My grandparents lived in a purple house. It was in a less-than-great neighborhood of plain row houses in the flats of San Francisco, and I remember staring out of the window of the car as we drove over there. Gray. White. Brown. Gray. Gray. White. Brown. Gray. Gray. Beige. White. Purple.
There it was. Sticking out like a sore thumb.
The hallway was dark, and the stairs creaked on the way up. The living room furniture was heavy, with scratchy, lumpy upholstery. Faded handmade lace doilies covered the end tables, and there was stuff everywhere, gathering dust. The bathroom had dingy honeycomb tiles on the floor and a clunky cranky toilet with a chain pull that scared me. The place smelled like old people and the dresser in the master bedroom had pill bottles everywhere. We had the run of the place, but we spent all our time lying on their huge four poster bed, a collective of cousins watching a console TV and eating cheese nibbles while my mom and her sisters and brothers gossiped and laughed and hashed through old grievances with each other at the formica table in the kitchen. The bed was enormous, soft, and comfortable, covered with fat pillows and hand-stitched quilts, even in the summertime. So what if there were things under the bed that hadn't seen the light of day for years? It felt like an island of relative safety in this rickety, messy house. We kids flocked to it, lying every which way and giggling. Our grandmother seemed to vaguely disapprove of the whole thing, but she lay up in the bed with us, watching soap operas through her cat's eye glasses with her ample frame in some shapeless dress, hollering into the kitchen with a still-thick island accent every once in a while when she needed something.
Me, in the living room of the purple house
The contrast with my other grandparents' house could not have been more stark. There everything was immaculate and just so. My sister and I slept in matching twin beds in an attic with flowered wallpaper that was only a tiny bit musty. The delicate china dinner plates and my grandmother were equally frail, elegant and fragile. No one yelled. We never even set foot in my grandparents' bedroom, much less sprawled across the covers with our shoes on. We could barely breathe from all the best behavior-ing we were doing.
In the quiet house, Gee Gee, as we called him, kept parakeets in an aviary in the backyard, and had a garage full of memorabilia and antiques, all neatly catalogued and indexed. He had old cameras, binoculars and kaleidoscopes. Tools and gadgets, buttons and trinkets. Instruments and books. He was a pack rat extraordinaire, and a fastidious one at that. As little girls, we loved the birds and had no time for the rest. We hardly noticed that he had a whole world down there under the stairs, where he tinkered away happily much of the day.
In the purple house, my grandfather had a garden. He grew sunflowers in the cold San Francisco fog that were taller than my dad, the tallest person I knew. Corn and tomatoes, melons and beans. To us it seemed like a wild jungle, but to him it was perfectly ordered, and he could coax almost anything to grow in that plain patch of ground amid high walls and fences. He would walk down the splintery wooden stairs to his yard, with scraps from the kitchen, his felt hat on his head, and perhaps a cigar. He stayed out there for hours, in shirtsleeves and overalls, weeding and feeding and sometimes reading the paper as the sun went down. Then he'd slowly climb back up the stairs, the newspaper wrapped around a heap of giant zucchinis and peppers, and step into the chaos, smiling.
My grandfather (the one with the garden), holding my sister
I don't miss a lot of things about those visits. The hushed sterility at one house, the cluttered free-for-all of the other. But I wish I'd spent more time sorting treasure under the stairs. And I wish I'd spent more time in my grandfather's garden.
Zucchini from my garden
