The Apt with Dumbwaiter on Cruger corner Arnow

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The places where we've lived are memorable for different reasons. I only lived in two apartments before venturing out on my own. And once I ventured out, there were a number of places afterwards:
* The junior four I shared with Marianne
* The junior four I found on my own when life with Marianne became insufferable
* The SRO (single room occupancy) in a Tenderloin hotel in San Francisco
* The apartment with paper thin walls in the Tenderloin in San Francisco (the elevator had a gate)
* The studio with shared toilets and showers in the hall on Nob Hill (two different rooms)
* The couch in West Los Angeles (crashing for a year in a friend's living room)
* A one bedroom in Hollywood in a duplex
* Another one bedroom in Hollywood (with a balcony)
* Another one bedroom in Hollywood (in a duplex across the street)
* The 104-year-old bungalow where I am now.

My folks were definitely a lot more stable than I. But I loved that walk-up apartment from my childhood. I was 5-6 blocks away from elementary school and we walked. Sometimes I went home for lunch. It had a dumbwaiter although it was made inoperable by the time I came into the world. There was once a pay phone in the lobby (in 1929 when the house was built, few people had phones of their own). There were few closets, but they were recessed (deep) and I remember sleeping in one of them.

The walls were painted with stencils. We had gold-colored leaves. And the bathroom floor tiles were octagonal and white. The staircase was marble, the banisters were oak, and the railings were wrought iron. The only thing I hated was the trash. It was in the back of the house in an alley on the ground floor. It was a room dedicated to garbage. And whenever I'd turn the lights on, feral cats would jump all over the place scampering out of cans or on top of the garbage can lids. I had allergies to cats and their speed and random motion felt like an attack. I dreaded going there.

There was also a carriage room. It stored bicycles and strollers. My mother called her a carriage, and she used it for lugging the shopping back home. She'd wait on the street for me to come down and carry the bags upstairs while she watched the carriage.

We had a washer in our apartment. Not everyone was so lucky. The clothes were hung on collapsible, wooden, clothes drying rack. Sometimes the clothes would be starched and ironed before they went into the closet or chest of drawers.

Life was simpler back then. Rent was also a double-digit number. On nights when we would have spaghetti, I would see the kitchen window steam up. I'd write something in the condensation. My Mother would yell at me.

The neighborhood has changed drastically. It's only two blocks away from a major train station of the IRT. That made it a one fare zone to get into the city. When I've gone back to the homestead, I would sometimes pass the building. There were even times when I had wanted to go to the buzzers in the vestibule to see if any names from the 1960s were still there. They were all converted when the buzzers were replaced by an intercom system. I keep a bank account in that neighborhood.

They were not happy days for me. But I managed to find comfort in the predictable. Whenever it would rain there would be two puddles that would form on the sidewalk. One was enormous and the other was a dwarf beside it. It had to do with how the sidewalk had been worn down and had no access to drainage. I always thought it was magic that the street knew exactly where those two puddles were going to form and how big they were going to be.