American Life

This Old House


I cut through the city on my way back from dumping Baby in P-ville, coming up one of the bluff streets that leads to Clarke College. DNOS rented a house in the area back in our collective younger years. I wanted to check on the state of disrepair my dream house was in.

1921 Madison, Dubuque

I discovered the house at some point during my high school days when I took a wrong turn. It sat on the bluff of Madison Street, overlooking the downtown. A Queen Anne design I later discovered and I could feel the serendipity radiating. Turrets, semi-wrap around front porch with a double balcony in the back and a three-story carriage house/garage, stained glass and a wooden front door with crystal lead window. Inside, I’ve read recently, there are still original features put in by the man who built the house in 1893 like parquet wood floors, decorated tiles around the fireplaces and chandelier lights. The yard is small and the carriage house butts the bluff but the parking is off-street.

I loved that house and scouted it periodically over the last twenty-five years, but it was never up for sale. It passed through the family until the late nineties when a couple bought it with the intention of renovating it.

They haven’t.

The house steadily declined like houses do in old neighborhoods that once were home to the well off who moved west with the suburbs. When I tooled by this past week, it was an eyesore, peeling and pale.

I dragged Rob over to take photos for me. While we were there, the current owner came out and handed us a flyer assuming we were there to wait for the realtor.

“There’s someone coming at eleven to look at it,” he said.

But he wants about eighty thousand more than the property has been assessed at and according to the county web site, the guy is defaulting on the current property taxes.

“There’s nothing to do here but demolish it and build new,” Rob said. “You’d have to win the lottery to have money to rehab this place.”

There’s a sink hole under a corner of the carriage house that’s getting worse because the owner and the adjoining neighbor are suing each other to force the other to pay for fixing it.

“The bluff is unstable,” Rob said after a bit of research the night before. “You’d have to have experts come in and assess it and then drill holes to pour concrete in and shore it, provided they could find a way to anchor it to the bluff in the first place.”

After the owner left, I scooted carefully up the porch stairs (it’s jacked up to keep the turret from collapsing) and peered in. The inside is faded too but oozes turn of the century from 19 to 20.

“Well,” Rob said as we drove off, “if you win the powerball, you can buy it.”

The powerball was $103 million. I didn’t win. If I had, you’d have heard from me sooner.

When I was eighteen, I couldn’t leave Dubuque fast enough. Even ten or so years later, I couldn’t imagine moving back there. Now, however, I could see myself living – part-time anyway – there. There are three colleges. Colleges always need teachers, but they prefer cheap ones and we’d need another source of income because Uncle Sam would not smile at all on Rob working. Americans are very anti-foreigner unless they are tourists, but the “security” measures in play are slowly choking off that money source.

Thing is, I don’t miss the States in general, just Dubuque. I like western Canada. I like the fact that Canadians embody the idea of equality in a way Americans really never have. My mom pointed out the new “hood” that has cropped up in the lower bluff neighborhoods in the past few years. People fleeing from inner city Chicago in wake of the razing of the wretched public housing there. Iowa’s more generous welfare benefits and smaller cities appeal to them, but they aren’t interested in assimilating to the local lifestyle or values, bringing their old Cabrini Green ways with them.

Those people.

Canadians have a bit of the “those people” attitude, towards Muslims in particular, but they aren’t as cold where the problem of generational poverty is concerned.

My poor old dream house. Time to lay it to rest.

Dubuque


Downtown Dubuque

It changes superficially but it’s essence remains unaltered by time. Solid working class semi-ultra Christian river town that forms a Bermuda Triangle of modern culture with its stunted twin city across the Mississippi in Illinois and the small town countryside of Wisconsin to the near northeast.

Technically I’ve spent more of my life living away from the north corner of Iowa than I did being incubated there. I left for college right after high school and moved to Des Moines directly from college. It left its mark nevertheless in the way that everyone’s childhood home does.

Our Lady of Angels, Dubuque. Today is home to a site of perpetual adoration but was a convent and a the home for unwed mothers that both DNOS and my birth mother stayed in the mid-1960's

When I was growing up, there was no minority population and personally knowing someone outside the Catholic faith wasn’t a common experience. There was one family in our neighborhood who wasn’t Catholic. When their seven-year old daughter was run down by a teen who took his parents car without permission one afternoon shortly before school let out for the summer in 1973, they buried her in Linwood Cemetery which is on the north side overlooking the river. I’d never been inside the gates. It’s where non-Catholics were buried. Not exactly unconsecrated ground but when I afterward pondered the idea of burial there myself (I was always a morbid child), my mother about had a cow.

“We don’t bury our people there,” she said.

Our people. Those people. That’s my hometown.

Tuesday was dubious.

N2 and the neighbor boys were having trouble incorporating Dee into their play. She was so looking forward to seeing her cousin, N2, but at eight, and being a boy, there is just enough difference between them now that it takes time for them to adjust to each other when we visit. It would be late Wednesday before they were on mostly the same page, so by supper time, Dee was in tears and lamenting the fact that she has no girl cousins and that Grandma’s neighbors are all boys. Auntie saved the day by sitting on the driveway with her and drawing with chalk while the boys played football the yard over.

As I watched, I could see why Dee was put off. The smallest of them was still an inch or more taller than she is and they outweighed her by anywhere from 12 to 60 pounds. She’d have been a stain on the greening grass.

N2 and Rob during our visit to the Mines of Spain State Park which is south of the city along the Mississippi River

The weather was stellar before I forget. Freak warm spell with sun and temps approaching 30C. Green of varying hues all around topped with budding flora. First time ever that we’ve traveled in the spring and it’s been beautiful.

And then there were family “issues”.

Lawnmower Man called around the time we were cleaning up from supper. Grilled a smorgasbord. Tasty. Baby had collapsed. Should he take her to the hospital?

“I don’t want her dying here in my house,” he told Mom.

Baby is forty-one. She’s been with Lawnmower Man for the last six years. He’s the father of the first child she had out-of-wedlock when she was a junior in high school. That girl would be twenty-four today and the last photo I saw of her as a six or seven-year old showed a verging on too chubby cherub who looked exactly like her mother.

Mom told Lawnmower Man to take Baby to the ER at the new hospital in the nearest town, but he called back within the half hour to inform us that Baby didn’t want to go despite the fact that she couldn’t move her arms and her hands were numb.

“Put her on the phone,” I told him.

“I can’t afford to go to the hospital,” she wailed.

And she can’t. She works in the laundry at a home in Dubuque that’s run by the state. After seven years and a compressed disc, she earns a whopping $11.86 per hour, works in excess of 35 hours a week but is classified as part-time so they don’t have to give her benefits. No health care for the working poor is the American way.

“Well, you might have nothing serious or you could be dying,” I said. “So, you can stay home and chance it or go to the hospital and find out for sure. You will definitely avoid the dying thing more easily by going to the hospital though.”

I am that helpful.

And I am always fairly heartless. Baby is a drama queen. The last time we’d gotten a call (and I was home visiting then too – Baby ALWAYS has some crisis or other when I am home or for some reason the focus is on me) it was Lawnmower Man. He had collapsed in their kitchen and couldn’t get up.

“I think he’s having a stroke,” Baby said at the time.

It was sciatica.

An hour goes by and Mom is teetering. In situations like this, she can’t decide whether to worry or fume, so she alternates. Meanwhile I’d brought Rob up to speed.

“This is why I don’t like wasting vacation on family,” was all he said.

Okay, that wasn’t all. To quickly paraphrase, he reminded me that my youngest sibling never missed an opportunity to steal my thunder whether I was just visiting, getting married (both times), having a baby or being widowed. Baby has to be the center of attention. No one puts her in a corner, I believe is how it goes.

Phone rings and no one makes a move. I have become the official go to once again.

“Well,” Lawnmower Man says, “She might have had a stroke.”

I should have known once the word “stroke” was uttered that I was about to lose a precious chunk of holiday, but I wasn’t so callous as to think that yet.

“She’s having more tests,” he continued. “I’ll call when we know more.”

“Do you want someone to come up?” I asked, not eagerly but I thought the gesture was necessary.

“Nope,” he slurred. “I’ll call.”

“What did he say?” Mom pounced.

I told her and she got on the phone, calling him and informing him that DNOS and I would be coming up.

“He’s drunk,” she said, disgusted.

“Was that ever a question?” I asked.

DNOS and I left for the hospital. It’s about 40 minutes from Mom’s house in Dubuque to the tiny college town in Wisconsin that is nearby Baby’s home. I left my silent and resigned but eternally patient husband with two kids to watch and my borderline hysterical mother to deal with.

“Next time I get married, I am screening the in-laws ahead of time,” he said.

On the way to the hospital DNOS, who is an oncology med tech at one of the Dubuque clinics, made a few calls, scouting the situation and seeing where she might pull strings. If Baby had had a stroke, Mom wanted her moved to the city.

“Yeah,” she informed her boss as we drove, “my little sister might have had a stroke and we’re heading up to P-ville to see. Can we move her to Mercy? Do they take indigent? Okay, good. No, I was watching Dancing with the Stars tonight. It’s first round. Are you watching Lost? I wanted my aunt to watch it for me, but she’s never seen it and wouldn’t know what is going on. Really? No, that Kate-bitch will probably stay because Buzz Aldrin was just terrible.”

Baby was alone in the ER. Lawnmower Man had left when he learned we were on our way. One of us alone is enough to make the man shit himself, no way he could face us both down as he recently gave Baby a blackened face from upper cheek bone to jaw. Not that we would hurt him – physically.

“You know,” I told DNOS on the drive, “if Dad had just told CB ‘yes’ all those years ago, it would have saved us a trip tonight.”

Lawnmower Man is my age which makes him five years older than Baby. She was sixteen when he knocked her up. We should have known he was bad news when our lovable dog nearly took his left leg off with one swipe the first time he came by the house to pick Baby up.

Naturally he took off for pregnant underage girlfriendless parts once the news of his impending fatherhood was revealed. About a year after Sarah was born, CB ran across Lawnmower Man out in the Bay area of California. CB and a few Mexicans he’d met during a month long incarceration were hanging out in a bar when he spotted Lawnmower Man, who had spotted CB too and was rightly concerned for his well-being.

CB explained the situation to his amigos who offered, as prison buddies are wont to do, to correct Lawnmower Man – kinda permanently and with no small amount of prejudice. CB called Dad. Dad asked CB to let it alone. Dad was a good Catholic.

And many years later, we are still paying for letting a good opportunity slide by.

It took about 15 minutes or less for DNOS and I to ascertain that whatever had happened, Baby was not stroking out. She was having a panic attack and thank god for Ativan is all I can say.

All told, we languished for another hour plus waiting for the doctor to finish expending valuable time and resources on a non-issue before Baby was released to our care with a lecture on healthy living and script for Vicodin that we had no intention of filling for her.

At one point a nurse approached DNOS and said,

“Your sister,” she began and hesitated. DNOS, knowing exactly where she was going waited patiently. “She’s slow, isn’t she?”

“Yep.”

And there is the inescapable bottom line where our little sister is concerned and why none of us can just write her off as a dumb-ass with issues.

It was nearly midnight when we got Baby back to Mom’s and put her whiny ass to bed with ice packs and otc migraine meds. Our shopping trip for the next day was scrubbed. Baby would have to be coerced out of bed and somehow carted home – I got stuck with that and it’s another long story for another day. Short version, Baby tried like hell to pick a fight with me to the point where she even said,

“Your husband hasn’t said a word to me. He doesn’t even care that I am sick!!”

Which I couldn’t have argued with if I wanted to, so I changed the subject.

Mom worried that Rob would never want to visit again, but I pointed out this wasn’t even the biggest blow-up he’d witnessed and that I didn’t have anything to do with his sisters either.

“Besides,” I said, “he’s taking me to a family reunion this summer that will be more than payback.”

Not that it’s a quid pro quo. Rob’s in-laws are nice people. The only thing is that where my family adores Rob, his late wife’s family is only nice to me, which is neither good nor bad. I am a constant reminder of a reality they prefer not to deal with and have the luxury of not dealing with most of the time.

That evening Rob, DNOS, BIL and I sat around on their deck while Mom babysat the kids at her house and we swapped dysfunctional family tales. It’s all good in the end, but Baby and Lawnmower Man have had their stroke apiece now and I, for one, am not running to their aid again.

Holiday Part Two


Sunday night found us bunking with Sis and her husband at their farm outside Prairie City which is just east of Des Moines.

Sis and I met at Hoyt Middle School when I was a second year teacher and she had left her hectic high school position in a self-mommy tracking move just before the birth of her second daughter of three. She is the older sister I don’t have naturally. Siblings are a hit and miss affair naturally and it seems to me that most of us acquire brothers and sisters outside familial bounds as we travel through life who better suit us. Sis suits me.

She offered her home as a way station and, as she always does, overfed us as a byproduct.

BFF and her youngest daughter, who is about eight months younger than Dee, joined us for the afternoon and for dinner.

Dee and Friend at the Prairie View Park

Staying at hotels means you are in charge of the schedule. Sleep isn’t at anyone’s mercy other than your own. Staying with friends and relatives inevitably means exhaustion is on the horizon.

Due to poor mattresses and thin walls, Rob and I were already on the leading edge of sleep deprivation and the gap only widened as the week went on.

On Monday we met up with a dear old friend from college in Iowa City. Dee was mildly curious about my college days. Mildly because she finds the idea of my having had a life previous to our current situation one that conflicts with her notion that I have always been her mother and that nothing that came before her could be worth effort required to remember it.

Walking to the Old Capitol

I took her and Rob on a stroll through sections of campus that made up the bulk of my time there. Dee was most intrigued by the Old Capitol building. It sits in the middle of the Pentacrest which are halls that make up the original college. Old  Capitol was the first seat of government when Iowa was just a territory and during its early years as a state. Monday meant it was closed, but Rob snapped a few shots of us in front of it and Dee peered in the large windows.

My old dorm was open, and since there were large groups of high schoolers and their parents being led about, it was accessed easily and without question.

Not surprisingly, most of the changes were fairly superficial with the biggest one being the removal of the cafeteria were I worked for a couple of years. Interestingly, the mailboxes were exactly the same. And, as we were walking back to the main campus, we strolled by an old man who looked at me with a faint glimmer of recognition. I had no trouble remembering him.

Smiley is a fixture in Iowa City. Tamer now than back in the day, he is mentally challenged with a side of creepy stalker thrown in just to make it interesting. He liked pretty girls. Young pretty girls. Which meant I didn’t attract his attention much but for years after graduating whenever I was in I.C. visiting and ran across him, he usually approached me.

I hurried Rob and Dee up. There is only so much nostalgia I am into. Small talk with a guy whose main hobby was deviance and harassment wasn’t on my agenda.

My chief memory of Smiley was the guys from the dishroom egging him on as we sat in the hall having dinner before our evening shift. He would try to sit by me – too close – and was always on about wanting my picture. I was not the only girl who thwarted Smiley’s quest to cover his walls with pictures of young women, but I was probably one of the most terse.

He nearly always had his camera with him but not at work.

“I could take your picture after work,” he said one night.

“Yeah,” one of the guys chimed in, “you could pose for him.”

“No, Smiley,” I said. “I don’t want my picture taken.”

Then one of the morons I worked with suggested to Smiley that he could simply wait around outside and take my picture as I was leaving.

“If you take my picture without my permission, I will take your camera and break it,” I told him.

Smiley is mentally retarded. There is no question that he is limited and that his emotional level is pre-teen at best. My statement of intent made him angry and I picked up my tray and went to another table while he ranted that I couldn’t do that and the guys ribbed him and me.

After I finished eating and Smiley had huffed and puffed his way into the kitchen, I went back to the guys who were still eating and said,

“Don’t you ever fucking do that again,” I said.

“Aw, we were just kidding,” someone said. Clearly I couldn’t take a joke.

“And when he finally goes from taking pictures to attacking girls? Will it still be a joke?”

No one said anything but no one was smiling as I turned away. Smiley was steered clear of me after that. He did eventually require police intervention when his picture-taking turned menacing and he purposely stalked a girl on the cheer squad. It got a bit ugly though she wasn’t physically harmed and the guys on campus stopped treating Smiley as an amusing lark.

Later at lunch, my chum Les remarked that Smiley had slowed considerably in his seniorish years but,

“He never forgets a face.”

Me and Les

Les hasn’t changed which is funny because she said the same thing of me when she saw me.

We lost touch just before I met Will. Addresses and phone numbers change so much in your twenties when jobs and boys and life in general shifts like the ground in an earthquake zone. People I knew in high school and college who coupled and bred in the decade between 19 and 29 were easier to keep track of. Rooting does that.

She had a photo album with party pictures from the dorm and the first years in rental houses/apartments. Nothing incriminating though I doubt much of that exists were I am concerned. My partying was sporadic and tame by any standard that could be applied.

I was so young once. I need to get her to copy a few to Facebook. There was one of us heading downtown on Halloween. I was Pippi Longstocking. I had totally forgotten.

We wandered the downtown and like my mother, Les knows everyone and at all the cool places. She introduced me to a semi-famous photographer carrying an armload of his new book at Prairie Light Bookstore.  He and I talked education for a bit after he discovered I wrote for a blog.  Being typical college town liberal, he had a too left view of teaching to make the conversation interesting for me, but I appreciated the opportunity to be taken seriously. Upstairs we chatted with a couple of employees who waited on President Obama the week before. The President stopped by to pick up a few books for his daughters while he was there to stump for his health care bill.

“He’s an impeccable dresser,“ one of them said.

“And so genuine,” remarked the other. “You just don’t get the sense that he is a politician.”

I just smiled and nodded. Obama is a politician, a genuinely good one, but as I said, I did the non-committal body language that people read in their favor thing.

Running about with Les reminded me that I don’t have girlfriends on a regular basis these days. No one to just pal with and talk about the old days – if that applies. It would have been fun to have had an extra day in Iowa City.

I had my typical college town fantasy, seeing us living there – me teaching and Rob tending house and whatever hobby/job tickled his fancy. We’d live in one of those older reno types close enough in to walk to my office on campus but far enough out that students wouldn’t ring us like soap in an old tub. This is a daydream of longstanding. It goes back to early widowhood. The place changes and Rob is an addition, but the basic vision of a semi-bohemian lifestyle of the liberally intellectual persists.

Me, Dee and N2 at the MInes of Spain

And then there was Dubuque…