The House Where I was Born

This is an actual photo of the actual house.

My oldest brother remembers everything.  He remembers when our parents were still together.  He remembers the storefront Baptist church where we were the only white people.  He remembers how my father had been friends with the pastor.  He remembers that I was only a baby and not at all happy to be there -- colicky and crying and otherwise throwing a fit.  (In my mother's version of the story, I was catching the Holy Ghost).  He remembers the neighborhood where we were living -- a bad neighborhood at the time and now even worse -- and how he rode his bicycle all day, all over.

I remember nothing.  My sister is younger than I am and remembers even less.  I don't know why it never occurred to us to ask my brother before -- or why it never occurred to him in past years to offer -- but this year , for some reason, when we had lunch together, and he had the rest of the day to kill before returning to work on Wednesday, he said, The church is still there, you know.  And the house.  The last time I drove by, there were people living there.  Do you want me to show you?

We did.

This is the first time I'm using the real photograph.  It's not a photo I've stolen from somewhere on the internet to represent something else.  This is the house.  No one lives there now.


See that upstairs window on the right? my brother says.  It's bone-chillingly cold suddenly these past two days, and we're sitting in the car across the small street from it, just staring, because what is there to say, really?  That's the bedroom where you were born.

I zero in on the tattered blue tarp blowing lightly in the window.  I feel like I'm looking at a crime scene.  I think of TV news reports, when they talk about something horrible that happened, standing right in front of the house, not the least bit scared, speaking confidently into the microphone.  And then they zero in on the window.

Do people say, "House where I was born"? I search my brain but can't come up with an answer for certain.  I know that if someone says they were born in, say, Howard, Ohio -- they don't mean that literally.  I know someone from Howard, Ohio, and it's, at most, 5 blocks long.  There's a church, but there are no hospitals in Howard.  So if anyone says they were born there, chances are that what they really mean is, that's where the family was living at the time; the trip home from the hospital ended there.  The same goes for "house where I was born," if people actually say that.

But not in my case.  My parents were somewhere in the nether world between art school dropout and religious freak, and somehow that particular moment resulted in my being born at home, surrounded by mysterious circumstances that my father -- now deceased -- alluded to, but that my mother never fully explained and never will.

I looked at the boarded-up house.  I couldn't stop looking, and when it was time to stop, I took a photograph with my silly flip phone.  In some ways I felt this house explained everything about me, answered all of the questions.  Mystery solved.

But that's a lie.  It feels like evidence.  It feels like a clue -- just as the list of family names and birth years and places going back to 1910 feels like a clue.  When we got back to my brother's house, he showed me that list, which an aunt I never knew had written out and sent him after our father's death.  What use is that when my last name is just an ordinary word in the English language? There are millions of us.  And the house looks just like any other house that has been emptied of its contents over and over again -- just like any home that has been boarded up and left to quietly fall apart.  Still, I took that picture; I copied that list of names by hand without quite knowing why.