The House I Grew Up In

I was browsing through an old acquaintance's photos on Face Book and found she had captioned one photo as "the house I grew up in." It's a great phrase but I'm not sure what it means to her. I have friends who lived in the same house from birth 'til the time they left for college. I have others whose parents, like mine, moved  at least a few times before they finally left on their own.

People ask me where I'm from and I always just want to kind of take breath. "Where I'm from." Invariably I give the cliff notes version and answer that I was born in Portland and grew up in Los Angeles. And that's the house I grew up in. I moved out of that house in LA and on back to Oregon even before I had started high school, before I could drive. But I had my first broken heart there, my first cigarette, my first alcohol. For me that's pretty much the definition: It's not girls, drugs, alcohol, cars, or work. It's not a thing. The house you grow up in is the place you come to realize you are done being a kid. Not that I wasn't still a kid. No, in fact, I was very much still a kid. But a kid who was ready to step out of childhood, to be older, to be old enough.

It wasn't until a few years after leaving LA and that house I grew up in that I came to have grown-up experiences. A real girlfriend who could be a friend and with whom I could experience a real relationship. A real job where I could actually work, make money, and get fired. A real car I could drive around and grind up the clutch without having anyone to apologize to.

It would be several years after leaving the house I grew up in before I would have a vision of where I was headed and what I wanted to do. But the seeds were planted in that house I grew up in. Turns out those seeds took 40 years to produce a mature plant. But still healthy. And still growing. And, I like to think, still blooming.