This is one of the most delightful things I’ve read in a newspaper since long before the current war began, and it’s almost enough to distract me for a few minutes from Kurt Vonnegut’s death, the rising toll of wounded and killed overseas and the idiocracy we seem to have saddled ourselves with in Washington.
For today’s Los Angeles Times, William Deverell, a history professor at USC, has written a quiet and beautifully moving paean to his home, his neighborhood and how he has learned to "live amid history:"
Houses and neighborhoods seduce us. They always have. What
starts with limitations — cost and location — often blossoms into
habits of living and cherished memories. Our love affair began in
Pasadena eight years ago.It was the fall of 1999. We knew we
wanted to be close to Caltech, where I was teaching at the time, and
near the Huntington Library, where my wife, Jenny, works. So we drew an
imaginary rectangle on a map of Pasadena, hoping that somewhere inside
this space we would find our perfect home and our perfect neighborhood.When we first saw it, the house hid behind 20 years of benign neglect.
It was a Mission Revival with old wooden awnings sagging atop wrought
iron braces. In the yard, worn-out grass fought a losing battle with
brown spots and weeds. Here and there, a few succulents hung on.Built
in 1923, the house was tired. The bathrooms needed work — a lot of
work. Every window had heavy iron bars on it. An apartment attached to
the garage was decrepit, and a freestanding building out back, with an
incinerator plunked down in a corner, was a mess.The owner
had been in the leather business in downtown Los Angeles. He had
retired years earlier and brought his inventory home with him. Bolts of
leather stood stacked in rooms and corners of the house: raw leather,
finished leather and leather in some stage in-between. A couple of
rooms were off-limits because we couldn’t open the doors; leather was
in the way.Our real estate agent apologized to us on the sidewalk as we left.
"I really like it," Jenny whispered to me.