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Published: 8/24/2011 12:52 PM
Last Modified: 8/24/2011 2:57 PM

The day my wife gave up ownership of the house her parents built, my parents began the process of re-establishing themselves as Oklahomans.

One end. One beginning. And two very different ideas about “home.”

My wife’s parents spent the entirety of their lives together in one place – a three-bedroom, one-and-a-half bath dwelling near the fairgrounds. They had the place built in the mid-1950s, when the intersection of 21st Street and Yale Avenue was considered “out there” by the rest of the family.

It was an idiosyncratic place. The contractor had somehow bungled the dimensions, and ended up making the house two feet narrower than all the other, similar houses in the subdivision. The living room, rather than being a spacious place to relax, was more like a hallway to nowhere.

But it was unequivocally home for the family, a place that served as a physical and emotional anchor. My father-in-law was an engineer for American Airlines, whose job took him all over the world. He spent much of his service during World War II in the Pacific. Travel, for him, was something one HAD to do.

On the other hand, my parents have lived in 10 different houses in four different states since I’ve been on the earth. Their new house, into which they begin moving this week, will be House No. 11.

My father was a minister, and many of the moves my family made were as a result of his work. Some were because of his own somewhat restless nature, to seek new challenges, to meet new people.

The longest time my parents remained in one city was the 13 years we lived in Tulsa. And during that time, we lived in three different houses.

All that moving meant that my parents are very good at reducing their worldly goods to the bare minimum, the better to fit it into whatever truck they hire. In preparation for their most recent move, my parents managed to get what they needed down to one large truck and whatever else they could cram into a Ford pickup truck and a Toyota Prius.

My in-laws’ house, on the other hand, was filled nearly to bursting with the accumulations of 50-plus years of life. One example: A short time before her death in 2000, my mother-in-law decided that it was probably safe to destroy some of the canceled checks she had stored in dozens of boxes stacked neatly in one a closet. Night after night, she would meticulously shred one check at time, started with the oldest. I believe she got up to 1955 before she died.

When my father-in-law died in 2009, the thought of re-entering the house and beginning the process of clearing out all the things her mother and father had gathered was overwhelming to my wife.

These things – everyday objects, family heirlooms, geegaws that no one could quite figure out their purpose or their worth – were in my wife’s eyes all that was left of her parents.

And her desire to get the task of cleaning out the house over and done with was at odds with her feeling that every last one of these things needed to be saved.

Never mind the fact that our own house was well on its way to being “filled to bursting” with our own collection of odds and ends.

My wife, being the sharing person she is, found a number of ways to pass along this legacy of stuff to people who could put them to good use.

Her father had been a fishing enthusiast, so she gave boxes and boxes of fishing paraphernalia to a former co-worker who was equally passionate about fishing. In a neat parallel, the man has two young daughters with whom he hopes to share his enthusiasm – just as my wife’s father taught her and her younger sister how to fish.

My parents have taken care of much of this for my sister and me, thanks to all this moving around.

“I’m out of business,” my father said recently. He had sold off his library of books – biblical commentaries, sermon collections, transcripts of religious debates, and the like – and had sold the contents of his woodworking shop. They will be living out of their RV for a day or two, until such unmoved necessities as a refrigerator and microwave oven can be purchased.

For them, it seems a bit like starting over – something my parents have been doing a good deal in their life together. A new house. A clean slate. An adventure.

Some years ago, when we were visiting my parents in what was House No. 9, my father asked me if I felt as if I were home in that place.

My immediate reaction was “No.” I had no history there; none of the rooms in that house had ever been “mine,” the way certain rooms in Houses 2 through 7 had been “mine.”

But then, I was thinking of home as a physical place – the building that has for years housed a particular family, that you as a member can freely enter.

And losing that privilege – for whatever reason – can be devastating, as my wife can attest. Signing her name to a stack of documents and handing over the keys of the house to strangers was more than simply giving up ownership. It was also giving up the impossible yet comforting hope that, as long as this particular dwelling remained “my parents’ house,” someday they might return to live there again.

“It’s like I’m having to give them up all over again,” my wife said, as she made one last walk through the nearly empty rooms.

But she takes some comfort in the fact that, while she may no longer have access to the place she once called “home,” she will always have a home. Because “home” is really the place you want to be, among the people with whom you want to share this life.



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ARTS

James D. Watts Jr. has lived in Oklahoma for most his life, even though he still has people saying to him, "Don't sound like you're from around these parts." A University of Oklahoma Phi Beta Kappa graduate, Watts has received the Governor Arts Award, Harwelden Award and the National Conference of Christians and Jews Beth Macklin Award for his writing. Before coming to the Tulsa World, Watts worked for the Tulsa Tribune.

Contact him at (918) 581-8478.

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