Little House I Used to Live In

As long as I was on the North Shore, after I finished my reconnaissance of the property next to the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant, I drove over to my childhood hometown, the village of St. James (not the town of my birth - Mineola - but the town in which I grew up), and went past my old home, the house that I had lived in from 1963 to 1970.

I expected change. Impermanence is everywhere, and when I tried to find the house on Google Earth a couple of times, I saw swimming pools and patios behind the houses in my old neighborhood that did not exist when I lived there. There was even a new subdivision at the end of my old street. That and with everything I had heard about the housing bubble on Long Island, I was sure (confident, convinced) that my old house had been demolished long ago for some suburban McMansion.

What shocked me was how little things had actually changed. I was able to easily navigate the roads from memory alone, and everything still looked pretty much as I had remembered. Turning on to the street to my old house, the roads were narrower than I had remembered (two cars going the opposite way would be hard pressed to pass each other) and some of the houses had been rebuilt, or even demolished and new homes constructed on the lots. But as I made the old familiar turn on the road, I saw that my old home was almost exactly as it had been when we left in 1970.

Okay, some things had changed - the house is now yellow, although I remember it being painted white. And the hedge formerly in front of the house had been replaced by a white picket fence. And the old circular, gravel driveway, not shown in the picture above, had been replaced with a more practical, paved parking area. But other than that, things had not changed. The frame of the house had not changed - no dormers or additions had been added. The same old barn still served as a garage. The old screened-in front porch, where I had spent many a sultry summer night, was still intact and unchanged. Even the old lace curtains in the upstairs bedroom that was once my parents' seemed to be the same ones that we had left behind.

I had to take the picture swiftly from inside of my rental car, as the owners were home - in fact, they were backing out of the driveway as I pulled up. I did not want to scare them by getting out of the car and photographing their private home. I could have introduced myself to the owners and truthfully told them that I had grown up in their house many years ago and had not been back in 39 years, but thought that a 50-something Zen Buddhist from Atlanta, Georgia was more culture shock than they were expecting on a Thursday afternoon. So I surreptitiously snapped one quick photo (the one above) through the driver's-side window as I slowly passed and wished that I could have taken a wider picture. But to do that I would have had to get out of the car and there was no place to park on the narrow road, and I would have had to stand in the yard across the street, which certainly would have aroused suspicions, if not a call to the police.

As you may guess, the preservation of my old home made me happy, especially since I had expected it to have been changed. So I drove around the block one time and then cruised the roads of my old neighborhood as the memories all came flooding back to me. The hills were every bit as steep and twisty as I remembered, although the nostalgic, old-fashioned St. James General Store seemed to have had some sort of makeover, and wasn't quite as I recalled.

The old beach at the head of Stony Brook Harbor had been allowed to revert back to its natural state, and is now a town park. That's just as well, as it never was much of a beach, anyway. At low tide, in order to get to water deep enough to swim in, you had to wade out past the trucked-in sand and sink into the black, organic mud loaded with snails and razor clams, and hope that you didn't step on a horseshoe crab. Not a pleasant experience at all, and even at high tide you had to get past all the debris floating on the incoming shoreline. Better to leave it as a park, and let nature reclaim what was hers all along.

Rain had started as I left the beach, but I still pressed on and found the old elementary school to which I had walked every school day during grades 4 through 6. Names of old teachers (Mr. Anacherico, Mr. Robinson, Mr. Raso) came flooding back to me, as well as the names of my childhood friends (Robert, Steve, and Doug). Classic, municipal architecture reminding me of simpler, more innocent times.

I continued to cruise around, confidently retracing roads from memory. Train stations, farm stands and retail districts were all where I remembered and more or less unchanged, with only the occasional strip mall and shopping center interrupting the nostalgia. I even found the old prep school I attended during grades 8 and 9. When I was there, it was an all-boys school and required its students to wear a jacket and tie to class every day, including Saturday mornings, and attend morning chapel daily. We were taught Latin and the classics (but not evolution or relativity) but I still learned enough in those two years to cruise through my subsequent years of public education without needing to study until my senior year, by which time my study skills had pretty much departed.

A 1-hour automobile tour that took in 7 years of nostalgia from 39 years ago. Impermanence may be swift, but it's apparently swifter in some areas than others, and not particularly swift at all on certain parts of the North Shore of Long Island.