In My Room

The Blake homestead went on the market in December and was sold last month.

My Mom has moved to a senior apartment complex and loves it. It was a logical decision whose time had come. My wife, Lorie, and I enjoyed moving her belongings and helping her set up her new home. It was walking through the empty house with the realtor later that got to me.

All those memories! I only lived there for three years, but what amazing years they were. We moved there in 1965, when it was an 8' x 26' mobile home. I slept on the sofa that first winter, and space was at a premium. When the weather warmed up, Dad and I built on an addition that more than doubled the size of our home. There are nails there that I drove, and ceiling that I helped hang. Half of the addition became my room, and we finished that part first. I was eager to have my own space, and we ran a couple of extension cords out there, along with a space heater. With a light to read by, and a portable record player, I was in heaven.

That same year we added a fourth member to the Blake family, a black and white puppy that I named Seymour. We had lived in an apartment for several years, and I had not had a pet since I was a young boy in Maine. Seymour became my constant companion. He enjoyed rolling around in the leaves and chasing the neighborhood cats. Every morning Dad would wake me up by opening the door to my room and letting him jump on my bed. We all loved Seymour.

We eventually finished the addition properly with heat, electricity, and furniture. During my high school years that room became my after-school fortress, which I emerged from only for meals and television. I devoured the novels of Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, Andre Norton, Arthur C. Clark, and Isaac Asimov. At my corner desk I wrote poetry. I worked late into the night assembling and painting Aurora monster model kits (the Bride of Frankenstein turned out especially well), and I'm sure inhaling all those glue and paint fumes did me a world of good. My cousin David West turned me on to scary old movies on Saturday night's Chillerama on channel 12 out of Providence. I would throw Star Trek parties on Friday nights and serve ice cream to my guests (other lonely guys without girlfriends). Shows like Gilligan's Island were the likely source of erotic dreams about Ginger and Mary Ann (and sometimes both!). My father had an old Hallicrafter radio with headphones that he gave to me, and I would fall asleep each night listening to stations like WKBW in Buffalo, New York. More than anything in those years, I loved music.

 In 1966, I purchased my first stereo record player at W. T. Grant's. I paid for it on what must have been the most lenient installment plan of all time: a dollar a week.  My room was always filled with music. My friends Dick Charron, Phil Beauchene, and Allen Beebe would visit, and we would jam along with bongos, badly-tuned guitars, and adolescent voices (I give my parents a lot of credit for suffering through that!) to the records of the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary, Donovan, and the Kingston Trio. And then there were the Beach Boys. Although I loved all of those gifted artists, I knew I could never be them. But the songs written by the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson spoke directly to me. I may not have been a surfer, but when the Boys sang about teen angst and not knowing what life was all about, I knew that Brian and I had caught the same incredible wave. He even knew about my room.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFS6C9OxNtM

There's a world where I can go and tell my secrets to

In my room, in my room

In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears

In my room, in my room

Do my dreaming and my scheming, lie awake and pray

Do my crying and my sighing, laugh at yesterday

Now it's dark and I'm alone, but I won't be afraid

In my room, in my room, in my room

[Copyright 1963, Irving Music, Inc., BMI]

Surrounded by woods, our yard was a great place to pretend I was the great Carl Yastrzemski, lefty-swinging my Wiffle bat and launching many home runs over the big rock at the end of the lawn. That rock was also an obvious spot to ponder the mysteries of the universe, and Seymour and I spent many an hour doing just that. On very rare occasions we would share our rock with special guests, like my cousin Bob McLellan.

After all those years in my room, I eventually went to college, got married, and moved into an apartment in town. But I still considered the "homestead" to be home. I visited often. Seymour did not make the move with me, as he had passed on by then. When I visited I almost always expected to see him come running to greet me.

Dick Charron and I started a band with a new college friend, Phil Marchesseault. Like everyone else, we wanted to be the Beatles, and like everyone else, we weren't the Beatles. But not for lack of trying! We decided that with a few alterations my parents' tool shed would make an ideal practice and recording studio. We enlisted the aid of my father-in-law, Dave Perotti, who was a great electrician, and we soundproofed the interior walls. From the outside today, it looks no different than it did in 1970. We kept calling it "The Shack," which is what we ended up naming our group. Our music was about as good as the name implies.

"The Shack"

Looking back on all of the years that these buildings and land were home, I find it hard to say goodbye to all of the memories (more good ones than bad, thankfully). There are ghosts of my Dad and my dog, movies in my head of family cookouts, and so much musical discovery. I never got to play for the Red Sox, or jam with the Beach Boys, and leaving this place for good feels like abandoning so many worthy dreams. My room will be no more. I wish I had some photos of what the room looked like when I lived there, but here it is today.

There is a rumor that the new owner plans to clear the land and build a new house. I will keep the image in my mind of what it looked like when I was a young man. The good old days, when all I really needed was a room to call my own, a big rock to think on, and a dog who thought I was all the things I could ever dream of being.

"Rock Dog"