The Contemplative Eye

When I was a little boy, I lived behind the building you see here, just off Main Street in the seacoast town of Branford, Connecticut.

It wasn’t called “Panache” in those days, needless to say. It was a branch office of the Connecticut Light & Power Company. Note the Art Deco facade, with its bas-relief light bulbs and commercial smattering of William-Powell-Myrna-Loy style. I’ve been interested in Art Deco ever since, although it’s slightly jumbled in my mind with black-and-white movies, which I disliked because they were pervasive on TV and dull when I was a kid.

I enjoyed my childhood, I think. But my parents were having difficulties in their lives—and I sometimes suspect it’s meaningful that I don’t remember much from before 1960.

Our house was “landlocked” (i.e., no street frontage), a big, brown-shingled three-story apartment building with yellow trim reached via a driveway along the ugly backside of a two-story commercial building and a greasy spoon’s belching incinerators. Our front yard was mostly CL&P’s fenced parking lot, we had neighbors on both sides, and our backyard was a fenced lumber yard. I’ve been interested in landlocked buildings, too, ever since.

It makes me sad to realize how my parents, well-intentioned, educated people from good families, must have suffered here. My mom’s father was a prominent WWII general. Her grandfather was a prosperous Edwardian eye doctor. My dad used to be an elite economist for the U.S. government in Germany after the war. His father was an editor of the old New York Sun. But here they were, through no fault of their own, living in near-poverty—in a near-tenement, now that I think about it clearly—while my father’s health drained away and the U.S. postwar economy boomed around them.

Me, I was having a ball, sort of. My brother and sister and I jumped as high and far as we dared from the swing set; flung ourselves from bicycles onto the lawn, pretending to be stunt men getting shot; ran a lemonade stand on the sidewalk out front; built snow forts in CL&P’s plowed parking lot complete with tunnels and underground snowball caches; dug a splendid hole in our sandpile aiming to reach China; climbed the roof of the lumber yard’s warehouse to survey the realm; ate stolen concord grapes from a neighbor’s wild vines; secretly explored the other neighbor’s abandoned barn; raced around in a wagon with one kid facing forward, steering, and the other facing backward, feet astern for propulsion; camped in a tent made from old sheets draped over a sumac branch; and built a wildly ramshackle two-story tree house in the farthest, darkest back corner of the yard. Whew.

I have tender memories of planting marigolds in half eggshells as a second-grader and watching them grow, day by day, in a ragged, mud-spattered flowerbed all summer long.

Damaged goods? Maybe so. The old house is damaged, too—gone entirely, in fact, demolished about 20 years ago to expand the lumber yard. But unlike the house, I’m still here. Still finding my way. And not landlocked.