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jss | work | writing | aboutme | projects |
click on the pictures for full-sized versions. the large versions are jpeg format and average 77kb in size. for now this page is mainly pictures. i'll eventually be adding more anecdotes and description here as time goes on (and as i remember it).
this is the house my brother and i were raised in. a single story, two bedroom brick house. washer and dryer in the kitchen. a sun porch my father added. a wooden deck my father and crew added. hand-hewn wooden beams underneath. a dirt basement with hidden crawl- and hiding spaces. a clothes line out back for hanging your swimming trunks to dry in the sun.
one night when i was small i couldn't sleep because i thought there was someone outside. i had to have the lights on so i felt safe. mom and dad kept telling me to turn out the lights. dad showed me that i was better off keeping the bedroom light out so i could see outside. he turned the outside porch light and inside bedroom light on and off to prove this to me. parents are clever like that.
our computer (a ti/994a then later our commodore64) was in the dining room, a great room with a wooden floor and a wood-burning stove. i remember being on hold with compuserve customer support getting help signing on. i guess i was half way through elementary school at the time; i still remember my original password. back then, compuserve charge $12.50/hr during hte day and $6.00/hr in the evenings and weekend for connect time. the speed was 300 baud. but it was cool.. i had email, discussion groups, file downloads, the whole bit. a the time, i dont remember any system advertising anyhting over 9600 baud, and i think only one of the local systems i called actually hard a hard drive. favorite games: winter/summer games, jumpman, larry bird/dr j basketball.
this house was where my interest in electronics began. pouring over all the small 'engineering notebooks' and making weekly trips to radio shack, where the employees knew me by name. i got handy with a soldering iron. i had parts boxes filled with categorized and sorted parts i'd scavenged from old (and some not-so-old) equipment. one summer, i got a whole bunch of broken tv circuit boards from a tv repair shop; i was in heaven. more parts. one of my more clever projects was connecting my commodore's joystick port to a microswitch that was taped to the door. when you opened the door and tripped the switch, a program on the commodore would notice the change and then beep loudly, warding off any intruders (or family).
the two closest neighbors to this house were my aunt and uncle (my
cousin was way big into star wars, and my other cousin into playing
school with me and my brother), and my maternal grandparents, who
lived at the top of the hill.
there was plenty of natural water around. across the street was the
pond my cousins played ice hockey on in the winter. behind our
house was the creek.
behind the house was a wooded area we called "the woods".
at the back end of our property ran a tributary of a tributary
of eagle creek. my brother and i used to play in the creek for
days at a time. damming it up, rerouting the water, playing
with the rocks, watching the fish, catching minnows with our hands.
during the winter, it froze over and became a whole new place
all over again for exploration.
the great hill behind our house became the best, closest hill for sledding at winter time. my cousins had a toboggan. after drooling over the toboggan and other kids who had sleds for so long, i finally got my own radio flyer sled for chistmas one year. and all was good and merry. parents are great.
looking over pictures of the old place reminded my mother of one of
the most touching things i've ever known my brother to say:
"when i have children, i want them to grow up on a farm just like
i did."
when you're so young and life is pretty uncomplicated, a place like this house probably is the best place you could be.
guess it was a pretty stereotypical midwestern childhood.
small down. spread out neighborhood. a woods surrounding the
property. and playing basketball in a barn.
the house at the top of the hill was my grandparents'. it was built
in the 'thirties and was my grandfather's dream house.
the milkshed was attached to the green barn. it was where the cows
used to be milked. some of the equipment was still there, including
the large metal storage tanks where the milk was kept.
the old pond is looking good. next door is a new subdivision. the small, quaint farmhouse where i learned to ride a bike, where my brother and i shared a bedroom, where my mother's cookbook caught fire from the oven, where our golden retriever would lay on the floor with us in front of the wood-burning stove, this place remains. i'm glad it's still there for me to visit and think back about the first sixteen years of my life.
some parts of plainfield are the same. well, all the parts that were there when i used to live there. the library. the church. all the schools. i didn't have time to visit all my old nooks and crannies. but i got the general idea that the town was still there, was doing fine without me and my family, and hadn't changed too much.
i'd like to go back again some time. maybe in a few years. and visit
the highschool. and the computer shop to see gordon. and i don't
know where else.