a brown bakelite housing. When the Indians played on the road, St. Louis or Chicago, games wouldn’t end until after sundown in northeast Ohio, so the boy was permitted to stay up. At night the porch was dark but for the magic shining of filaments in vacuum tubes, the sorcery of heated electrons invoking the sound of radio play-by-play. Darkness, but for the glow of tobacco embers signaling from the Irishman’s pipe.
For this house, the portal to and from the world was the screen door on the back porch. Deliveries of bread and milk and daily newspapers entered up thick oak steps through the wood-framed gate that stretched wire mesh across the hinged scrim that slammed shut by the physics of a steel-coiled spring. This ventilated the kitchen inside and served as line of defense against the flights of summer flies and mosquitos. But as daylight shortened and air chilled by the alchemy of the seasons the door remained fixed. No storm door replaced the screen even in winter.
The Irishman came up in a tradition of time before time when the veil between us and the dead was its thinnest, the first of November.
On this night dinner was served in the kitchen by the open door no matter how chilly. Places set on the table for the departed as we served their dumb supper. They no longer speak so children are told from where they have come, from the souls through Samhain’s screen door.
