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My mother moved out of the family house today. With my father’s passing last year, she found the place just too big to care for. She’s moving to a lovely condominium in Bethel, CT, only 20 minutes drive from the old house in Weston, and nearer to the rest of the family as well. And for her, the good news is that because they paid the place off years ago, the 7000-percent windfall goes straight into her pocket.

She and my father bought the place (a woodsy, cedar-shingled colonial) in 1972, moving from a dreary little subdivision outside of Chicago. It was a big deal for my father to be able to move us out to the East Coast and to a place like that. He had grown up fairly poor in Philadelphia. Of his three older brothers, two were life-long servicemen, while the other went into gas stations. My father was far more successful than the rest, and they resented him for it. But my father was also far brighter as well. He did serve in the Air Force for a couple years, but not as a pilot like he’d wanted (his oldest brother Jim is featured in several books for his prowess and achievements as a bomber pilot in the German Theatre of WWII.) My father, instead, taught calculus to the pilots. He went onto the Charles Morris Price School of Advertising and Marketing, which I understand back then was a very good school (though I think since has been bought up by some other school.) He then went on to working at TV Guide, Phillips (Philco, I believe), Vision (a Latin American publication), and then, before ending his career as a consultant working from home, Vice President of Sales for Thomas Publishing in New York City. My Mother worked at Online Magazine for 18 years herself.

So, when my father took that gig with Thomas, we moved out to Connecticut. It was a totally different world than we had known previously. Chicago, all the houses looked exactly the same and there always were kids in the street. In Weston, several acres of woods surrounded our house … some kids … but not a neighborhood like we knew it. And while my father was indeed making good money, we did not have the money that many of the others around us had (we did not receive cars on our 16th birthday, which was fine with us … we all had jobs in our teen years.) It was a very strange place in a lot of ways. And even though my father never considered himself a success, oddly enough, I know it was always a source of pride for him knowing that he was able to move his kids up in the world, bring them to a place like this, offer them a extraordinary education, give them his shoulders to stand on. His own Father had worked the mines in Pennsylvania at an early age, shovelled coal on the railroad, and then took a job with one of the major newspapers in Phildelphia, eventually becoming their main typesetter.

So it is with a lot of mixed feelings that I look back at the place and realize I can never walk those rooms again. My mother, years ago, had commissioned a local artist to paint a portrait of the place. He was a drunk, I was told, which explains the extra window to the living room that does not in actuality exist. (I should photograph and post that painting.)

Perhaps when we drive down again I’ll swing by the old place. I imagine the new owners will either knock the place down and rebuild or otherwise do major renovations to make it appear more at home among its 7-figure neighbors.

Here also is a video montage of my father’s life that I made the week after he passed through this world and onto the next. (It’s a 24 MB file … so only click the link if you have a peppy connection.)