Effortless - Melody Cryns

It was a crisp, cool clear night when I walked my little white dog across San Carlos Avenue in San Jose – to the nice area, the Rose Garden it’s called, with the lush, green grass, perfect old houses of different statures, the leaves on the trees now brown and gold – you can see them even in the darkness, illuminated by authentic, older street lamps which cast out a dim orange glow and keep the street well lit even at night – one feels as if they’re on floating down the street in a different time and space when everything was beautiful and people all helped one another. As Is topped to let the dog sniff, looking across the street at the lovely house with the A-frame roof, lights shining through the window, I thought of my Aunt telling me that my Grandpa, whom I never knew, actually gave a family a house during the great depression.

“Yes,” she said to me, “It’s true.” This was in 2005, the last time I visited with Aunt Anne Marie, my dad’s older sister. She had been visiting the west coast from Chicago for a while now and when she’d called me to tell me she was coming to stay for a little while, I asked her how long, and she said, “I’m not on any time schedule, honey!”

I had to laugh at that. Aunt Anne Marie stayed with us for about a week, sleeping in Megan’s bed – which was comfortable. Everyone always got Megan’s room when they visited. She was a young girl still, and had a nice sleigh bed.

“That just seems to unreal,” I had said to Aunt Anne Marie.

“It’s true!” Then Aunt Anne Marie told me about how my grandfather had to move a lot when she was growing up because of his job as a prominent baker in the Midwest. She said that even through the worst depression, she and her siblings, my dad being the baby of the family, never did without – they always had a good place to live, food to eat and even a little money to always go to Catholic schools because that’s what they did back then.

“Your grandfather wasn’t good with money, but he had a big heart and he made sure we never suffered,” Aunt Anne Marie told me. I don’t remember my dad ever sharing all this with me – it was news to me.

I looked at the beautiful houses lining Shasta Avenue – when one crosses San Carlos Avenue, suddenly Leigh Avenue turns to Shasta Avenue, and it’s like entering a completely different surreal world, almost as if walking into an invisible wall. I couldn’t even imagine anyone “giving” a house away – either here or anywhere else for that matter. What was my grandfather thinking when he did that?

“This family was struggling, there were a lot of kids, at least six or seven,” my Aunt Anne Marie had continued. “And the father had been out of work because it was the great depression. So, when my dad had to move back to Kansas City, Missouri for his job, he gave them the house, well actually they paid him a dollar.

“A dollar?” I said. Unbelievable.

“Yes!” Aunt Anne Marie laughed, “A dollar.” Then he gave them the house, and that was it. And we moved to another house.”

“Always to a house?”

“Yes, just about always to a house. But we made wherever we lived our home…”

I continued to walk down Shasta Street, looking at houses, peeking into people’s lives, a couple watching a big screen TV in the living room, the big screen TV contradicting the oldness of the house, kids jumping around in another lit up living room and another looked like the room belonged in a museum or something with all the artwork and artifacts one would see…

The dog loved walking down this street – it was our neighborhood. Then I remembered what my friend Debby said, “When you walk these streets, you own them – you don’t get to keep them, but you own them.”

I stopped once again while Sydney sniffed at a tree stump.

That’s when I heard the voice loud and clear – a voice that only pops into my head occasionally and it always jars me.

Crazy as it sounds, the “voice” was my mother’s, and she says, “Mary, you’re not going to be homeless…”

I want so badly to believe that – and to believe that the voice of my dear mother who has been gone for 13 years really did exist and it wasn’t just a figment of my imagination because I so wanted to believe in magic – As much as my mother drove me crazy at times, I loved her so much and I knew she’d have the answer. If only I could reach out and find her, maybe see her in one of these houses on Shasta Street.