The house that built me.

There's a country song out right now by Miranda Lambert entitled The House That Built Me. If your not familiar with the song it's about a person going through a rough patch (imagine, a country song about that)and she goes back to her childhood home hoping touching the past will bring some comfort to her life. There's lines like 'I know you don't know me from Adam but these hand prints on the front steps are mine' and 'I bet you didn't know that under that live oak my favorite dog is buried in the yard.' I think that most of us that had at least a passably happy childhood can relate. The house I always think of as my childhood home is the little two bedroom, one bath, black cinder blocked underpinned, white vinyl sided, almost perfectly square house on 2nd Street. It had a little concrete front porch that seemed to me always to be cool to the touch, a little covered carport and a gravel drive. My dad put up a storage building and if you were to look you'd see my initials in the concrete pad. This is the house we lived in from the time I was about 5 until I turned 12, the wonder years, I believe there sometimes called. This is the place where I built so many tree houses I killed a cherry tree, where my friends and I would play ball and war, and sometimes ball that turned into war. This is where we would act out our favorite shows like Ultraman and The Dukes of Hazard, I was always Luke because I thought Bo was a show off (which, of course, he was). When we first moved in my dad and grandpa built a large deck on the back of the house, my first stage. I would put my record player's speakers up next to the kitchen window, slap on a stack of my favorite 45's (yes, I'm that old) and put on a private show. This is the house where my sister and I shared a room, my half containing my NFL toy box with all the team mascots on it, and we would curl up together in the mornings in the tiny little hall that separated the 5 rooms from one another in front of the oil furnace. This is where we lived when I was convinced I was going to grow up to be either a mailman or a cartoonist. I had 3 regular cartoon strips I drew- Yucky about a big eyed dinosaur and his cousin Spike, Sheriff Sam with his big cowboy hat and outlandishly large mustache meeting without any other trace of face showing (a la Andy Capp) defeating the outlaws often times as not with a spit of tobacco (how un-pc of me), and a one panel comic I called Teddy Bear Rock about a rock band made up entirely of teddy bears, each installment was merely a different picture of the teddy bears rocking out. In other words this is the house where I was a kid, before the world invaded. Back before puberty reared its ugly head, before I knew moms and dads sometimes had fights, when a heart break was over a missed cartoon and not my heart. So I understand what Miranda means when she says she wishes she could touch the past to heal the present, but of course it's not the house, it's the innocent we were when we lived there. Once I remember a man pulled his car up along the front of the yard and got out and talked to my mom or dad and told them that he had grow up in our house and just wanted to see it. I can't remember what he looked like but sometimes, just sometimes, I believe it was probably me. Sometime, somehow, somewhere in the future I'll find a way to go back in time, and visit the house that built me.