Alfred's House

One of the best things about Sunday afternoon is waking from my nap and looking out across to the other side of St. Andrews Bay. Unfortunately, a pine tree, and the cedar tree that’s My Laughing Place, have inched up ‘til they’ve now hidden Shell Island from my view. The Old Pass is filled in now, so it’s no longer an island, but a pencil-thin peninsula stretching to the jetties of the new pass. 

My father started out in this house, a picture around here shows him sitting in the leaning-double-trunk cedar tree down front, dressed in a little boy suit. He was five years old, which would have been 1916, a couple of years before the January 1918 night when his brother Alfred drowned in the wreck of the twin-masted fishing schooner Annie & Jennie. When I was a little boy, my grandmother Mom used to tell me about Alfred, whose story has always been a powerful part of my own life. One day some two years after his death, Mom and Pop packed up and drove away with their family, never to return to this house so filled with memories. Even after my parents bought it back into the family in 1962, Pop would never come back. He told me, “I can’t go there, because of Alfred.” 

As well as about Alfred, Mom told me about my father. One time there was a fox under the house and my father “chunked him out,” as Mom said, throwing stones until the fox ran out and away into the surrounding woods. Another time, my father was sitting in the upstairs window of Alfred’s bedroom, currently my bedroom, and from that window, which I’m looking at right now, he fell out onto the ground below. His oldest sister, my aunt Evalyn, used to say, “He landed on his head and he’s never been right since!” 

As I wrote last week, my mother died two years ago, July 17, 2011. Eighteen years but just three calendar days apart, my father died twenty years ago, July 20, 1993. He started here. A picture shows Mom holding my father, a baby, in front of the older house that was here before this house was built. That older house is across the street, across Calhoun Avenue from us. My father remembered when the older house was rolled across Calhoun Avenue on logs, watching the kitchen light, hanging at the end of a long cord, swing back and forth. He was two years old. My father told me about the time he let the pump go out for several days because it wouldn't start and he couldn’t figure out how to fix it and was afraid he had broken it, and the high water cistern ran out of water for the house. In those days, he said, St. Andrews Bay was alive with every kind of sea creature and you could catch crabs and mullet galore down front. Pick up oysters, and scallops.

This house changed hands over the forty years after Mom and Pop moved to Georgia with their four living children. Later owners did various things to it. During WW2 when there was a severe housing shortage in Panama City, the house was converted into four apartments, and whoever did that installed a metal stairway on the back of the house as the entryway to the two upstairs apartments. Linda and I have added more, so that the metal stairway is now our fire escape in the middle of the house. The first time I came here was about 1947 with my mother: the house was for sale and we came and looked. Beach Drive down front was just one set of tire ruts through the Bermuda grass that was the front yard. 

My parents didn’t buy the house then though, they bought it back in 1962, partly trading for a waterfront lot they owned in Lynn Haven, while Linda, Malinda, Joe and I lived in Ann Arbor, where I was an MBA student at the University of Michigan. Christmas vacation that year, we took the train home and I helped my father tear out the partitions that had converted the old house into four apartments. I will never forget the look on my father’s face when we lowered the wall that was covering up the bannisters and stairway going upstairs, and he again saw the house as he last had seen it the evening he left with his family, about 1920. And he showed me, in the living room right in front of the fireplace, “That’s where my brother’s casket stood.” 

The old house is too big now for just Linda and me. During my silent directed retreats this summer I have experienced that three rooms and a bathroom would be perfectly adequate. But here we are. I expect to leave when -- you know.   

If I were younger than going-on-78 it probably would be possible for me to remember where I meant to go with this blog post when I started out writing it a few minutes ago, but I have no idea.

Shell Island is the strip of land on the far horizon.

TW