Passing

My sisters and I grew up in the corner house on a cul-de-sac at the base of a mountain in a white flight suburb of Los Angeles.  Our house was a faded gold color and there was a brick patio and an olive tree in the front yard.  The numbers on the black mailbox were crooked and dichondra grew on a crescent-shaped lawn.  When I was about seven, my parents had a swimming pool built in our backyard; it was rectangular with blue tile; it kept us tanned every summer for years, and our pet duck was often found floating around above a pile of blurry poop down there at the bottom.

On the bottom floor of our house was a formal living room where my friends and I couldn't run, a den where we watched 'The Brady Bunch' and 'The Six Million Dollar Man,' the kitchen and dining area that I remember were somewhat green, a bathroom where my father listened to talk radio in the morning, a closet where he dropped a water bottle on his foot, and my parents' bedroom which at some time held a black and white patterned pull-out couch where my grandmother slept when she visited us from over the hill.  Upstairs were our rooms: my oldest sister had the biggest room overlooking the pool, my middle sister had the smallest room in the front of the house, and I had the unremarkable room that became remarkable in 1984, when my father consented to painting it purple. 

My father played the piano, but I don't remember this.  My mother was the musical one.  Downstairs in that living room where we couldn't run, there was a stereo that my mother used as often as the sewing machine, and even more as she tired of stitching dresses for three long-haired girls.  My mother played the Beatles, Seals & Crofts, Stevie Wonder, the 'Hair' soundtrack, Barry White, Earth Wind & Fire, War, Carol King, Simon & Garfunkel, Joni Mitchell, and several albums of classical music whose titles I cannot recall.  My mother sang along to everything, and we three girls sang along with her.  I can remember being a child and singing 'Here Comes the Sun' and 'As' from memory.  Music played out to the sidewalk, where my mother pushed me in a stroller and people slowed down to stare at the white-skinned woman and her brown-skinned baby.  I can remember coming home from school and hearing the music before I'd turned the corner.

Yesterday, driving from the Valley to the City, turning the corner toward the freeway, my sister played Michael Jackson's music.  'Man, I cannot believe he's gone!' she said.  Adding, as if she knew him, 'Michael is gone.'

Hearing his music, I thought immediately and viscerally about my childhood home, the gold house on the corner.  The staircase.  The double doors.  The dog.  The sliding glass door I ran into (while closed) the night my parents came home from Tahiti.  The push lawnmower and my father in a white v-neck t-shirt.  The radishes growing in the backyard planter.  And the strawberries, and the peas that grew like a vine up the back fence.  And the juniper bushes that gave me a rash.  And my sisters in bell-bottom pants, singing and dancing to that music, snapping and clapping and sliding around in their socks on the marble floor, and me, the youngest, sitting at their feet, looking up at them, happy.