This is a bittersweet one for me. This is where my sister Pat lived from some time in the mid-1980s until her death in 2015. I wrote about her after she died. I miss her more than words can say.
This would be my last place of residence in Garland, Texas, & it was somewhat inadvertent. I stayed mostly at the apartment in which I spent my high school years (which I talked about here) after my first year of college, but when I returned from my second year of college - & to this day I think I only came back because I thought I might spend the summer in Germany - about which more below - my mother had moved from that apartment for complicated reasons. Or maybe not so complicated - the convenience store which her boyfriend owned was sold, the two of them wasted the money traveling for a year, & she had found herself unable to afford that place & needed to find another job & somewhere else to live. She had done both, sometime before the summer I arrived, & I ended up spending it sleeping in the half-garage space my sister & brother-in-law converted at some point (the other half of the garage was my brother-in-law's "workshop").
My memories are telling me that my little brother lived in that space after he finished high school, but by the summer of 1988, he was living again with my mother in her one-bedroom apartment (I think the two of them slept in the same bedroom) & I was staying in my sister's half-garage.
My sister & I weren't friends then, & I spent the summer doing as little as I possibly could because I felt like I had been deceived about a trip to Germany. I had written a pleading letter to my relatives, asking if they would let me stay there, I just needed them to get me a ticket, & I would work, & I would pay them back. My German was pretty good - I had two years of college German in me & I was quite conversational. I don't know this to be true, but I suspected that my mother stepped in & told them not to let me come. Some things against this theory: my relatives in Germany weren't rich, & they might not have been able to afford a ticket for me. I'll never know - they never wrote me back to respond to my request. My mother instead told me it wouldn't happen. She had told me that she didn't want me to go, not without her. & I was angry about it, & bummed around the entire summer.
Most of the time I slept during the day, then went out at night. I would listen to records on my Walkman as I wandered the deserted streets of Garland - & boy were they deserted. I was especially fond on the Chameleons record Strange Times. I felt isolated & disaffected & often thought about death. I probably wrote a lot of terrible poetry. My only friends were a fifteen-year-old girl for whom I made mix tapes, my college roommate William, & maybe a friend or two in Austin with whom I wrote letters. I wrote lots of letters. I didn't get a lot of letters back.
At the end of the summer I used a portion of my financial aid money to travel to Memphis to visit the only girl I had kissed at the time. It was disastrous. I came home even more broken-hearted & broken than before. & I would move back into the Town Lake Apartments (as I discussed last week) at the beginning of my third year of school. But I would never live in Garland ever again.
Later on, after other horrible interactions with my family, I became friends with my sister, & I would return to this house when I visited Garland - ostensibly to see my mother - but I always had more fun hanging out with my sister. I loved sitting around her kitchen table talking about stuff - news, politics, gossip. There was sometimes another family member there, & it would be the only time I would see them.
My brother-in-law sold this house a couple of years after my sister died. He has remarried & he no longer lives in Texas. He actually unfriended me on Facebook a couple of years ago although I thought we had a good relationship. I have texted him a couple of times - it's been a while now, the last I think was when I sent condolences after his father died - but he doesn't speak to me anymore & in fact he doesn't even speak to his son. He has a granddaughter now, which he's seen only twice. It's a real sadness.
Mostly it's wistful to see this house. I mowed that lawn many times. I endured countless unpleasant family gatherings in its backyard. I went to Christmases there, sometimes walking from my mother's apartment when I was staying with her for the holidays - my mother's apartment was a quarter-mile down the street. I ate meals there, I listened to records on headphones there, I played Super Mario Brothers there. I was there when the call came from my Uncle Harold that my father had died. I had terrible fights there, & more than once I swore I'd never return.
Now of course I never will.
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