Rooms. 

How many rooms have I worked in, lived in, stayed in? Thousands is my guess. If you take a decade on the road at two hundred nights away per year that’s 2000 hotel rooms, give or take a few hundred, and that’s only one decade. That’s my story. But there are many people, so I’m told, that remember every single room they’ve ever lived in, or at least every house. Either they have exceptional memories or they haven’t moved much, as in from house to house…room to room, town to city to bigger city and back. 

The rooms of childhood I can feel still ; the rickety walkway to the back door, which I think was the only door we used. That’s the first house I remember, standing with my chin level to the seat of the kitchen chair, tasting some buttery substance I found on a spoon on the floor. I can see it in front of me, hair and dust and god-knows-what, I remember it was wretched, I remember crying. 

The living room was dark brown linoleum., shining under the gaily wrapped gifts covering it on Christmas morning…and my Mother’s shimmering red house coat, her kimono she called it.  And I remember standing looking out the screen door with my mother, a summer rain and the smell of the old wood pile, damp and organic. 

I remember playing in the backyard when angry voices drew my attention to the screen door just in time to see a salesman come exploding out of it, my Dad’s right hand launching him from the collar. Mom never had the heart to turn them away…Dad, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoyed bouncing them out the door. 

Yeah, rooms. 

I’ve seen a lot of them. 

I seem to have been on the move most of my life. That little four room house gave way to The Pink House when I was five, I think. It was no larger, just a different shaped space… square, and instead of offering indoor plumbing it offered an outhouse and a rain barrel. That living room floor leaves a reddish hue in my memory, maybe paint, maybe old linoleum; it was partitioned with a curtain to form separate sleeping quarters for me and my two brothers. My Dad fashioned an indoor potty in the only closet, which was in my parents bedroom. There where piss-pots under the beds in the kids room. 

She had him paint it Pink, the house that is, (I capitalize because that’s the shade of pink it was), a bright hot Pink…with white gables. It was on a huge corner lot next to Dr. Watson’s house. 

One more move in Dawson Creek, more rooms, three upstairs. To the left were two sets of bunk-beds, all occupied, to the right Lil’ Albert, now a teenager, finally got his own room… and in the middle was an actual play room. The living room was dark blue paint, more dark brown linoleum, Mom still wearing the same satiny red kimono. The kitchen walls were bright yellow masonite panels of fake tiles, the four burner gas stove had an oven. My mother’s quarter-pound christmas doughnut was conceived and brought forth from that very stove;  my parents still kissed in front of us. We lived there until I was twelve.