- CAPITALISM IN PLACE
- GALLERIES
- Unhoused City
- Transnational City
- Racialized City
- Greenwashed City
- Georgia Heritage
- Mississippi Heritage
- Florida Heritage
- Roadside Heritage
- New Mexico Desertscapes
- California Waterscapes
- New York Landscapes
- New York Streetscapes
- Imagining Bel Paese
- Revisiting Rome
- Staging Emilia-Romagna
- Consuming Milan
- ¿Auténtica Oaxaca?
- Authentique Quebec?
- ¿Auténtica Cuba?
- Authentic New Orleans?
- In Progress: Jacksonville
- CONTACT
PLACE: THE VALUE OF HOME PART 4
Dad had given in, whether voluntarily or under duress I don't know. But far from settling the home issue once and for all, the purchase of the Oceanside house brought to the surface a basic question that had lain dormant when Chuck and Mary were in the prime of life, pursuing their dreams, with nothing but time and endless horizons in front of them. Now they were age 73 and 69 respectively, so there was a good chance that this would be the last home they would ever own. Both of them must have understood that the homeownership escalator was more than likely going to stop here, in Oceanside. This reckoning with time invested the question I am referring to with a sense of urgency that human beings often feel when they realize that the clock is running out: what is the value of home?
Mom wanted a comfortable home which was close to the beach, where the four sons, their wives and children, or however many of them happened to be in town, could gather for special occasions—a grand total of fifteen people in 1999, all of whom lived in California except for Allyson, Brendan and me. It would be a place for meals, conversations, celebrations, parties, throwing flank steaks on the grill and watching Notre Dame football on TV, which was elevated to ritual status in a family that had long since fallen away from the Catholic church but retained a residual sense of Irish Catholic identity. And drinking, needless to say; after all, we were all Steffens.
Dad had no objections to any of this, as he genuinely enjoyed being with and entertaining his kids, grandkids and daughters-in-law, the latter of whom formed a tightly knit sorority of participant observers, honorary Steffens, whatever that is worth.
But as he envisioned it, the Oceanside house, in addition to being a place for an elderly couple to live and stage family events, should shine a bright light on the strivings of Chuck and Mary, now coming down the final stretch of life—the home stretch, as it were. Dad had no sooner set eyes on the house and, above all, its unfinished "activity room," which seemed like a blank canvas in search of a painter, than his thoughts turned to gutting the whole place and redoing it from the inside out. Most sensible people would have thrown in the towel on major home remodeling after experiencing the kind of financial disappointments which Chuck and Mary suffered when they took a bath on the sale of their previous two homes in Covina and Palm Springs. But not Dad. Like a bloodied prize fighter who has been on the mat in the first two rounds but answers the bell for the third, Dad proposed to undertake another home makeover, putting you know who in charge of the project. That's right, James Callahan, designer to the stars and the Sultan of Brunei, was back on the payroll. Dad had lived in a Callahan trophy house, and by God he intended to die in one.
Years later, when Mike was going through Chuck and Mary's financial records, he came across a file folder to which Mom had attached a post-it note itemizing the expenses of Callahan's Oceanside job. He recalls the bill totaling somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.3 million. To put this very large number in context, let's consider for a moment some other numbers. In 1999 Chuck and Mary sold their Palm Springs house for $355,000 and bought the Oceanside house for $370,000. Fourteen years later, in 2013, when they were preparing to move into an assisted-living facility, the Oceanside home went on the market and brought $675,000. You do the numbers: over a million dollars went up in smoke in the course of buying, remodeling and selling the Oceanside property. Dad was heart-broken by the sale price. He told me when the property was first listed that he was going to hire a professional photographer to do a full layout of the house, which he seemed certain would find its way into Architectural Digest or some such glossy magazine. Magical thinking. "Doesn't anyone know that this is a James Callahan house?" Mark remembers him saying as he waited for the bids that never arrived. Thus came to a fitting close Chuck and Mary's long-time practice of buying homes, fixing them up and selling them for a loss.
Why did Mom, the invisible presence, leave behind this this paper trail for one of her sons to find and another to write about? She was not on board with the project, certainly not as it began to spin out of control financially, and create emotional stress, strain and open conflict at home. Perhaps the note was her way of recording her dissent. Fed up by the delays and cost overruns, as well as by the bad blood that seemed to be spilling all over his pet project, Dad hauled Callahan into small claims court and sued him over some faulty accessory in the guest bedroom. This was a squabble over nickels and dimes compared with the total bill, but it registered Dad's state of mind as frustration turned into something akin to sorrow when the house went up for sale and was greeted with a big yawn by prospective buyers. The judge ruled against him and in favor of Callahan, suspecting, I am willing to bet, that the case before him was driven by deep-seated psychological issues that called for therapeutic rather than legal intervention.
From start to finish the Oceanside finale brought all the contradictions of the homeownership escalator to a head. It was a slow-moving trainwreck.
Before Alzheimer's and stroke cleaned the slate, Chuck and Mary had come face-to-face with the unanswered question underlying their dream of homeownership, the dream that brought them together and kept them together. What was a home? For Mom it was a space in which to live. For Dad it was this plus one more thing: a space in which a man could see material evidence of how far he had come and how much he had achieved. This space was the ultimate proof of adequate manhood.
This sounds like the end of the story, but it's not. The Chuck and Mary story has one final chapter left, in which Mom slips away from those who loved her, neuron by neuron, while reborn Dad undergoes his final metamorphosis to emerge as redeemed Dad. I hesitate to use the word "redeemed" because of its Come-to-Jesus associations, but I believe it fits the case at hand. You be the judge.
The first serious signs of Mom's descent into Alzheimer’s appeared around the time I took the picture above, in which she is collecting her polished beach rocks, and the previous picture from the last section, in which she sits alongside Dad at the dining room table. Dad has his signature cup of black coffee, while Mom keeps her ever-watchful eye on the world that revolved around him. I wonder now if she could read what she is looking at so intently over Dad's shoulder or if she is just content to share a quiet moment with her husband on one side, and her son across the table with his camera.
Dad did the best he could to care for Mom at home, eventually hiring 24-7 help as she became less and less mobile. As the emotional pressures of caregiving intensified, causing him on occasion to lose his patience and temper, he knew that the time had come to stop drinking. Drawing inspiration from one of his four sons who had called it quits a few years earlier, in 2007 Dad attended his first AA meeting at the Oceanside Moose Lodge # 1325. When my recovering-alcoholic brother was in town, the two of them would get up bright and early and head over to the Moose Lodge, after which they retired to Don's Country Kitchen across the street for breakfast and lots of coffee. Father and son became brothers in sobriety. Neither could have stuck it out without the other. I am proud to say that Dad never had another drink before his death, and that my brother remains clean and sober to this day.
When Dad made the decision to sell their home and put Mom in a nearby assisted-living facility, he had to empty out the house. He crated up the two antiques remaining from the French period—the black commode mentioned earlier and a terracotta statue, attributed to Clodion, of a bacchant and bacchante in a wine-fueled embrace—and sent them back to Abell Auction, closing the door once and for all on the home-decorating phase of the marriage. Then he cleared out his closet and tossed his entire wardrobe into a dumpster, right down to his last pair of socks and his eye-popping collection of bikini briefs.
When Chuck and Mary left the last house they would call their own, they took little more than the clothes on their backs. They would be traveling light from now on.
If it had been anyone else, I would have chalked up such behavior to shock, grief and trauma. After all, here was a man beginning the process of saying goodbye to his companion of sixty-six years. But there was a method to his madness. Dad had always subscribed to the doctrine that the best way of dealing with life's ups and downs is to make a clean break and never, ever look back.
As you have probably surmised, I had an edgy relationship with Dad, one that was balanced precariously between respect and love on one side, and hair-trigger male ego on the other—mostly mine, to speak truthfully. On one memorable, alcohol-infused night when Mom was not present to keep the peace because she was helping with the arrangements for Mike and his fiance Mary's wedding in Petaluma, a nice little town nestled in the Sonoma County wine country, I mouthed off to Dad about his so-called Greatest Generation and its hypocritical sense of white entitlement. He hit me across the chin with a kitchen bar stool. There was a lot of blood. I remember him saying a few seconds later, "Charlie, this is something you'll never forget," and then he complimented me for not raising my hand in anger or retaliation.
Dad was right about not forgetting, though I very much doubt that he imagined his son would write about the incident or that a complete stranger like yourself would be reading about it now. And Dad was also right about my response; it would never occur to me in a thousand years to strike my father. What I wanted at that moment was for him to strike me so that I could show him that at least one of his sons could take his best punch. Crazy, right? Adolescent, right? But that's how it was. When the air cleared and we both sobered up, Dad drove me down to his office a few blocks away and stitched up my face so that I would look half-way presentable the very next day when Mike and Mary said their vows. A few hours later we were on a flight to San Francisco.
Looking back on it, I believe what really stung him was my insinuation that he had gotten a handout, a gift he hadn't really earned and maybe didn't deserve. In Dad's mind, he worked hard for everything he had, unlike a lot of other men who, he believed, depended on handouts, his handouts in particular. Did these inadequate, incompetent freeloaders include his four sons? Did they include me? From the time I was a teenager this question hung in the air whenever we were together, like the musky, testosterone scent of an old-school boxing gym.
It was Mike who phoned to tell me about Dad and the dumpster. I don't remember being overly concerned. The old man's okay, I told myself. He just needs a little time and space to adjust to the new reality.
As part of this adjustment, Dad did something remarkable, which I will venture to call redemptive. Not for the first or last time in my life did I realize how much I underestimated the nobility of his character, if that's not too melodramatic a way of putting it. Say what you will about him, I said to myself, the SOB did look after his own. You see, my father wasn't yet ready to let go of his wife, nor would he ever be. The place where he planned to put Mom had an available two-bedroom apartment. After making some inquiries, Dad learned that the management had no objection, none at all, to collecting double rent from an Alzheimer's patient and her high-functioning, low-maintenance eighty-six-year old soul mate.
Dad moved into memory-care with Mom.
Mom rapidly lost the ability to walk and speak, feed and clean herself. A "vegetable" by the end, to put it bluntly. An angel brigade of underpaid women from Mexico, Guatemala and the Philippines cared for her, assisted by Dad who could come and go as he pleased, running errands to get whatever she needed. Surrounded on all sides by cognitive decay and disrepair, and separated a good part of the day and all night from the outside world by a heavy door that locked automatically to keep patients like Mom from wandering off, Dad soldiered on. He set up his computer and microscope on a desk in his bedroom, where he continued to read slides and operate his dermatopathology practice.
The car keys were his best friend. Every other Saturday, Dad fired up his Toyota and drove from Oceanside to his former clinic in Palm Desert to read slides for his colleagues performing Mohs surgery. Two hours there, two hours back. A brutal commute, even for an alert and cautious driver. But alert and cautious were the last words anyone would use to describe Dad when he got behind the wheel. This hearing-impaired octogenarian was never happier than when he was playing Puccini's La Bohème at full blast on the car stereo while belting out "Che gelida manina" in his best Italian. With Dad at the helm, the Toyota was a bel canto missile streaking across the hills, shrublands and desert wastes of his beloved Southern California.
We tried to convince him to surrender the car keys. Not a chance. Each time I came out to see my parents, the Toyota sported a new coat of dents, scratches and dangling side view mirrors. It started looking more and more like my face after our brawl thirty-eight years earlier. (Now who sounds like a private dick out of a Mickey Spillane novel?)
But that was Dad. Speed demon and opera lover. Hardhead and healer.
Four years later, in 2017, came the massive stroke that grounded Dad for good. He now joined Mom on the receiving end of the healing arts. No more reading slides or running errands to fetch adult diapers for Mom. No more daily workouts at his gym. No more morning walks on Carlsbad Beach. No more quiet time sitting on his favorite park bench that offered panoramic views of the Pacific Ocean. On that bench, he seemed truly at peace with himself, a copy of the LA Times in one hand and a cup of bad coffee in the other, both courtesy of the local 7-Eleven on Carlsbad Drive.
The two love birds now shared a perch in another skilled-nursing ward, this one nested in the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains. The facility was located in Eagle Rock, not far from downtown LA, where William Anthony Steffen and Marie Early married and began their life together a century earlier, where Steffen Flowers opened its doors in 1929, where Dad grew up dreaming his American dream. Chuck and Mary now slept in identical hospital beds, separated by a few feet.
Mom had no idea where she was, as best I could tell. (I said she was a vegetable, but how can you know for sure?) As for Dad, he was often in panic mode after the stroke, thinking he had misplaced his wife somewhere, on a street corner he vaguely remembered or in the booth of one of their favorite restaurants.
“Where’s your mother? I can’t find her.”
“She’s right here, Dad, in the next bed. She’s fine. Don’t worry.”
That’s the way things were at the end. “Mush brain” is how Dad sometimes described his crippled mental state. In these lucid moments, which seemed to come from out of nowhere, his black Irish humor flashed its teeth. One day, when Dad complained about the facility being a "dump," Dan replied, "Believe it or not Dad, this place got a top rating."
Dad locked him in his sights, and said, "Not."
My brothers and I divided up the job of monitoring our parents during their final days. Mark, who lives in Torrance, an hour-drive away if there was no traffick, was on point. Dan in Thousand Oaks, another hour drive, was on call in case of an emergency. Mike continued to oversee our parents' financial and legal affairs from his Bay Area base in Fremont. I did my bit by catching a flight from Atlanta to LA every other month. My home away from home was a Comfort Inn on Colorado Boulevard, close to the nursing home, where I'd spend a week powwowing with the brothers and visiting my parents. Visiting is a euphemism. Holding vigil is more like it. The angels fed Mom her lunch and dinner, I fed Dad.
Their bodies were cremated and their ashes entombed in a cemetery wall at San Luis Rey de Francia, one of the original Spanish missions in California. San Luis Rey is a lovely spot located a few miles from my parents' last home in Oceanside. It is also an active community of Franciscan friars. The church and grounds are seeded with San Damiano crosses in honor of the order's founder, Francis of Assisi, who is everyone's first-ballot Hall of Fame favorite saint. I'm looking at one such cross right now, which hangs in my home study. I purchased it at the mission gift shop on my most recent visit. Not sure when, or if, I'll return.
Allyson says, "You'll be back."
Mom. Carlsbad Beach. Oceanside. 2007