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Stig-lightful, Part II: B&E
By briantologist | March 29, 2004
So after our capital time at the strip pits, we headed back to the Clay compound so Darleece could finish sewing the badass apron she’d been working on, and so I could play Hank Williams songs for Grandma Clay (she likes “There’s a Tear In My Beer” best; she made me play it twice; I love this tiny old lady). But we had one stop to make on the way home: The ancestral, or “old” Clay place, sold years ago in favor of the grandparents’ current digs across the street from Uncle D.
Grandma and Grandpa’s house is, of course, fraught with memories for all concerned, most notably Darleece and Miz H., so we they wanted to linger for a bit, by which I mean “break in.” I mean, sure, seeing the back patio with your tiny kid footprints in it is nice and all, but it’s no substitute for seeing if the really green bathroom is still really green. (NOTE: It is. Like, really green. For real. I’m not even kidding.) After trying every window we could reach, we noticed the door frame was gouged out a bit near the doorknob. Right about now you’re no doubt thinking, “If only someone could jimmy the latch with his Blockbuster card!” Friends, I’m way ahead of you.
I’m not saying I could disable any security systems or blow safes or anything, but if you need a third man for simple B&E (though I’d like to point out that nothing got broken), drop me a line. It was exceptionally cool, too, in that I’ve had an itch to bust into abandoned buildings and explore them for some time now. I know it’s kind of a remedial version of that, but hey, it’s the little victories that count.
Still, there was a little melancholy smeared around the edges. It’s tough to see a place with memories soaked deep in the smelly old carpet and underneath the unflattering wallpaper just left to sit and rot like that. Houses are powerful that way: They hold whole sets of memories completely alive for every person who ever lived in them, and when you go back to visit, it’s like you never left, no matter how weird whoever lived there made the place look when they redid it in ’68.
I think maybe that’s why I love old houses so much, or more specifically why I hate new houses so much. There’s life in old houses and old neighborhoods, generations stacked on each other, and all it takes to unlock them is a single person who used to live there. Nobody lived in these cookie-cutter plasterboard subdivisions they’re building out in the suburbs. They’re blank slates, and call me biased, but the way we’re living our lives now isn’t chalking much that I wanna read about.
I know the old neighborhoods I love so much are the subdivisions of yesteryear, and that buildings have to be new before they can be old. But new subdivisions bother me because frankly I don’t believe the houses in them will be around long enough to get old. There’s not the vaguest element of longevity or survivability or solidity to them. It’s like they’re made of stacked marshmallows, and whatever fat kid who plays video games inside them until it’s time for him to get a business degree and take a sales job won’t know the one he grew up in from one in an identical suburb in Salt Lake City. These houses are like the food we eat: Cheaply made and devoid of sustenance. We’re as likely to remember the shit we take to get rid of it as we are to remember the meal itself.
Stigler is probably slowly dying. At least, significant parts of it are. It’ll probably grow into something new, though — I guess small towns wouldn’t still exist if some people didn’t want to live in them. I don’t mean to get artificially nostalgic about Stigler, as I don’t have any memories of it earlier than when I first visited the Clays five years ago. I just mean to say that it’s got a lot of hidden magic of its own, and that I’m glad I’ve gotten to see it. Saturday was the type of day that made me feel sort of proud to be an Oklahoman. I’m not making any claims to being from the sticks or anything � all I’m saying is that I’ve been there and liked it.
Topics: Exciting, Possibly | 4 Comments »
March 29th, 2004 at 4:50 pm
Stigs is an amazing place. I learned how to blow a bubblegum bubble there, I got stung by a bee there, I got a lot of tetnus shots there, those are my tiny footprints in the patio. I’d forgotten about them and I got all choky when I saw them again. I’ve shot guns, and learned how to drive, and caught frogs at the ocuntry club pool. Man, now I’m all maudlin.
March 29th, 2004 at 9:43 pm
One one end of the spectrum:
The place we live in now–I am not kidding when I say I always wanted to live here. I’d walk by this house as a kid, and it was so amazingly clean and well-tended. It looked like a paradise. The upstairs apartment where Ca-chee and I live stood vacant for 30 years before it was remodeled and we moved in. It is so baffling and awesome that the last people to rent this place back in the ’60s were … Ca-chee’s parents. That is history.
At the other end of the spectrum:
If you live in one of those brand-new cookie-cutter plasterboard subdivisions in the suburbs, you can rest with ease that every booger ground into the carpet is a FAMILY booger.
March 30th, 2004 at 8:33 am
Wow!
That is probably the best entry I’ve ever read. I want to move back to rural Oklahoma now.
March 30th, 2004 at 9:30 am
I have some similar memories of my grandparent’s old house, and I get the same feeling whenever I go to rural parts of Georgia.
I live in an urban area, but the neighborhood is fairly old and you can definitely see the history in the houses. Some of these houses have been converted into apartments (like where I live), and I really love the feeling of living in an older building rather than a shiny new apartment complex.
In other words… I get it.