The Old House

Dr. Robert Philipson reflects on the layered history and personal meaning of his childhood home in Southern California, weaving together Indigenous displacement, colonial conquest, and postwar suburban life. As he moves room by room through The Old House, Philipson unpacks memories of joy, loneliness, family ritual, and quiet grief, transforming the house into a central character in a story about belonging, loss, and the passage of time. A meditation on memory and change, this episode speaks to anyone who has tried to hold on to the past while facing the inevitability of letting go.

Host Info
Hosted by Dr. Robert Philipson
Robert is a former professor of African-American studies with a passion for jazz and art. A published author and Harlem Renaissance historian, he has produced multiple films about the intersectionality of race, music, and sexuality.
shogafilms.org/podcasts

Music:

"A House is Not A Home" - Luther Vandross

"Home in Pasadena" - Tony Martin

"The Folks Who Live on the Hill" - Peggy Lee

"This Ole House" - Bette Midler

"El Rey" - Vicente Fernández

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Transcript

Once upon a time in a land that had no name and no boundaries, a race of people dwelled in such abundance that they never developed the arts of cultivation and lived on acorns, game, and wild grains. The climate of this valley was temperate: the men and children wore no clothing, the women, only a skirt of bark. There was no warfare, and the people slept comfortably under blankets of rabbit fur and deerskin. Then came the Spaniards, bringing with them the eighteenth century, Christianity, and diseases that would eventually wipe these innocents out. To this land, which had no name and no boundaries, the Europeans gave both: Alta California, the northernmost outpost of the great Spanish empire. They christened the oak-covered valley San Gabriel and called its inhabitants Gabrieleños. Franciscan fathers established the San Gabriel Mission, converting the Indians to their eventual extinction and facilitating Spanish colonization. In 1828 the Mexicans revolted against the Spanish crown and administered for themselves the lands their fathers had stolen from the native populations. The Mexican government then expropriated the holdings of the California missions and carved these into ranchos, sold to Mexicans (known as Californios) to fill state coffers. Hugo Reid, a naturalized citizen nicknamed the Scotch Paisano, gained formal possession of the Rancho Santa Anita through his Indian wife, Victoria, in 1845. An American visitor wrote that the rancho of thirteen thousand acres “was then the most picturesque spot of Southern California, with mountains, valley springs, and running silvery streams.” 

Reid didn’t possess his holdings very long. Two years later, in 1847, he sold the rancho for 20 cents an acre to a recently arrived London-born merchant, Henry Dalton, intent on carving out an enormous estate at the base of the San Gabriel mountains. The year before, the United States had begun the bellicose theft of northern Mexico that goes under the name of the Mexican-American War. After sufficient slaughter of the Mexicans, their government acquiesced to the cession of 40 percent of its territory, and the U.S. took over Alta California, rechristened simply California. With the 1848 Gold Rush greed and gringos hurtled in, and the territory was consecrated with statehood two years later. The former Californio landowners were cheated out, squeezed out, or chased out. The new overlords understood how to use Anglo-Saxon law when it was to their advantage and how to circumvent it when it wasn’t. 

Now a Californio, Dalton found himself on the losing side of multiple legal battles in a doomed quest to secure his purchases. By 1858 Rancho Santa Anita ended up in the hands of two American investors, who soon sold the western portion of thirteen hundred acres to a genuine covered wagon pioneer, Leonard J. Rose, for one dollar an acre. Calling his new ranch Sunny Slope, Rose planted extensive vineyards and turned his property into the largest, most successful winery in the West. Rose also bred trotter racing stallions. He lived in princely fashion, bet high, spent lavishly, and sold Sunny Slope to a British syndicate in 1887 for more than a million dollars. (When fortune turned against him twelve years later, he swallowed a fatal dose of morphine.) 

One of the Gold Rush adventurers was a self-taught artist by the name of William Cogswell. He stayed long enough to paint Gold Rush scenes and gather material for dioramas which he exhibited on the East Coast to advance his career. This eventually produced a prize-winning oil of President Lincoln, acquired by the White House, and a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant that entered the collection of the U.S. Senate. Though well established on the East Coast, Cogswell returned to California at the age of fifty-four with his son-in-law William Rhoades. In 1874 he purchased 473 acres of the wild westernmost section of the rancho at seventeen dollars per acre Though choked with greasewood, the mesa’s prospect took in the broad San Gabriel Valley sloping to the blue Pacific with Catalina Island on the far horizon. Chinese laborers pulled up the greasewood and planted citrus trees and grapevines on the newly cleared land. Naming their estate Sierra Madre Villa, Cogswell and Rhoades built a large house landscaped with rose gardens and ornamental trees. But the excessive fertility of the Southern California climate combined with America’s unquenchable desire for more to bloat the dream to its own destruction.  

Rhoades had such a good time entertaining his increasing number of visitors that he built a twenty-room addition with a glass-enclosed veranda. The house was now a hotel and soon the premier winter resort on the West Coast. Activities for guests included horseback riding, country drives, hunting, fishing, and in the evening, dancing parties and musicales. Guests came for a week, a month, or for the season. The hotel ledger boasted the names of former president Grant and three of the Big Four railroad barons as well as English financiers sniffing around the edges of the real estate money mill. Then the middle classes caught on. Large excursion groups from Boston arrived in Los Angeles and greatly increased the hotel business. Rhoades put in another fifty rooms but came to regret it. Gone was the intimate atmosphere of the hotel’s early days. It wasn’t fun anymore, and so in 1886 Rhoades sold his share of the hotel and grounds to the son, also named William Cogswell, of his famous father-in-law. This was not a good investment for Cogswell fils. More fashionable, accessible resorts had sprung up in the valley below, and Sierra Madre Villa no longer made a profit.  

The hotel closed its doors in 1894. Cogswell sold the seventy-six acres of grounds and building to a brother-sister investment act, James and Mary Lyman. The Lymans figured they could make a profit by renting the former hotel out as a sanitarium for people with respiratory issues. (Given my smog-ridden midcentury youth, this detail, when I read about it, seemed laboriously ironic.) By 1916 this too became a losing proposition, and the rental was not renewed. The large wooden building remained empty until 1923, when the Lymans, concluding that fire insurance was too costly, tore it to the ground. They spared the original dwelling built by Rhoades and Cogswell as well as the washhouse and dormitory for the Chinese workers; the latter eventually became the Old House of Old House Road. 

Free of its wooden albatross, the Sierra Madre property went from investor to investor. One of them, Jerry Hoskins, cut down the citrus groves in the late 1920s. The visionary Hoskins planned to make his fortune by turning the mesa into a housing development. To that end he put the land on the market in five-acre tracts. However, the Depression squelched his dreams. The previous owners had to foreclose but could do nothing with the property outside of selling two large parcels in the late 1930s to notable figures. Douglass Montgomery was a famously handsome theater and Hollywood actor. He'd already moved away from the mesa by the time I was growing up there. (When the independent channel broadcast the George Cukor version of Little Women on TV, my mother made us watch it because Douglass had been “a former neighbor.” As a child, I found the movie boring, but I do remember her remarking in an amused tone to my father, “All that beauty wasted.”) The other parcel went to the not yet famous Linus Pauling. Thus, we became neighbors with the twice-crowned Nobel laureate whose friendship with a Japanese chemist brought his daughter into our family. But I’m getting ahead of myself.  

With the recovery of an economy gearing up for war, the reluctant owners of the mesa were finally able to dispose of the remaining forty acres to Mr. and Mrs. Alfred T. Murray. Finding the Rhoades house too large for their residence, the Murrays sold it to Disney studios who carted it off to Placerville as a movie set. (Having served that purpose, it too was razed but the gingerbread decoration ended up adorning the buildings of Disneyland’s Main Street.)  Mr. and Mrs. Murray turned the washhouse into their new dwelling. For convenient access, they cut a track directly from Sierra Madre Villa Avenue and christened it Old House Road. On the corner of the intersection stands an ornamental brick wall bearing the name of the street cast in the metal calligraphy of Mrs. Murray’s hand. 

* *  

In 1947, when my mother was pregnant with her second child, my parents decided to look for land on which they could build a house for their growing family. From their small Temple City home, they took many weekend excursions to empty lots along dirt roads in the various towns of the San Gabriel Valley. Finally, in the following year, my father read an announcement for half-acre subdivisions with an ocean view selling for three thousand dollars apiece. Since this was only half the worth of the land at then current prices, he called the number in the ad and spoke to Mr. Murray, who gave him directions to the Old House. 

My father, mother, their two-year-old son, and infant daughter turned onto the three hundred yards of dirt track, and their car climbed to the white house of rustic shingles and wooden siding. Surrounded by a white railing fence, the house was flanked by groves of eucalyptus trees. Green alfalfa waved on either side of the road, and the San Gabriel Mountains, half a mile distant, rose dramatically in their vegetated contours. The day was diamond clear, and when my parents stepped from the car, they took in the green mesa sloping to the brown valley and, off in the distance, the wide blue of the Pacific Ocean sparkling like a promise fulfilled. 

Mr. Murray met the young family, decided they were suitable, and explained that he was selling the land below value because he needed to raise money quickly to finance a reservoir that would provide water for the projected subdivision. He cautioned my parents that they would not be able to build until water had been assured, but they knew that buying the land would leave them with no money for construction, and they were content to wait. They chose a lot halfway between the Old House and Sierra Madre Ville Avenue because it boasted a fine old pepper tree. Mr. Murray had them sign one paper making them shareholders of the future water association and another that bound them not to resell the property to Blacks, Jews, -or other undesirables. 

By 1952 my parents had saved enough to construct their home. Working with an architect, they built a low-slung ranch-style house (as did all the coming neighbors) modified for the needs of our child-centered family.  

Indoors 

The Little Bathroom 

It is the smallest room in the house: a sink, a toilet, a bathtub. My brother and I share this bathroom; everybody else uses the big one. Inset into the western wall is an electric heater, two long coils that quickly turn orange once the switch is thrown. A round night-light sheds a blue illumination on our midnight visits. If I am on the toilet at night, I turn on the heater and watch the glowing orange and blue reflections in the glass of the mirror and the enamel of the tub. 

As I sit on the closed toilet seat, my mother applies medicine to my toes for my chronic athlete’s foot, a skin condition I share with my older sister. We call it “the creeping crud.” I whimper because the medicine stings. “If you didn’t rub your toes raw,” my mother says, “it wouldn’t hurt so much.” 

“But, Mommy, it itches.” 

The Western Bedroom 

I spend little time in this room. It is my brother’s, and he hates me. He hates many people. On the door he has placed gold letters spelling Private, Keep Out. He calls his room Grand Central Station because, he claims, everyone troops through. Since we have free run of the house, there are no sacred precincts. The only interior doors with locks are the bathroom ones. David’s room is painted brown and filled with a fascinating clutter of models, glue, model paint, a crystal set, an aquarium. On the west wall is a large, old-fashioned map of the world with corner cherubim blowing wind out of their rounded mouths. After our return from Europe, David—or perhaps my mother—marked the voyage of the Canberra, the ship that took us from Los Angeles to Southampton in 1961. A thick black line traces our itinerary to Hawaii, New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon, Aden, Egypt, Italy, and England. 

One sure way to make David crazy is to play with his toys. Since my brother and I are constantly at loggerheads, we never share. He is four years older than I, bigger, more athletic, and perpetually aggrieved. The only time I sleep in his room is Christmas Eve, when our grandparents are visiting from Chicago. During their stay, I sleep on a rollaway bed in the living room, but I can’t on Christmas Eve because Santa will come in the night. I try to stay up listening for the reindeer but fall asleep. 

The Middle Bedroom 

I wake up frightened from a nightmare. As I look on the wall opposite my bed, large stars of different colors, like the stick-on ones we have at school, glow in the dark. Terrified, I pull the covers up, but the darkness fills with monstrous faces coming at me in balloons. It is so late I no longer hear the crickets outside my window. I jump out of bed in a panic and run for the light switch across the room. Bam! The room is bathed in yellow, but the stars still glow on the wall. I pad down the hall to my parents’ room and wake my father. 

“Bobby, what is it?” 

“I’m scared, Daddy. There’re stars on the wall, and when I try to hide them, I see these horrible faces!” 

My father gets up and takes me back to my bedroom. He tucks me in and makes room for himself on the edge, pushing Teddy, Doll-Dolland the stuffed black kitten slightly up from their usual position by my head. 

“The stars are still there, Daddy. Can’t you see them?” 

“Shh.” He strokes my head. “They won’t hurt you. I’ll stay with you until you fall back to sleep.” 

The Eastern Bedroom 

My parents make us go to bed too early. I’m rarely sleepy when they send us back to our rooms. My sisters and I devise a knocking code for the wall that separates our two bedrooms. In order to initiate communication, one side or the other taps out the first part of the shave-and-a-haircut rhythm, the other responds with “two bits.” One knock means “yes,” two knocks mean “no.” Three fast knocks, “Quiet. Mom is coming.” Three slow knocks, “Come on over.” 

There isn’t much of interest to me in my sisters’ room. I do go in there to read Calling All Girls, which I find more compelling than Boys’ Life. Young as I am, I feel obscurely that I do not want to read these girls’ magazines in the front part of the house. 

The Big Bathroom 

My sister Alice is sitting on the toilet telling us a fairy tale while Jean and I are supposed to bathe ourselves. In spite of the enticement of chocolate chip “trains” on the enamel corner of the tub that have gotten wet and are partially melted, we are reluctant to get down to the business of soaping up. Mother has delegated our bath to our older sister, and she gets the job done. She favors cajoling over threats, but there is always a hint of menace for shows of recalcitrance.  

The big bathroom has two sinks in a white-tile-topped counter. Over both sinks sits a mirrored medicine chest. When I open the door of my father’s cabinet wide enough, its mirror reflects off another one fastened to the south wall. Putting my head between these two reflections, I find myself in an accordion pleat of parallel universes curving away in infinite regress. I wonder if the other Bobbys live in the same world that I do. 

 The Master Bedroom 

My parents sleep on twin beds next to each other because, my mother claims, my father rolls around in his sleep too much. It’s nice to cuddle with one or the other on a weekend morning. My mother envelops me in a soft, musky embrace; I hug my furry bear of a father. Of an evening the family gathers on the two beds for the Meeting, which consists of talking, joking, fighting, crying—and sometimes Prince Bagel stories. In our family the first punishment for bad behavior is exile: “Go to your room right now!” 

The master bedroom is one of the best places to play hide-and-seek because while you’re under one bed and your pursuer seems close to discovering you, you can roll underneath the other. The two sliding-door closets also provide good hiding. Occasionally I like to pull out my mother’s high heels and totter about. Oftentimes I prowl around the house at night. If my parents are talking quietly in the dark, I listen outside their open door. Their soft low voices are reassuring. 

 The Hallway 

Dark, long, carpeted, the hallway is an essential part of any circular itinerary when we’re chasing one another in play or anger. One rainy night we come back from the movies to find that a pipe has burst in the ceiling and it’s raining in the hall as well. We sandbag the rooms that are dry, but the hall carpeting is ruined. For the next few days, we walk on bricks over the waterlogged rugs until they are pulled up for replacing. 

The summers are hot, and my father, wishing to avoid the expense of air-conditioning, has a large suction ceiling fan installed in the corridor. My mother complains that it doesn’t cool, just moves the hot air around. We name it the Woo because of the noise it makes.  

 The Living Room 

A four-foot wooden partition, which we call a pass-through, separates the living room from the entrance hall. It is the first room one sees entering the front door. My father sits at an elegant cherry table and plays with his coin collection at night. Occasionally he yells, “Turn the television down!” or “Turn off the lights!” We christen him the Voice from the Gloom. Whenever I play games with my father, we sit on the floor of the living room. Because cribbage is, in part, a game of chance, I occasionally win, but he beats me so consistently at chess that I eventually lose my desire to play. 

The living room is a misnomer because nobody lives there. It is as formal—and therefore as empty—as the house gets. My father’s desk, placed against the pass-through, is piled so high with papers, reports, and mail that he has no room to work at it. He spreads out on the large dining table in the playroom, and my mother has to nag him to clear his things so she can set for dinner. 

There is a cabinet on the wall separating the living room from the playroom that allows access from either side. This houses the speaker of “the famous George Gott,” a large boxy radio and turntable that would play in stereo if we had two speakers. But we need only one, according to my father, because the lazy Susan in the cabinet allows the speaker to aim for either room. The Gott is one of my father’s bargains—a mediocre stereo system that only gets worse with the passing of years. The phrase “famous George Gott” is a teasing allusion to my father’s erratic penny-pinching.  

 The Playroom 

The playroom is a huge rectangular room measuring five hundred square feet. It is the center of action, and everybody loves it. It houses the fireplace, our sole television, the winged armchairs, the three-legged kidney shaped coffee table (so modern!), the dining table, the piano, the game cupboard, and myriads of toys. It hosts our Christmases and Easter egg hunts, our parties and roughhousing, the stories told in front of the crackling fire. I read a lot on the brown plastic couch under the three-way floor lamp. Our tutelary deity is a moose head, named Thidwick after the Dr. Seuss character, mounted over the piano. My mother’s small wooden desk sits against a window facing the San Gabriel Mountains. She spends many hours there typing letters to her mother, cousin Marion, and others. The room is too full of memories. It is the heart of the house. 

 The Kitchen 

If the playroom is the heart of the house, the kitchen feeds its stomach. (The Philipson shield features a chocolate milk shake rampant upon a field of truffles.) The kitchen is my mother’s domain, mostly a place of routine where she turns out countless meals. Family dinners are eaten in the playroom, but she serves breakfast and more informal meals in the dining nook. Every school morning my mother is the first to rise. She wakes us, makes our bag lunches (sitting on the counter with our initials—D, A, B, J—to distinguish their contents), and cooks us breakfast of eggs and toast. Sunday brings the treat of my father’s limited repertoire: freshly squeezed orange juice and sour milk pancakes. All other times my mother works in the kitchen, where she tests me on my spelling bee, talks to me about some family event, some neighborhood happening. It is only there, and rarely enough, that I have her to myself. 

One evening, when I am ten, my mother loses it. She pulls dishes out of the cupboard and dashes them on the floor in a fury. “I can’t take it anymore!” she yells. “Something has got to change!” The noise is tremendous, and that, combined with her crying, is frightening. We cower in the hallway until the squall passes. 

 Outdoors 

The house is built closer to the road than usual, and so most of our half acre is the backyard. This is eventually partitioned into a cement patio (roller skating and barbecues), a lawn (ball games and croquet), an asphalted court (trampoline and badminton), a corral for my sister Alice’s horse (Princess, then Stormy), a sandbox (swing set and jungle gym), and the pool area. My parents love to swim—they grew up within walking distance of Lake Michigan—and, three years after the house is completed, they dig the first and largest of the neighborhood’s pools. My handprint and the accompanying date, 3-15-55, grace the southwest corner of the pool deck. In the early days, when the young families are still new to the wave of prosperity that will eventually wash them upon the isolated atolls of their individual fortunes, when there are still empty lots, citrus groves, and easy access to the mountains, the only thing that separates the neighborhood kids are age differences. We are forever in one another’s houses, yards, and bedrooms. With our family of four children spanning an eight-year range, there is hardly a child that isn’t a contemporary, and my parents’ laid-back hospitality makes our house a magnet of activity. On certain summer days, we put a flag in our driveway signaling that the pool is open to the neighbors, and our deck is filled all afternoon with children and their mothers. 

The pool itself is a unique zone of recreation, not a kidney-shaped splash pond but a sizable rectangle, 60 feet long and 20 feet wide, of clear blue water. You can cannonball off the diving board splashing everyone nearby; careen down the pool slide on your butt, your backside or your stomach; wrestle for dominion over Allie the inflatable Alligator; play underwater teeter totter holding both hands of your swimming partner and pushing him down as he pushes you up; silently glide beneath the rubber raft to upend its unsuspecting sunbather. Marco Polo, of course. On weekends our father plants himself on the far end of the pool deck, and the four of us pile on, trying to overwhelm his stability. As we yell in pleasure, he grabs one or the other of us, sometimes one with each hand, and pitches us into the deep end. Up we go on the aluminum ladder and rush back into the fray. Eventually, and probably with his connivance, he yields. We clamp his legs in a concerted attack and push from behind. Our father’s solid bulk begins to topple, and the flailing mass of Philipsons crashes into the water. 

And then there are the greased watermelon fights. There is a team at the shallow end and a team at the deep end. In the middle of the pool our mother pitches a watermelon that she has lathered in margarine, and the fight is on. I believe the goal is to get the watermelon to touch the wall of the opposing team, but the fun stems from the underwater mass of confusion as adults and children fight for possession of this slippery green oblong. It shoots from one desperate grab to another. There are no rules; there is no strategy, no timed periods of play, no breaks. The game ends when the watermelon cracks or the players gave up in exhaustion. 

If not for the house and its inducements to pleasure, I would have spent a lonelier childhood than the one I remember. I am a spaz, a crybaby, and forever needy. In spite of my household’s many attractions, I think of my childhood as one long forlorn quest for friends. 

“Is Greg at home?” 

“Can Stevie come out to play?” 

“Do Rod and Ruth want to come to my house?” 

Sometimes they do; sometimes they don’t. 

My brother can’t stand the sight of me; my sister Alice is indifferent. Playing with either of them is out of the question. This leaves my younger sister, whom I tease and bully so much that she stays with me only for lack of a better alternative. I am oblivious to her growing dislike, and it will come back to bite me in later years. Nonetheless we play: from Old Maid in our elementary school days to the French version of Risk, called La Conquête du Monde, in early adolescence. One of the more interesting private games we invent is the neighborhood crawl. The challenge is to enter every backyard in the area and find something to play with there. My favorite yard is the Lincolns’. They have a player piano in their garage.  

 Addendum—July 1992 

Tomorrow, I will put my belongings in my car and drive to the Bay Area. Between Laguna Beach, where I lived for six months as a visiting professor in the UC Irvine French Department, and now, after month’s stay in Pasadena, I can say with certainty that Southern California is no longer my home. I revisit each room of the old house, starting, for reasons I can’t fathom, with the little bathroom and say goodbye to every one. I do not see myself staying here again. I sit at my mother’s desk and idly open the drawers. To my surprise, they haven’t been cleaned out. 

I come upon a yellowing article that she had cut from a 1955 edition of the Pasadena Star News. Why she saved it I do not know, but when I read it, god, the faucet turns on again! 

First Settlers of Sierra Madre Villa Move East 

 For one family, at least, an era is ending at Edgecliff Lane up at the end of fabulous Old Sierra Madre Villa Avenue. If and when the Montgomerys come back to Southern California they will be residing elsewhere. The place has such fond memories for Douglass that he says he cannot bear to see it subdivided so will stay away as far as possible. 

 Old House Road was where I grew up; where I spent my childhood and adolescence; where I returned on holidays and vacations to take my place in the web of family. It was the magnetic pole that oriented my wanderings through Africa, Europe, the East Coast, and the Midwest; the site of my earliest memory and present writing. The backyard witnessed innumerable barbecues and pool parties, our Fourth of July fireworks, my sister’s wedding, my mother’s memorial service. The old house hosted the comforting recurrences of our family life: birthdays, anniversaries, Thanksgivings, Halloweens, Christmases. Many of my own landmark moments took place within its confines: my sixteenth birthday, when I gathered the group of friends who made up my circle during high school; the first time I successfully defied my mother as an adult; the bizarre attempt to have sex on acid with my former high school girlfriend; the hysteria of accidentally coming out to my parents; the babbling, tearful farewell as my mother lay in her coma.  

She lived on Old House Road from 1952 to 1985, the year she died. Though my father stayed for another three years, he’d lost his stomach for continuing his life there. The children made it a point to come home for the holidays, but there was a hollowness to our revelry. It was all so familiar, from the gold-edged china to the Thanksgiving turkey baked in a paper bag, yet we were enacting a scene without the principal player. Mother had made it all the way it was. We knew the routine so well we could reproduce it without her, but it was a fruitless attempt to keep the reality of change and death at bay. Once my father’s grief had abated somewhat, he began dating a recently widowed woman from my mother’s circle, and, when she was ready, he moved from Old House Road to take up residence with her on the next mesa west. That was the end of life at the old house, and what “the old house” has come to mean is the house on Old House Road. The place has been on the market for three years now, but in our fin-de-siècle recession, it floats becalmed on a waveless sea. 

The old house comes in handy on occasion. It accepts the overflow when too many of the extended family descend on Pasadena for a holiday or special occasion. It sheltered the family of my brother’s second wife when they arrived from England for their daughter’s wedding. Most of the time it sits empty. With no one living here and much of the furniture gone, the house seems sad and dingy. Dirt streaks the playroom walls; the kitchen ceiling blisters; a long dead spot disfigures the backyard lawn; the paint on the exterior stucco has faded to a color that, while unattractive, defies classification. Even the pieces remaining from our former life—the upright piano I was the only one to play, the black wooden rocking chair with the large goofy flowers my mother painted on, the gloomy portrait of my great-grandfather from San Antonio, Texas—are not so much ghosts (they are too corporeal for that) as lifeless relics from another time. They no longer resonate, and the house is still. 

Nostos [return home] algos [pain]. Should I not rejoice with the new generation and the new centers of our family life? My father is happy with his new love in his new home. My brother, never happy, also has a new wife and a new home. My older sister is happy with her lover in Berkeley, and they are raising a daughter. I am still in transit, sterilely nostalgic, I suppose, for a past that never was, an illusory anchor to stay my bark from further voyages and eventual death. I don’t have to die, do I? I don’t have to lose my strength, my powers, my loved ones. Am I not sitting in the old house at my mother’s desk, facing the San Gabriel Mountains? Was I happy here? Am I happy now? 

These tears! They must be tears of joy.