the old house in el cerrito
Do you remember the house that you grew up in? I sure do. I lived on a house in El Cerrito, California, on the corner of Richmond and Moeser.
Richmond Street is just another street in suburbia, admittedly, but Moeser Lane was a piece of work - Moeser snaked up an incredibly steep incline and into the El Cerrito hills. The community center with the swimming pool was only four blocks up the hill, a manageable walk. Two blocks past that was the junior high school. Anything past that made driving a better option, but once you walked to the top of the hill, there would be a breath-taking view of the San Francisco Bay Area. An old man would set up a Christmas nativity scene in the hills every year, and we weren’t quite sure whether to stare at the gawdy plastic camels or at the lights flashing off the Bay Bridge behind us.
If you walked the other way from my house, you would hit San Pablo Avenue, where the Baskin Robbins was and the Payless and the Safeway. Oh yeah, and the adult bookstore. “Ina,” I would say to my Sunday School teacher as he would drive my sister and I to church, “can we go in there? It says ‘Arcade!’ I love video games!”
“Uhmm, no.” she’d hastily reply.
My memories of that house are limited, but vivid. I remember getting yelled at by my mom for standing in the front yard in my bare feet, spraying passing cars with her garden hose. I remember the track lighting in the living room when my parents would let me stay up late for New Years Eve. I remember standing in the kitchen watching a policeman and my father dragging my sister away the first time she had a skitzophrenic episode.
I was five years old. She was wearing pink socks. I remember waving at her, saying goodbye. Some things you never forget, no matter how young you are.
My mother would always complain because we lived on a corner. She would always catch me in my pajamas in the middle of the night, staring out the windows as cars sped down the street or turned at speeds that were faster than she was comfortable with. “It’s too noisy,” she would complain to my father. “No wonder he can’t sleep.”
We lived in that house when until Junior High, when my parents decided that one of those cookie cutter housing developments were a better real estate investment, the kind of houses that all look alike and are all inspired from those adobe houses in New Mexico. The new house was larger, sure, but I suddenly felt isolated: trips to the market now involved a 10 minute car ride, going to school turning into an ordeal, my father dropping me off at school on his way to work at six in the morning, waiting for an hour and a half for classes to start. The junior high school that was a two-minute walk from the old house in El Cerrito.
And there I lived, for better or worse, until I left for college. And the childhood memories, both the good and the bad, begin to fade away and you begin to disassociate the memories as mental Polaroids that you can picture, but not with any emotional attachment.
Until today, when at around 1:20pm, when a large truck lost control on Moeser, slammed into a couple of cars and crashed into a house, bursting into flames. In this picture, the house I lived in is off to the left. At least seven adults and one child were injured, three in critical condition.
And suddenly, the memories come back. That and the hypothetical questions, of course. “If I still lived in the house, would I be helping anyone to safety? Would I have been a hero or would I have hid for safety? Would I be dead?” And then you realize that you weren’t living there, so there’s no reason to ask such things, and then you feel guilty for thanking God that you moved to the middle of nowhere years later. Which leads us to now, I guess.
Oh well. Just your moment of Zen.
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