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House on Wheels The house I grew up in was a sprawling brick affair with a four-car garage, a fenced-in patio, and wide lawns of fescue that stretched off on either side of a concrete driveway that more than one neighbor half-jokingly described as “a parking lot.” It was an impressive house, to be sure, but also a little odd. That oddity had to do, at least in part, with the neighborhood where the house was located, which was full of much smaller, two- and three-bedroom bungalows compared to which our five-bedroom house looked like a bloated mansion. But even more than this, the essential strangeness of the house had to do with the fact that it was built piecemeal, with additions and other renovations coming along every three or four years, whenever my mother had managed to put money aside or my father happened to be seized by some new idea he would sketch on the back of an envelope before committing the entire family to its execution. “Remodeling”—that’s how my parents referred to these seasons of furious activity, which required the family to huddle, refugee-like, in some semifinished part of the house (usually the basement) while the parts undergoing renovation were sealed off with plastic sheeting or blankets tacked into place with framing nails. In some respects, the years of my childhood were filled with little else but these fantastical and interminable “remodeling projects”—or at least that’s the way it felt to me at the time. With few exceptions, all of the work involved in these projects was done by my father and older brothers, although sometimes a too-curious neighbor who stopped by to remark on our progress would be pressed into service for an hour or two, maybe even an entire weekend. In this way, my father silenced any potential outcry against the use of power tools late at night or in 1 4 ❍ T h e T o w n the predawn hours of Saturday and Sunday mornings. To complain too loudly was to risk being swept up in the madness that defined and set us apart as a family. The house I have described as a bloated mansion (and I can already hear both of my parents’ objections to this description ) began its life as a three-room shack without electricity or running water in the high wheat country twenty miles north of Dodge City. That’s where it sat, in the corner of an enormous wheat field, when my uncle Harold bought it in the late 1940s. Of course, Harold being Harold, the house didn’t remain that way for long. During the decade or so he and my aunt Marilyn lived there, they doubled its size, adding two new bedrooms and a kitchen, as well as electricity and modern plumbing. By the time my parents acquired the house in the late 1950s, it had the look and feel of your average single-story, three-bedroom, clapboard-sided farmhouse—nothing fancy, perhaps, but clean and serviceable enough. That’s pretty much where things stood when I was brought home from Dodge City’s St. Anthony’s Hospital in the late summer of 1964. Not long after this, in 1965 or 1966, my mother, who had grown up three hours away in Wichita, began to complain about the eighty-mile-a-day, round-trip commute she made on bad country roads taking my older brothers to and from Sacred Heart Cathedral School in Dodge City. As more than one neighbor pointed out, a bus would have picked the boys up and carried them the twenty miles to a public school on the north side of Dodge, but this my mother, a Catholic convert, would not hear of. So long as there was a God in heaven looking down on her, she was determined to remain blameless in His eyes in all matters relating to the exercise of her faith. If she had to drive eighty miles a day to accomplish that, then so be it. However , if she didn’t have to make that terrible and wasteful drive, well then, all the better. As it happened, my father had reasons of his own to move to town; he and Harold had just bought a salvage yard on the south side of Dodge City, and running this business would soon be a part of my father’s daily routine. [3.135.205.164] Project MUSE...

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