Happiness is an Old House

Here we were, my young bride and I. We had just talked a doubtful bank into loaning us a little money on an old Victorian cottage on South Broadway in Little Rock, Arkansas. Did I mention that it was in what planners called “a neighborhood in transition?” That is to say it was transitioning from benign neglect and blight to strip commercial, a major downward trend. At the time, it was characterized by many rental properties, alongside a few homes being loved and cared for by a courageous, but foolish, band of young couples who saw the area as worth preserving.

“Worth preserving? Hah.” I can imagine those words echoing in the cigar-smoked rooms where decisions were made back then. “Tear ‘em the hell down and build gas stations.” How many gas stations and used car lots did Little Rock need? According to the good old boys, it needed a bunch.

That was one problem with which we had to deal. Fortunately, that courageous band of historic preservation nuts stood like the Spartans at Thermopylae against the destroyers of the area’s historic legacy. We stood on the shoulders of those brave giants and dared the dozers to come any closer.

Meanwhile, we were dealing with a lovable old couple to whom we had given 60 days to clean out their junk from the cottage we had just purchased. No problem. We still had our house in Leawood subdivision, though it was on the market. The first day the sellers of the cottage came to start cleaning it out, we met them on site. Straightaway, we discovered two things.

One, Skipper loved to talk.

Two, he was a master of what we call, in the South, “branching.” A typical conversation might run like this:

Skipper: (Holding up a painted, burned-out light bulb). “I used this for a commercial I did for a furniture store out on University. It’s not there anymore. The owner died of cancer not long after we made the commercial. My nephew died of cancer about the same time. He lived out Markham past the old Tijuana Club. We never went there but it was a popular place back then. A couple we knew used to go there all the time. He worked at a bank so they got a free membership. The bank is in one of those new high-rises now. Back then it was down near Fourth and Louisiana. They tore it down for the urban renewal project. Another couple we knew had a restaurant next to the bank. The city tore it down and built them a new building out off Cantrell. He liked to play golf, and the golf course was nearby, so he liked it. I went with him once to play, went with him and another friend who worked at Bruno’s Little Italy. It used to be out on Asher, but they’ve moved. Hey Nila, where is Bruno’s now? She liked it better than I did. She’d always order … “

You get the picture. After a three-hour branch, he wouldn’t have discarded a single item, but would have disclosed a lot of the history of Little Rock if you could keep up with him. Oh well, we had plenty of outside work around the cottage, so we weren’t in a hurry. It was true that there wasn’t an inch of vertical surface that wasn’t stacked with junk. There must have been over a hundred years of National Geographics alone. We didn’t care. We were young, dumb, and full of self-assurance.

Then we received an offer, a good offer—an offer we couldn’t refuse in fact—on our house in Leawood. Yeah, the one in which we were living. The offerors wanted to move in as quickly as possible.

We were almost always
happy then, I think.
(Apologies to Dylan Thomas)