I Am So Popular: This Is Not My Beautiful House

Experience has taught me that not much can slow me down. Sure, the occasional malignant tumor or caustic divorce has offered momentary pause. But really, rare are the times my mind is not racing. Thus I do not ever plan to relax on my many “vacations.” Instead, I hope to give both brain and body a new place around which to race. Fresh scenery of the literal and figurative variety, if you will. Then again, being a creature of habit, I also enjoy some comforting familiarity to balance out the excitement that this fresh scenery sometimes incites.

Astoria provides the perfect setting for these conflicting goals. It acts as both a Madonna lyric (like a virgin… shiny and new) and a pair of well-worn house shoes (known, reliable, assuredly comfortable). In the Auld Lang Syne department, I get to spend time in what, after four years, is taking on the feel of an old haunt: The Blue Scorcher bakery. With it’s incredible coffee, thrilling cardamom rolls, and contingent of steady customers who are also avid knitters, it presents me endless pig-in-shit-esque moments. I like to go to the Déjà vu thrift store, which used to be my second favorite in the country, until the Silk Purse in Galveston was forever wiped out by Ike, thus making DV my new all time favorite. I also meet up annually with a private yarn dealer, whose stories I delight in at least as much as her wool.

But because I never stay too long, and because the place has been around for a good long time, there is always something new for me to see. And by new I mean old. Very old. Downright historic.

This year, I took in the Flavel House, completed in 1885, the retirement home of Cap’n George Flavel. A massive Victorian with a turret overlooking the mighty Columbia (and, beyond it, the Pacific) the place is captivating. In fact, I find it reminiscent of another seaside home I love, Bishop’s Palace in Galveston.

As I wandered the Flavel Mansion, it occurred to me why I am so drawn to these old places, similar to why I love dollhouses. It all has to do with a sense of control. Though I never had a dollhouse as a child, in my twenties, I used to go to Terra Toys and gape longingly at their collection of miniatures. I think what I loved so much was the idea that, if I were ever going to own a really nice house with really nice furniture, I would only ever be able to afford something very small and unreal.

I also loved the god’s eye view. I could stand back and take in the whole scene, understand the big picture, be omnipresent. Beyond whatever god-fantasies dollhouses fulfilled, there was the simpler matter: As someone with no spatial relations skills and zero sense of direction, being able to see the whole house, all rooms and all dolls in it, suggested a certain comprehension I sometimes lack in real life. (Likely this is also why I use one of those huge, paper, Month-at-a-Glance calendars.)

History, likewise, provides an overview that soothes me. Sure, there is some mystery, some room for speculation. For instance, Cap’n Flavel married his wife, Mary, when she was just fourteen. They had three children—two of them daughters. The girls never married. These facts and, more importantly, the blanks not filled in, lead me to want to know what I can never know—what was it like to be the fourteen year-old wife of a successful, much older sea captain? And were the daughters repressed lesbians—rich enough to travel the world, yet never able to be happy in love due to society’s constraints?

But beyond these little unknown gray areas, we are certain that they lived, they died, and whatever stories they had are done now. There is no uncertainty of future for them. Everything is past. Passed. And so, like dolls in a house, their lives can be seen—beginning, middle, end—as a mostly controllable whole.

I wrote recently about why I love yarn stores and weddings— the common denominator they share of potential. When I perform weddings or think about my next knitting project, my heart swells at the thrill of what might be. Not to overextend a cheesy metaphor too far, but yes, I am aware that some sweaters and some marriages will fail. There will be flaws and dropped stitches and some necessary unraveling to straighten things out. But in the moments of fresh and new—the yarn just gathered or a groom kissing a bride at ceremony’s end—anything is possible.

Somewhere beyond these extremes of history past (with its residual stories manageable and fascinating at once) and a hope-filled future (so fantastical and far reaching that there is no room for moths or divorces) runs the much wider, messier, frayed at the edges swath of day-to-day life. This I know, even if I try to avoid reality sometimes, and hover instead in houses-turned-museums, or doll filled worlds, or the adrenaline of a wedding reception.

Because neat and tidy, in truth, are falsities that only come to pass after much time fades out the narrative’s sharper edges. Water on rock and all that.

Last week, I helped write an obituary. I know it’s “too soon” for me to be reporting the sudden death of yet another friend—wasn’t it just the other day I told you about two friends passing inside of a week? But how can I time these things? Shit happens. And the shit that rained down two weeks ago was this: My friend Ed died suddenly and tragically. He is gone now, though I freely admit I do not believe it and am not sure if I ever will.

Getting to assist in putting meager words to Ed’s indescribable life story was an exercise in surrealism. I could hear him laughing at me—pleasantly, not mean-spiritedly teasing me for the daunting task his absence left me. I chugged away at like the job that it was, something to help keep me busy, a chance to reflect but to do so behind the safety shield of performing a role as opposed to, say, throwing myself to the earth and wailing.

The Flavel House—nay, Astoria as a whole— brought to mind Ed for me. Not just because I realized that it’s going to take at least a couple hundred years before Ed’s tale takes on that false sense of neat and tidy the way George Flavel’s has. But also because I first met Ed in Real de Catorce, San Luis Potosi, Mexico, which is where he lived with his family for the last twelve years until they moved back here recently.

Catorce is another one of those little places I have been to many times. Like Astoria, I get this perfect mix of old and new from being there. Old, old—as in the ruins of the silver mining operation long ago shut down. And old, as in now having visited enough times to know the locals by name, and for them to know me. And new, every time, the way that places perched in gorgeous natural settings always are.

As I like to visit the column commemorating Lewis and Clark, a place that offers a spectacular view across Astoria, so I love hiking the trails of Catorce. This I did with Ed, reaching vistas that let me look down into a bowl full of both history and the moment. Ed was always a rich part of the latter, until, in an instant, he moved to the other side. I will have a hard time ever placing him in the history department, though. I think instead I shall count him as an active ghost, one who might never be captured in some dollhousey museum.

Spike Gillespie blogs at KnitBuzz and spikeg.com. She’s a little tired of the rain and really sick of all the sudden death.