In places like Davis, California, some other yearning is stirring for a neighborhood, for proximity, for a front porch. Houses create us as much as we create our houses. Every child knows this, maybe even better than the adult. We are shaped by rooms and ceilings. Windows are our eyes.
Doors open our mouths to the street.
A few years after our family moved away, the house on 39th Street got torn down. The entire East side of the street, where the Jones lived and the Battels and the Hardings and old Mr. Newman, all the houses, and ours, disappeared for a parking lot for Mercy Hospital, rows of cars now where once there was an apricot tree in the backyard, the shiny Cadillac, where once I sat on the porch dreaming of my own car, someday. I'm Richard Rodriguez. All Rights Reserved.