The thing about a
lot of towns is there’s a lot of history about each town that folks will never
know about.
I got to thinking
about this the other day while I was riding my bicycle home after work. I was pedaling through an old section of town
looking at old run-down, boarded up houses that surely dated back a hundred
years, maybe a little more.
With a 21st
century eye I looked at some of the bigger hulks, the two story kind, and
thought of the cost to renovate them, the cost to heat them.
Then I wondered why
they were so big.
I wondered if these
big, old, rambling hulks had once been boarding houses. I mean, it made sense…Clovis, New Mexico
started off as a railroad town named Riley’s Switch. So there’d be all these railroad workers
who’d need a place to live.
I’m kinda getting
ahead of myself here because you might be one of those folks who doesn’t know
what a boarding house is.
A boarding house is
a place where people rent rooms…like someone might rent an apartment….and part
of the rent goes for “board” or meals…it’s where the term “room and board”
comes from, if anyone still uses that term.
The room might come with breakfast and dinner or just dinner. The meal would be at a set time, the boarders
would all sit around a big table and have a meal. If you missed the meal you were just shit out of luck.
I remembered my
encounter with an old-fashioned boarding house many years ago back east.
I had taken a job
selling advertising in bowling alleys:
Ad space on the scorecards, ad space in the lobby, ad space at the end
of the lanes above the pins. I had
thought that with a wide-open field I could make a million bucks…later it
turned out if I averaged out my pay over the time I spent hustling local
businesses in a three-state area I was making about 4 bucks an hour, about
minimum wage back in the day.
It was a traveling
salesman’s gig. I spent many a night in
cheap motels in small towns. I needed a
place to crash when I was done with the work week. I was in a rebuilding phase of my life so I
didn’t have much in terms of cash reserves to put down a deposit on an apartment. I scoured the local paper for maybe a room
someone was renting out of their house or something.
I decided to drive
out and have a look.
The address was out
in the country on an old US Route that had seen better days after the
interstate opened up and most everyone was zipping from town to town along the
new highway.
I pulled up in front
of a run-down, ramshackle, two story, old farmhouse.
I got out of my car,
stood and stared at the house.
A spry old woman
came out of the front door.
“Can I he’p you?”
she asked.
“Yes ma’am,” I
said. “I saw your ad in the paper for a
room with board.”
“Well come on up
here,” she motioned.
I walked on up the
dirt path to the front steps. The front
porch railing was covered in honeysuckle and trumpet vine. The plants wound their way up the columns in
front.
It wasn’t ‘til I got
to the porch I noticed a sleeping old man slumped in an old weathered arm chair
off to a corner amidst more vines.
“Come on in,” said
the old woman.
I walked in the
house and was taken back to the 1930’s.
It was clean but everything was from another time.
I walked past an
entryway to the living room where two old men, maybe in their 70’s, were
sitting back and watching some soap opera on the TV.
She started walking
upstairs.
“Let me show you the
room I have for rent,” she said. “I’ll
be honest with you, the man who was renting it died in his sleep two weeks ago.”
I smiled and said
nothing.
She stopped at the
top of the stairs and turned around.
“You didn’t say
anything,” she said. “That doesn’t
bother you?”
“No ma’am,” I
said. “We’re born and we die, that’s the
deal of life on Earth.”
She chuckled.
“You ain’t a hippie,
are you?” she said smiling. “That sounds
kinda hippie-ish.”
“I am what I am, ma’am.”
I said.
“What do you do?”
she asked.
“I sell advertising
in bowling alleys,” I said.
“Oh my,” she said, “you’re
a traveling salesman.”
I laughed.
“Yes ma’am,” I said,
“I reckon I am.”
We continued down
the hall walking on a runner rug that was probably new 50 years earlier.
The old lady opened
the door to a room and there it was:
Just a room with a single iron bedframed mattress and box springs, a
small desk and chair, an old easy chair and a dresser.
“New mattress?” I
asked. It sure looked like it.
“Well yeah,” said
the old woman. “You know when people die
things kind of cut loose.”
“Ah,” I said. “Yep, yep that’s what happens.” I thought to myself how good it was she
replaced what was probably a stained mattress, that she didn’t just flip it
over.
“The bathroom’s down
the hall,” she pointed, “You have to catch it open when you can catch it open
and I just have to insist that you not take too long in there ‘cos there’s
three others here who use it too. Oh,
and that you rinse the tub out when you’re done.”
I looked at the
simple room. It had an appeal to
it. Simple. A window that looked out across a field that
no one tilled anymore, a field where scrub trees were starting to reach for the
sky. Off in the distance was the Blue
Ridge Mountains. It would be a good
place to rest, a good room where I could write.
“You’d be the
youngest in the house,” she said.
I paused and
pondered.
To be surrounded by
four old folks might be a good thing, I might learn something. But then it might be seriously depressing
too. And if perchance I had a social
life I’m sure a visitor in my room would probably not be tolerated.
And me using a tub
used by 3 other dudes…I mean, I’m sure that’s how people did it in bygone eras
but I didn’t know if I was ready to go back to ancient times.
I turned and looked
the old woman in the eyes.
“I appreciate your
time, ma’am,” I said. “I have a couple
of other places I want to look at.”
“Well now this might
not be available soon, people’s always looking for places to live,” she said.
“Yes ma’am,” I
said. “But if it is to be it will be.”
“You sure you ain’t
no hippie?”
I laughed.
“I’m a traveling
salesman,” I said. “Now I might’ve been
a hippie in college.”
“I knew it,” she
pointed a finger at my face. “Well now I’m
a pretty good cook.”
“I’m sure you are,
ma’am,” I said as I walked down the steps, past the two old men watching TV and
out the front door to the porch where I paused, looking at the fellow asleep
off in the corner.
I stuck my hand out
and shook the old woman’s hand.
“Thank you for your
time, ma’am,” I said. “It looks very
nice.”
I ended up living in
town, sharing a ramshackle old house with a young woman who had a very active
social life and the offices of a telemarketing vitamin company.
I got the house’s
old living room with French doors furnished with a double bed, a big desk and
chair and a dresser.
I knew the girl
upstairs had an active social life because from time to time there’d be a
banging on the front door of the place at 1 or 2 in the morning and there’d be
some drunk guy hollering, “JENNIFER! JEN….IFFF….FERRRR”
and she’d come down the stairs, I heard her, there’d be the opening of the door
and quick, hushed talking. There’d be
footsteps back up the stairs. Sometimes
I’d hear rhythmic thumping coming from up there.
I reckon Jennifer
had her own bathroom because I seemed to have the downstairs bathroom all to
myself. To get to the bathroom I had to leave
my living room and walk down a long hall.
Sometimes I wondered
if I missed anything by not taking the room at the boarding house…the window
looking out across the field to the mountains in the distance.
Sitting down to a meal with folks from another time. Would there be macaroni and cheese? Homemade yeast rolls dripping with sweet creamery butter? Would there be good stories told?
Or would it be stuff quickly whipped up out of boxes and eating in silence.
I'll never know about the boarding house experience.
No, I was in the
noisy town, a busy street right out front.
But at least I had a
shower.
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