Where ever I wander, there's no place like home

        “Home” is at 4345 Middlesex Drive.
        In my memory, that place remains as solid and tangible as it was for nearly four decades of real time when our family owned it.
        It is a two-story Spanish-style house on a cul-de-sac in east San Diego.
        There are three bedrooms upstairs and a large living room, family room, dining room, fourth bedroom, kitchen and two hallways or entry rooms downstairs.
        We referred to the family room as the “TV Room,” the dining room was our “Breakfast Room” and the downstairs bedroom was my father’s “Den”.
        From the back door stairs led down to a brick-floored, patio, complete with a fireplace and built-in seating.
        In front, a small porch perched two steps above a walkway that curved through the large front yard. Most of that yard was covered with ivy and fruit trees, but along the side there was a strip of desert plants that my mother calls “succulents”.
        I recall every inch of that house, of the yard and of the section of canyon that was part of our property.
        I know the neighborhood and am familiar with dozens of routes leading from our house to Adams Avenue, which was “Main Street” for Kensington, the center of my universe for the decade during which I passed from age eight to eighteen.
        I left Middlesex Drive by foot, bicycle, bus or automobile several thousand times over those years only to return within a few hours after school or church or other events.
        I lived in that house, occupying the same room, sleeping in the same bed for those ten years; and I have never since stayed so long in place – any place.
        I finally moved away from home in the summer of 1967.
        Through two marriages and the raising of two children, that house continued to be the dominant landmark in my life, though I never lived there again full-time.
        I probably wouldn’t have done so, but the idea of buying or inheriting that property and ending up back on Middlesex Drive for my golden years did cross my mind many times.
        When my father died in 1994, I urged my mother to give up the house, but I had mixed feelings about seeing it sold.
        And, after she finally did let the property go, I never went back – somehow the thought of seeing it under new ownership makes me uneasy. Perhaps I’m troubled by the fact that others can now make changes and that this place with so much historic significance – to me at least – may be remodeled or altered in ways that make it no longer seem like … like home, I guess.
        Looking back, I recognize that the house and its environs were very positive for me. I had my own room – a large space with windows on two walls, a huge closet and very few restrictions on how I ornamented and utilized it. I felt safe inside that room – I had privacy and freedom there. I spent a lot of time in my room and it was happy time.
        My love for reading and interest in writing blossomed in my room on Middlesex Drive, I discovered music by way of an old radio that I endlessly took apart and put back together (I always managed to make it play again, but each time I reassembled the thing, I found homes for fewer parts).
        I know there are 15 steps in the staircase; I’ve counted them hundreds of times. I know that tobogganing down those stairs works far better on an inflated air mattress than on cushions from the couch. I know you can spy on the occupants of my sisters’ room from the sunroof outside my parent’s room by looking through a small closet window – if the closet door is left open.
        I’ve crawled under the house through a small opening in the patio and I’ve been in the “attic” – which is only a crawl space itself, accessible through an opening in the ceiling of that same sisters’ closet.
        I’ve been up way before sunlight, folding newspapers for my route; and I’ve heard birds and seen nocturnal animals that roam Middlesex and surrounding streets in the pre-dawn darkness.
        I fired my father’s pistol into the canyon from that sunroof and I snuck into a neighbor’s rec room five or six houses down from us and looked at pictures of naked ladies behind his bar.
        And when I was 14, I snuck high school cheerleaders into my room late at night for orgies.
        The neighborhood was great. I would have loved…
        …Ok, I never snuck any cheerleaders into my room.
        I would have loved to have a lake in my back yard; but living on the edge of a canyon is also pretty cool. The canyon was a place for discovery. My little sister and I, with a couple of neighbor kids, formed the “Canyon Club” and frequently slipped below the lip of the mesa, looking for adventure.
        We circumnavigated the cul-de-sac at the end of Middlesex on a trail we blazed ourselves a hundred or so feet down into the canyon.
        We discovered artifacts, built forts, snuck up on homeowners who were oblivious to our presence below them, and generally engaged in rock-throwing, bug catching, climbing, jumping and goofing around that only kids consider to be fun.
        The center of the cul-de-sac, of course, was the street, Middlesex Drive itself. Our street was made of huge concrete slabs that were welded together with flat strips of tar, laid down in a regular pattern that created excellent, though a bit oversized, foursquare courts.
        Other, disorganized, seemingly random black tar-lines created jagged and irregular stripes that patched breaks in the concrete.
        Traffic was light and we played endlessly in the street, only occasionally shouting, “Car!” and yielding to oncoming traffic.
        I could tell a hundred more stories of childhood and adult adventures in that house, along Middlesex Drive and in the canyon surrounding our cul-de-sac…
        Though I accept the truth in the statement, “You can never go home again,” I know that, in many ways I’ve never left Middlesex Drive and that I never will.
        Even if I do finally “settle down” and actually spend twenty or thirty years in one place, the word “home” will still evoke memories of the cul-de-sac, the canyon and that two-story house numbered 4345.