you must demolish that which you want to rebuild

weeks of waiting, though it wasn’t really that long. The tick tock started when we came home, and lurks in the background of every day. We have 12 months to get back in the house before we have to start paying our own way. The contractors keep mumbling about longer , so the fear sets in.

so after two weeks of waiting, I just pulled the trigger and authorized demolition to begin. Within a couple of days a crew showed up with the first of what I am sure is many dumpsters and began ripping the plaster from my walls. As they did, the skeletal shadows of the bare walls began to revel themselves, like some finely striped shirt, the horizontal lathe remained on the walls.

Lessons from houses #1: Life begins in destruction. you must demolish that which you want to rebuild.

A side note before i get all philosophical again: remodeling is all about portapotties. It is almost the first thing that a contractor decides on. When will it arrive, and when will it leave. Like a day or a life, construction is singularly defined by how and when we begin to evacuate our bowels and when we cease.

More prosaically, your home belongs to the workmen on the day the portapottie arrives and does not become your own again until it leaves. This is not metaphoric—they own it. they park in your driveway, use your power and water, do what they like, generally, and hope that you, the homeowner get in the way. When it happened, i thought it was natural enough, but I’m starting to see it as the leading edge of a far more profound experience.

At the risk of sounding banal, i think i have begun to see the difference between a house and a home. It started as a small idea. As i was walking around the burnt rooms, trying to imagine this spectacular floor-plan that i have been drawing and walking through in my 3D home design program, i began to think that the house looked rather small. No matter how “open” our new floor-plan looked on paper and in 3D rendering, the actual space seemed a little cramped.

At the time, i couldn’t figure out why, thinking that perhaps the dimensions i was working from were off somehow and incorrect, and that i would resolve it later.
Then a couple of days ago, i brought charlie over to see the now denuded house. Most of the upstairs rooms were stripped to the wooden lathe, walls and ceiling, giving the space an eerie geometric sameness, as if we were trapped in one of those puzzles my mother used to buy me from the Museum of Modern Art in the 1960’s. The first floor was basically intact.

He walked through the house, the downstairs mostly still black, and I think mostly keyed into the darkness and spookiness, and then he followed me upstairs. We walked into my office, the room I have spent virtually every day in since he was born and which he too knew as if it were his. Looking at the wooden walls, he asked, “What room is this?” I answered before I could register how strange the question was, a strangeness that fully hit me when we walked into our bedroom and he asked it again. “Who’s room is this?” It was, i can only imagine, Charlie’s first really dislocating life experience. This house that he took for granted, that was the only house he had ever known and therefor never had reason to question or look at critically, was suddenly something else, an object. Not his home at all. He had walled these floors in perfect ego self-centeredness for all these years with full trust that the house just was, had always been, and will always be. Suddenly, it wasn’t.

We walked into his room. “My rug!” he said, recognizing the now sodden, black, and disintegrating Berber that used to lay, white and cozy, on his bedroom floor. This was, perhaps with the exception of the kitchen cabinets, the only thing left in the house that was a thing, and that he had a relationship to. He had rolled, played, slept, and I think, peed on it, and its presence today grounded him somehow, brought back for him the sense that this wooden shell was a place that was, at one time, something more.

Back in the car, I asked him what he felt about seeing the house. “It's so small.” He said. So small. The words rang in my head. Just as I had thought days before. This place that we had slept, ate, made love, and pet cats in for 12 years seemed suddenly a small empty box, and even a 6 year old noticed it.

Here’s where we get to the house/home part. A house is a wooden box, walls and floors, staircases and rafters that can be easily apprehended in a glance. It has width and length and height, shape and form and scale, and is simple as a child’s building block. The distance between where our couch used to sit and our dining room table is no more than 10 feet, which, in an empty house, is ten feet.

Yet we used to sit in the dining room while charlie sat on the sofa and we felt worlds away, deeply enmeshed in different experiences. Because a home cannot be apprehended in a glance. It is a narrative. You don’t walk from room to room, you walk through it, each step past one thing or another, each thing the carrier of a history, form, and beauty (or uglyness) that become the narrative of that journey. A living room calls forth a concentration and attention different than a dining room. The journey up a stairway is a journey from the public to the private, from the presentable to the most unmentionable. And that narrative, that succession of experiences works on you,. They fill those ten feet with meaning and richness. That door is not a door, it is an expression of exclusion following its angry slamming. That sink is not a sink, it is the place that rinses vegetables and washed soiled babies.

It is, in the end, this that makes a home. Not the sentiment of history nor the experiences it contained, but rather the way each step through it creates a narrative of experience, how each item is like a black mark on a white page that you read anew with each step, or skim past in that way that you find yourself three-quarters of thee way down the page of a novel to realize that your mind has wandered and you don’t know what you read. Though you don’t remember, you still read, and that wandering daydream-like the wandering through a house in which you’ve lived for a dozen years-was still a narrative act that occurred in that book.

A home is a book that you read again each day, the sound of whose words resonate through you, and whose narrative reflects each moment you live within it (or now, for us, without it).

Nothing is more vulnerable than a house that leaks.

Nothing is more vulnerable than a house that leaks.

It goes against all that is house. So vulnerable and exposed. We trust our houses to keep out the elements. It is why we build them, why we think of them as haven. As the otherwise welcome rains fall in drought plagued Los Angeles, the house has leaks in its roof, small drippy breeches through which the water penetrates with slow destructive power. It soaks the cellulose insulation I had blown into the attic to keep us warm, old recycled newspaper fibres that sealed out the 1920’s drafts. Now the besotted weight will pull down the ceiling over where our bed used to sit. I picture a crew with shovels, loading yet another dumpster with the detritus of the fire.

It would be better, I think, to begin the demolition, the tearing out of the shards of clinging plaster and exposed untapped wallboard to expose the studs and rafters behind. At least that destruction has purpose, intention. It is destruction that is constructive, part of the journey to being once again a place to rest our heads, in dry, warm comfort. This slow, piecemeal and random destruction, the destruction of neglect and elements, feels, as Elicia suggested, like something from a Garcia-Marquez novel, time inexorably wearing down the best intentions and efforts of those that live, turning the inanimate back to the jungle from which it sprung. It is as if, uninhabited and scarred, the house has reunited with the forces of entropy, of disassembly and component-ness.

Is that what a house is? Components held together in a system of organization by the daily presence of humans who generally take it for granted? Does a house remain a house because of the million lightbulbs that get changed and floors that get mopped and pipes that get tightened or replaced. Is it the accumulation of small actions, unnoticed at the time of their completion, that accrete into the idea of house? Or is there some metaphysical force, a living energy, that by its very presence just keeps the parts related?

These are the two sides of my mind, of course, the concrete and practical and the imaginative dreamer. Today though, as the rain falls and the ceilings with it, I feel disabled and at a loss. I have no raincoat, nor umbrella to keep me dry. My hoodies, which I wear beneath a borrowed leather coat for warmth, become quickly saturated, and the chill the dripping rain leaves in the small of my back seems unending and inconsolable, no matter how much earl gray tea I drink. “The grieving feel chilled,” Joan Didion quotes, in The Year of Magical Thinking, from Emily Post’s etiquette manual of 1922, “they need soup.”

It is true, I suppose, if grieving is what this feeling I have is, for there are parts of my body, regions immune to warmth, relaxation, medication, massage, or any of the other traditionally healing things that integrate my easily shattered life. Matija’s grandmother promised me chicken soup this weekend .“You don’t make Chicken Soup in a pressure cooker,” she insisted, when I told her of the demise in the fire of my mothers, the 40 year old Presto in which our soup was always made. She seemed vaguely insulted, in that way that only a jewish mother can. Perhaps her soup, sans pressure, will be the cure I need.