A big White House

A Big White House

A big white cube, or nearly so, 24 feet wide by 30 feet deep, two floors plus a full basement. A kitchen, dining room, “hall,” and living “front” room on the first floor. Four bedrooms and a bathroom up. The living space totaled 1440 square feet, a relatively big number but a not-so-big containment vessel for the energies of twelve kids and the ambitions of two parents. Now it seems small for a large family. The house my wife and I live in today (with two sons now moved on) is 1600 square feet. It doesn’t feel particularly small, but I can’t imagine a dozen more bodies living there.

The 828 house seemed large while I was growing up. It was crowded, but didn’t seem so. We all fit somewhere, even if someone else fit right next to you. Most of us found a way to gain a little privacy. My refuge was the top bunk in the little kid’s room, where I couldn’t easily be seen unless someone climbed up to see me. Another place was the basement when no one else was there, or in a closet with the door shut, with no one the wiser.

A 12,240-cubic-foot containment vessel! A haven into which we could retreat. It was a place to recharge ourselves and return to the outer world. Perhaps it was insular, knitting our family so tightly that some of us (me) found it difficult to respond to others in the same way that we regarded our sibs.

There were the “nons,” of course, particularly the non-Catholics and the non-Kerbers. People a shade different from us. Not bad people, just not us. When I was approaching puberty, Mom told me I should find some friends other than the Protestant kids in our neighborhood. I would be meeting girls soon, she said, and I couldn’t date a non-Catholic. (Hah! me, a high school freshman, dating! That’s a good one, Mom. More on that later.)

 That containment vessel leaked, of course. Our physical energies escaped, through a window broken by a thrown metal cap gun or a door through which Mom or Dad chased us when we were fighting, telling us to “take it outside.”

Our non-physical energies must have escaped too, but not always. Looking back I see a pretty tight container, a pressure cooker even. The house may have been made of wood, glass, and shingles, but 828 was made of less tangible things, like the determination of two loving parents to fit into middle class society. It was also made by the mores of the Midwestern USA, the cultural (r)evolution of the 1950s and ‘60s, and the unbending doctrine of the Catholic Church. But these, too, are stories for later.

Like many childhood homes, 828 is the vessel from which I was (we were) launched. And like the space shuttle, I seem to have an unbreakable tether to it, without which I would drift afar and be only a dim satellite of the Earth.

—Bob