It was 1989 and I had ended my first marriage and had bought a house built in 1929 by a local banker. Presumably before October 29, of that year. I had purchased a small 1940’s shingled Cape Cod Cottage and a 1940’s ranch styled home in my first marriage and I grew up in a 1920 Craftsman in one of the central historic neighborhoods in Merced. I was in love with older homes and given modest carpentry and masonry skills, did renovations in each.
The 23rd Street home is known as a Spanish Colonial Revival as was a popular style of construction in California during the decades between the first and second World Wars. It was an attractive home with an asymmetrical facade, a stepped or varied tiled roofline, and stucco exterior. I had always loved that style since visiting Scotty’s Castle in Death Valley. I was now in a position to use this transformative period of my life to reinvent myself.
Arches frame the rectangular paned windows that match the arched entry and the niche detail inset into the portico. There is an arched gate that buttresses the western side of the house and a gated driveway, narrow for the time period of autos, that leads to a detached garage on the eastern side of the property. Upon moving in I had central heating and cooling installed and renovated the kitchen and few other interior features preserving the home’s Spanish Colonial theme. I had constructed a fence enclosing the back yard and poured a driveway accessible from the alley where I stored a Coronado 15 and Catalina 22 sailboats. I rehabbed the landscape and later, having remarried, finished a kitchen remodel and constructed a deck off of the back of the house with the help of my two new step-sons, 10 and 4 years old at the time.
I lived in the house for five years, the last as a newlywed. One of the first things I did to the house was to fence the yard where I decided to store my two sailboats when not moored at Lake Yosemite or, in the case of the Catalina 22, being hauled over to Monterey, the San Francisco Bay, or Tomales Bay. Enlisting my father, then a retired cement mason to help with the driveway and a friend Dave Moss, we poured 7 yards of concrete. I pretty much built the fence, singlehandedly over a period of a couple of weeks screwing all of the components together with an early model, Makita cordless drill and chopping with my Craftsman miter saw. I commissioned a 16 foot rolling chain link gate to allow for secured entry and egress. I have incredibly fond memories of how the house helped me leave a marriage, recapture my sense of self, and enter into another marriage, one that lasts until this day.
Some memories are completely unique and not related at all to what a home can come to mean. For instance, one day, when assembling the alley section of fencing, I noticed movement at the far end of the alleyway. It appeared to be something living and making its way, single file and slowly, in my direction. I stepped back to observe 12 peafowls that apparently startled upon noticing me, hopped up onto a fence opposite from my side of the alleyway, then leapt up onto the roofline of a small bungalow, adjacent to the intersection of the alleyway and “I” Street. Mind you, this was in the heart of one of the older Merced neighborhoods, just two blocks from “G” Street, one of the busiest streets in town.
After they all had assembled across the rooftop, one of the marvelously blue throated males, perhaps the alpha, shaking wings with a tail rattle, fanned his glorious train in a semi-circular display, decidedly not for mating purposes, but as a defensive posture having noted me with my mouth agape. Letting out the piercing call for which peacocks are known, declaring to his pride, “it’s time to muster!” And just like that, one by one, they glided back down to the street and continued their solemn march west, disappearing into the horizon — leaving one lesser peacock behind, still holding the Makita.
The ubiquity of cell phones (cameras) wasn’t a thing back then nor did I routinely take a camera with me when working on the fence so I cannot use the Sagan Standard of having extraordinary evidence to prove my seemingly specious claims. But I do have evidence of the beginning of a life I couldn’t imagine while watching peacocks parading down the alley. I suspect I had more in common with that alpha male than I cared to admit — a man freshly unmarried, fanning out a new house, new boats, new life, less in courtship than in some instinctive need to prove I hadn’t come apart.
There are memories that are uniquely meaningful to a home. I built the fence to keep nothing in and nothing out — just something to call mine again. Looking back, I was probably doing my own version of that tail rattle. Fortunately for me, it worked!
I drove by the house today and it is in truly sad condition with peeling stucco, lawn dead, and a junk filled sailboat pad. In fact, it appears to have no maintenance since I sold it 31 years ago. I, on the other hand, have since constructed so many more intimate, sentimental memories, that only continue to make my life, exceptional.
None, however, featuring peafowl…
