Why We Loved Our Rooming House

After the tornado of 2006, we walked around town to see the wreckage. St. Pat’s Church: gone. A hundred years of genuflecting and chanting Latin responses: “Dominus vobiscum.“ Et cum spiritu tuo.” I remember a basin filled with holy water, which my mother said was unhygienic. A friend claimed she had drunk a little and was none the worse for it. Later, when the Mass was translated into English, I lost interest in the church. But when I taught at a Catholic school, my students learned to recite the Pater Noster and Ave Maria.

By 2006, most of the schools had stopped offering Latin, and we were also living through Climate Change. Perhaps a Pater Noster now and then would not have hurt. The tornado took a sharp turn southeast and uprooted a gazebo in the park, ripped a roof off a sorority, and then tipped over and smashed several houses on Iowa Ave.

But I was so happy when I saw the old boarding house on Iowa Ave. was intact!

It wasn’t exactly a boarding house, though I love to call it that. We roomers shared a kitchen in the attic, next to an artist’s room. When you share a kitchen, you get acquainted fast. You make lots of small talk and share occasional treats. We were an eclectic group: a dancer, an engineer, a couple of art students, an education major, a mystery man who was never there, and me. And we formed a kind of loose community.

How often does a group of strangers bond like that? Fate must have gathered us together. This was the way humans were supposed to live, with humor, kindness, and tolerance.

I wasn’t home much, but I was there to make tea for the dancer after she had an abortion . Likewise, she made tea for me when I was strung-out from insomnia. But perhaps I was fondest of the education major, who was smart, athletic, altruistic, and entirely without ego. She introduced me to the “hot pot,” which you plugged in to boil water for your tea. She also shared her space blanket when we sunbathed on the roof. (I got a terrible sunburn, though.)

Often we gathered on the engineer’s balcony. He had the fanciest room: actually two rooms, one of which was filled with shelves of tools. Sometimes he invited us up for cheap beer. I was lucky to have seen the Room for Rent sign. I wasn’t around much, but it was a peaceful house.

Was it the house itself? Some kind of a portal to generosity?

It was chance. It was luck.

And a very happy time in my life.