We just had a most unusual visitor.
I pulled into the garage after the weekly library trip, ready to unload the crate, when I turned and saw, to me out of nowhere, an older man walking down the driveway. About my height (which means short), well-dressed in a Sunday casual kind of way. He said, “Do you live in this house?” I said yes. He said, “My dad built this house.”
Now I saw that a minivan was parked in the street, and a woman got out of it and came forward. They were in town from Connecticut for the weekend, attending his 50th high school reunion from what was then the one Catholic high school in town, Central Catholic. It no longer exists, but two others, on the north and south, both named after bishops, have taken its place.
He just retired from teaching high school English and drama, was a Notre Dame graduate, and indeed had attended the Catholic grammar school which Joseph now attends.
He asked if he could take a look around – I welcomed it, because I had some questions. (I also was thankful that we had a bit of company this weekend – Michael’s friend Tony in from New York, down to then proceed with him to the Colts/Bucs game – so I had, er,  cleaned.)
So they looked around, and he told me bits and pieces of the story of its construction. His dad had been a chemical engineer, and very inventive. There’s a pillar holding up a little roof over the doorstep, and when his father originally built it, he had installed a switch in the pillar, wired to open the garage door from the driver’s side of the car. (Long gone for us – it was all manual when we got here). The room that is now my study, in the front of the house, he had built as a music room – listening to, not making. He had built in a music system, and it was his place to listen to his LP’s – his father had been a concert pianist, hence the love of music. The man’s wife told me that her husband still had his father’s LP’s, which were all marked, in the middle, with a list of dates on which he, the man’s father, had listened to each disc.
There is a lot of built-in cabinetry in the living and dining room, and it is all painted white – I had always wondered if it was that way originally, and he said yes, it was. Another major mystery for me was this:
  
It’s the interior of this:

The tile-like disk is on the inside left of this cabinet which itself is inbetween the stairs on the right and the living room to the left. The disk doesn’t show on the outside, and there’s not even any impression of it – there must be a thin layer of plywood or something over it. I could never figure this out. Why was this disk there? Why was it only visible on the inside?
Well, it turns out, the gentleman’s audiophile father had originally built this cabinet to contain a built-in speaker and the cabinets which extend back into the living room contained the rest of the system. So I suppose when ownership changed and the speaker was removed, this decorative element was inserted, and then that was covered up.
He went about the house pointing out various features to me and his wife – the laundry chute, the cabinet beside the fireplace which also has a door on the opposite side, in the garage, intended for wood. He asked if we used it, and I said I think we had tried but it drew bugs. He nodded and said, “Well it seemed like a good idea at the time.”
He remarked that they’d had a shuffleboard court in the driveway, and – this was very funny – as he looked out the back windows to our neighbors in that direction, he said to us, “We always called it the rich neighbor’s house.” Which is almost exactly what we call it – dumbed down a little ’cause we’re products of the 60’s and 70’s – so we just call it the rich people’s house.
But the basic reality remains the same!
It was a fine little visit, although about 30 minutes after they left, I kicked myself – hard – because I remembered we actually do have the original plans for the house. It probably wouldn’t have been a great idea to give them to him, because someone might need them someday,  but he probably would have so enjoyed looking through them. I actually felt really bad about not thinking of it, but he did seemed to pleased enough by the walk-around in the house he grew up in (he moved in 1963), with a little boy who sleeps in the room he slept in and even attends the same school he did as a boy.
Before he left, he pointed to a built-in cabinet in the dining area. “My mother always kept African violets there,” he said.
I think that tomorrow, a trip to the gardening center is in order. Don’t you?