The street in the photo looking up towards the mountains is the present day view of the street that I grew up on. In my early years, until about when I was seven or eight, it was a dirt road. The road at the end of this street is San Fernando Road, the Old 99 Hwy. Railroad tracks are on the other side of the Old 99. The house I grew up in that my father built is on the left side in the middle of the last block before the highway. The house of Mr. & Mrs. Copp, the prototype for the house in the novel, was further up the road on the right side – it burned down in the late fifties or early sixties. The house of the man I describe as mean was further up the road from our house on the left side. I don’t know what happened to that house.

***

A Tale of Two Houses on the Road, Originally Dirt, That I Grew Up On

On May 22, 2023, I posted about how my mom in her 1947 diary, wrote that she and my dad bought the baby crib and mattress that all of my five sisters and me were to sleep in when we were babies.  As the featured photo for that posting, I used the earliest photo I could find of that crib, one with me in it outside in the warm months of 1951 when I was approaching one-year-old.  In the posting, I mentioned that the house up the street in that photo was the prototype for the house in my novel, “This Old Wooden House”.  The old couple that lived there and my interactions with them were also the inspiration for the old couple in the novel, especially their kindness and friendliness toward my mother, and their gentleness and kindness towards me as a toddler and a young child.  I even use their names as I remember them – Mr. & Mrs. Copp – as the last name of the old couple in the story. 

I loved climbing up the two wooden steps to their front porch where they sat many times it seemed to me and from where they must have greeted my mom and me on our walks before my next sister was born.  I seem to remember Mr. Copp getting another chair from inside the house for my mother to sit on, very welcoming, and so she would sit and talk a bit.  While she talked, I walked about on the porch in front of them all moving about all their legs, openly and without rebuke or scolding, moving within their kindness, as if I was also welcome and perhaps a delight to them.  For they were old and if they had children or grandchildren, I never saw or knew them.

And maybe they just loved children, for on Halloween their doors were open, and they gave gifts of candy and pomegranates from their trees.  I remember one Halloween when I was about seven or eight when we, everyone, was invited into their house.  The inside of the house was like Mr. & Mrs. Copp, pleasant, friendly, welcoming, and old-fashioned.  One of the old-fashioned Halloween things that I had read about, but had never seen before, was a big metal washing tub filled with water and many apples. The Copps invited the children to “bob” for an apple and told us that some of the apples had a nickel or dime or maybe even a quarter in them.

I decided to try, as I wanted a nickel or dime but really the quarter.  I stuck my head in the water trying to get an apple and after a few tries, Mr. Copp kindly coached me, and with his words, I realized I had to chase an apple with my mouth to the bottom wedging it along the rim at the bottom in order to get a bite into it – and I finally did and brought out an apple!  They had a towel and dried off my hair a bit and I ate my apple.  The apple didn’t have a nickel or a dime or anything in it, but that was ok as that was the first, and the only time, I had ever bobbed for an apple and it was interesting and sort of fun – and I’m writing about it now

As it turned out, that Halloween was the last time I remember being in Mr. & Mrs. Copp’s house and having any interaction with them or even seeing them before I became realized they were gone – to me they just disappeared, for one time they were there and the next thing I remember about them maybe a year or even more later, was that they seem to have been gone for a while, as the house was empty with no one ever living there again.  However, I have always remembered them, and their house, and their kindness. 

This was not the same with the house on the opposite side of the then dirt road from them.  That house was a different house, with a very different man, with a very different beginning and end in my heart and mind.  With this house and the man who lived there, I have much different impressions and deeper and more complex thoughts and emotions concerning events near or at the house and the memories and understandings stemming from them.  For the effects of this house, which I never entered, and the man within it upon my thoughts and life as a toddler, as a young person, as a preteen, and even long after the house and the man for me vanished never to intrude or be part of my life again, are only now presently resurrected to a certain extent as I write of this house for the, “Tale of Two Houses”, for my website.

The other house across the road from the Copps as I remember it was smaller than the Copp’s house.  It did have a porch also in front, but in my memory, there were no steps that led up to it.  And I was only near the porch once and that was when I was around twelve – during my last interaction with the house and the man who lived in it.

This house across from the Copps’ house was the last house on our side of the road with a large and very long empty field between the house and San Fernando Road, the old 99.  There was one lot and one house between our lot and this other wooden house, which is where the Byrds lived, Frank and his wife Edith and their dog Daisy, all characters, and nice, friendly, honest, helpful people, and a gentle dog.  They had built their house with a flat roof and when I was young, I always wondered how that worked when we had rain.  Later when I was a teenager, I learned that it did not always work well.

The man who lived in the smaller wooden house was not as old as the Copps, but still old to me, older than my parents were, and he was never a nice man.  When I was very young, I only vaguely remember seeing him from a distance, on the porch standing or sitting.  I also only specifically remember one interaction with this man when I was young, and that was between him and my mom when I was on a walk with my mother as a toddler, perhaps a little older than two, without any younger sisters yet around. 

On this particular walk, my mom was holding my hand and we were walking back to our house, probably from a walk, perhaps just walking back from the 99 up the road, as it seems taking a walk was something my mom liked to do it, and probably needed to do, because at that time we only had one car which my dad took to work, and this was the only way for my mom to get out of the house for a time.  And then when my mom and I had walked past this man’s wooden house, we suddenly stopped in front of his property near the edge of his lot nearest to the lot between his lot and ours.  When I looked up to my mother with inquiring eyes to see why we stopped, she was gazing at something over my head and I turned to see what she was looking at, and I saw all these dark green vines growing high on long trellises – at least two or three rows of them stretching a long way back into this man’s property. 

My mom said that they were blackberries and she may have asked me if I wanted some, which I did, as I always wanted to eat whatever was around and I thought they must be good because my mother thought they were good.  I then remember my mom saying she was going to ask the man – I never knew his name – if she could pick some of the berries.  She may have said to wait for her, which I did, and she left me and for some reason I did not follow her with my eyes to see where she went.

So, I just stood still and waited, as my mother must have gone to the house to talk to the man.  And when you are very young and alone away from a parent, time and the sense of where you are seem to change and I just stood still, and everything around me – the ground, the vines, the dirt, little rocks – were there, but not as separate things, but just part of everything together because I couldn’t see myself and so I was just what I saw and that was how I was there.  When my mom returned, it seemed as if she just entered the time and space again, for just as I didn’t see her leave, I didn’t see her return.

When she came back, she just took my hand and we continued on our way back to our house.  I was a little confused and asked if we were going to pick some blackberries.  I remember thinking that maybe we had to go home first to get something to put them in, and my mom said no, that the man said she had to pay money if she wanted to pick any berries – and however early I learned about money, I always remember us as not having much – and somehow in the way she said it, I could just see his face.  Maybe I had seen him up close before because in my mind, I knew his smile wasn’t nice. 

As we finished walking home, I remember how disappointed I was that I wasn’t going to get any blackberries, which I really didn’t fully understand, as there were probably so many blackberries there on the vines.  And somehow, that did not seem good or right to me.  I did not think that man was nice, and I did not like him, and I sensed my mother was a little down or sad, and perhaps that was also why I didn’t like the man as he was not nice to my mother.

Later in life, I understood that the sight of the blackberries may have reminded her of England, perhaps especially from the time when she was evacuated from London when WWII broke out, and she was living out in the country in Berkhamsted, where the blackberries grew wild and were plentiful.  Then, not receiving any of the blackberries from the mean man may have brought up again the deep homesickness for England and all the things she loved about the English countryside she had felt when she first arrived in California.  And perhaps it also touched upon how much she may have still missed her mother who died in England the year after she arrived in California – her mother’s death providing the money to buy the lot our houses were built upon.

But also somehow even at that time, before I knew my mom was from England – or even what England was – I knew or sensed there was some other connection to the blackberry vines other than just the berries, because through her I already knew that the green of the vines and the rows of them were good to her and made her happy, maybe happier, for just a moment, when we passed them.  And maybe this was why I never heard or knew that man’s name.  There was no reason to know his name, and I never heard his name spoken in our house.

Years later, when I was old enough to ride my bike, I remember riding past the property – I don’t remember looking at the house for that was no longer in my inner self, but I saw that all the berry vines were gone.  They were no longer there.  I told my mother about the vines and she said without any real emotion that the man never picked the berries for himself and that they just went to waste – something she must have known for some time, maybe years – and then she went back on to do whatever she was doing in the house. 

And all of this stuck with me and I thought how the man was really not nice and how mean he was to my mom all these years, and how over those same years, he could have been nice and shared and gave some of the berries to her, to us, and it would have made my mom happy for a time.  He could have shared the berries – we as a family would even have come and picked the berries together – and not just wasted something that we would have enjoyed and always looked forward to receiving.  Then he would have been a good man, a good neighbor, and we would have known and remembered his name, and I would have written about him on these pages in a very different way.  However, there is still more to this tale.

When I was twelve or so, even though I wasn’t big or muscular, I did get big enough and strong enough to push the hand lawnmower to mow our front grass, and I started to mow the grass for my dad.  I don’t think he asked me to mow the grass, and I didn’t do it all the time, but I would mow the grass especially during the summer when I wasn’t in school and had more time.  I liked the smell of the grass after it was mowed.  I always had it seems, and when I was even younger in grammar school, since my bedroom faced the front yard, on weekends when I loved to sleep in, I would smell the aroma of the cut grass coming in through my open windows when my dad mowed the front lawn on Saturday.  Even now, I love the smell of mowed grass and it still reminds me of my father.  My father worked hard taking care of everything around the house; he just fitted in everything that he had to do with the house, with the cars, and with all us kids, which by the time I was twelve, there were six of us, the youngest two.

And so after a while of cutting the front grass, I thought that maybe I could make some money cutting other people’s grass, but all of the other men and fathers on our street seemed to mow their own grass, and the only house I could think of to ask was the man who was not nice.  I had never seen anyone else at the mean man’s house, not a wife, definitely not kids, and never even other people visiting.  But by then, I never really looked at or paid any deliberate attention to the house.  However, as I occasionally road my bike past his property, the sides of my eyes must have registered that sometimes his front grass was overgrown and needed mowing.  So I walked up to his house to ask if he needed someone to mow his grass.

Now at twelve, I was not a big kid and was a bit thin – “rather bony”, as my mom would say when I was even younger – but a nice looking boy with dark brown hair, and I was polite and articulate.  I could at times be very friendly and warm like my father, but then like my mom, I didn’t necessarily put myself out there.  But, I was not shy, and I wasn’t intimidated by adults, but communicated well with them when I had to.  I also possessed my mom’s speech patterns and a faint echo of her English accent.  In a sense, I was not a typical anything.

So, I walked the short distance up to this man’s house and found him sitting on a chair on his front porch.  It is interesting that in my mind I always have this image of him sitting on his front porch with a shotgun held on his lap, which of course he didn’t, but with the spirit he projected, this was a fairly accurate image it seems, as he sat on his porch not to welcome people but to keep people away in a mean way, saying tricky mean things.

He watched me walk the short distance to the porch with a tight smirk more than a smile on his face.  I stopped a few feet in front of the porch and asked him if he needed someone to mow his grass.  He then looked surprised, maybe even startled, and to me, he did something that seemed very strange.

As he told me he mowed his own grass and didn’t need anyone to do it, he didn’t look at me.  Rather he leaned forward and looked down the street towards our house with a sort of confused, discombobulated anxious look upon his face.  He didn’t really look at me for some reason, and I guessed he had had enough of a look at me as I walked up, and I got the feeling he was looking to see where I had come from.  There was something about me that apparently confused him it seemed, and even at that time I think I knew or sensed that he probably knew where I had come from, which house, but once I opened my mouth, I was not what he expected me to be. 

After a moment, I said thank you or okay and perhaps goodbye, being a polite boy, and I turned and left, sensing and knowing, that he was watching me, which made me slightly uncomfortable then – and actually more now as I write about this encounter – as even then I felt an unease about the danger of turning my back on this man and not knowing what he was doing or going to do.  But at the same time, I felt a certain satisfaction verging on smugness, as I knew what had confused this man was all the good things in me my parents had taught me and what they had raised me to be.  I knew I did them good, but I never told them I had asked this man if I could mow his grass.  This interaction is the last time I remember ever seeing this man, though it could just also have been the last time I even glanced at the house, for I have no memory of that wooden house after this encounter with this mean unnamed man.

Many years later – I was probably in my late 50’s – I was interviewing my mom for family history and she told me something that made so much more sense about this man’s behavior and responses to us and to me.  She told me that when she received the inheritance from her English mother in 1947, she and my dad decided to use the money to buy a lot on which to build a house and they saw an ad in the newspaper for lots for sale on the road where my dad eventually built the two houses we lived in.

This unnamed man who wouldn’t give my mom any blackberries, was the owner of a number of lots on the road, and my father wanted to buy the lot next to this man because it was wider than the one that they eventually bought.  However, the man refused to sell it to my father because he told him he didn’t want a Mexican living next to him.

My mom was in her late 70s or early 80s when she told me this very important fact of our family history.  She told me this without anger in her voice, but her tone carried her very appropriate English factual statement of judgement she was known for, tinged with coldness – coldness towards this man who wouldn’t sell them the lot they wanted because he didn’t want a Mexican living next to him – a Mexican American who had fought in the U.S. Army in WWII, a good man who was her faithful husband and the father of their six children.  And this other man – who a few years later with a smirk, told my mom he would only give her some blackberries if she gave him some money for them, even though he did nothing with them, and they went to waste – drying up on the vine or rotting on the ground – eaten by no one, and providing good for no one, including my mother and my entire family, especially my five sisters, one older and four younger, for whom the blackberries would have been a great treat – with just a little sugar sprinkled lightly upon them – a little delicious luxury, that we could not afford as a family – well, he was just a mean little minded man.

And when she told me this, I was surprised she had kept this to herself all these years – maybe to shield us from his meanness, as she probably shielded us from many other hurtful verbal intrusions into our family – but, like wow, I realized that I had been right, I had truly sensed what there really was about this man, and why he was so confused and uncomfortable and stunned when I opened my mouth to speak.  In his mean little mind, I really was nothing as he had expected me to be.  I admired my parents even more.

So, this is the tale of the two houses situated across the original dirt road from each other.  The house where the Copps lived became the model and prototype for the house in the novel, “This Old Wooden House” and because of their kindness and friendliness to my mom and gentleness with me, the good old couple in the novel carry their name, and the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Copp in the novel possess the essential kindness and goodness that I remember of them.

This other wooden house became the model for nothing, and it in essence just vanished from my consciousness for there was nothing good or kind from the house, only meanness with a smirk, and surprise at the goodness of my parents reproduced in their son.

Proverbs 10:7 The memory of the righteous is blessed, But the name of the wicked will rot.

The memory of the Copps in this posting and in my novel is indeed blessed, and although I cannot say that the mean man was wicked, but because of his harmful and perhaps hateful attitude towards my father, and his meanness and lack of simple generosity and grace towards my mom and me and my family, then at least for us, his name does rot along with the blackberries he never gifted my mother or family with.  The berries would have made my mom happier. They would have been a gift, a little luxury, my family, my five sisters and I, would have so enjoyed.  It would also have given me something different and better to remember and write about this man.  My family then might have spoken his name, and I would have known it, and honored it also within these pages.

***

To View All Family Non-Fiction, Please Use the Link Below

Family Non-Fiction – Writing In The Shade Of Trees

To view all posts in the Moments of Seeing & Occasional Pieces, please use the link below.

Moments of Seeing & Occasional Pieces – Writing In The Shade Of Trees