House on Childress Street A Memoir

husband 1 "You must not have blinds at your house," my grandma Sally Helen Langley chuckles, her eighty-two years of benevolence wrapped in a housedress adorned with blue and white flowers. I have to struggle with the aging string before the metal slats twist open, forcing freshly squeezed sunlight into the newly redecorated abode. It's been nine months since my grandfather's passing and things in their house are in even better order than before. There are new cabinets in the railroad-style kitchen and a new silver fridge complete with an ice maker. The walls are now white instead of their previous lime green. The old brown carpet has been stripped away for a new burgundy one, and the green velvet couch set, a sacred cow in Langley home entertainment, has been switched out for a creme sofa and loveseat set, both with more pillows than they should be able to hold. "There's so many pillows that when people come in to sit down they can't find nowhere to sit," she says as she smiles, taking a seat across from me. "Before he passed Jesse said he was gonna fix this place up real nice and put a sign out front that say 'The Langleys.' He had started doing everything. But he didn't finish nothin' he started. Poor thing." Her words make me remember a visit I made to see the Lone Ranger while she was down in Richmond, VA, taking care of her sister Rebecca as she lived out her last days with cancer. There wasn't a light on in the front of the house and the dining room table was covered with two boxes full of tools. The old man had work to do. He'd refitted the wood paneling on the first-level porch and started to build a barbecue pit in the rear yard. It was as if he was trying to keep busy, hoping that constant movement might slow the inevitable. "Granddaddy gonna be goin' away soon," he told me. "I ain't gonna be here much longer." I blew it off as one of his usual rants, empty words strung together just to fill the silence, or to make me laugh, or just so that he could have something to say to the grandson he barely knew. You're gonna be here when I got grandkids," I snapped back, feeling the awkwardness in the air. Our eyes met for a moment. We both knew that I was lying. That little exchange rang in my ears on that Monday morning, December 30, 2002, when I first got my mother's message that he had crossed over. On this visit to their house months later, my uncle Gary is sitting in the dining room watching music videos on BET while his mother cleans and straightens her abode, as she has done nearly every morning since the day she said "I do." "You see I moved the TV," she grins, motioning toward the oversized idiot box in the dining room. I glance and then nod. "I said I'm gonna let 'em watch TV in there. 'Cuz they ain't comin' out here on my new sofas. I let 'em come out here and they'll get those messed up like the last one." Her they is general and not specific, the result of her playing hostess to hundreds of changing faces around the neighborhood since the day she and her husband moved onto Childress Street, barely a year after their first child, my mother, was born. Everybody loves Sally Helen Langley. At this point I am just glad that she can still sit before me, that she still smiles when I put my lips to the softness of her cheek. She's always happy to see me. She likes to remind me of that day on November 20, 1975, when I came into the world. She and my uncle Tony raced nearly twenty blocks from their jobs at the C&P phone company to George Washington University Hospital. Her husband did not meet her there. He didn't come to rejoice over the birth of the first grandchild on both sides of the family. Her face was always most visible. His presence was most felt behind the scenes. In August of 2003, Sally wJasper, Kenji is the author of 'House on Childress Street A Memoir', published 2006 under ISBN 9780767916790 and ISBN 0767916794.