compulsive compartmentalization

For a long time when I was in school I would catch the bus in front of my friend Ronnie’s house. Ronnie’s house was not a part of our neighborhood, instead it was situated behind the woods on three or four acres of land. It was an older house that was built before anyone began developing the land on that side of town. Though that area is now building up at an exponential rate. I can still remember the woods and horse pastures that were right behind our house. You’d hardly believe that only fifteen years ago there wasn’t much out there.

Ronnie’s house was peculiar in the fact that it was heated by a large wood furnace. Yes, if they wanted heat, they would have to chop wood. And so they did. I remember many days in the fall chopping wood with Ronnie and his father.

I have never been much of a morning person, especially on frigid mornings when I had to walk through the woods to get to the bus stop at seven-thirty. My routine was the same. I would leave my house, walk through the path I had made through the woods, past the garden and tire swing, up the back steps and knock on the door. His mom was always cooking bacon. She would let me in and I would head straight to their furnace room.

There I would sit in a small wooden chair, wrapped up in a heavy coat, staring with half-open eyes at the fire through furnace door which was always slightly open. Some days his dad would come in, sit down, and tell me a ridiculous tale about him prospecting for gold in the Yukon, or that he couldn’t decide whether to become a brain surgeon or a cab driver. When I was older, that particular mediocre joke once ended with, “I guess I’ve been whatever I was going to be.”

I don’t remember that joke being told much more after that.

But on most mornings I was alone and just wanted to sit there. Forever. I wished that just for once they would let me go to sleep. I always knew that somehow that would be the most restful sleep I could ever have, leaning back in that wooden chair at seven thirty in the morning, staring into the fire.

But I never got to. Would it have killed them to let me stay there just once? I guess my parents might have, when they found out I was late to school. But in the grand scheme of things that’s a small price to pay for a good nap.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2004 at 1:08 pm and is filed under Memories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.