Room For Rent

by Jeff Baker

Norby, Kansas wasn’t too far away from where we all lived but I hadn’t been through there in a while. But with our son going off to College I figured we ought to. It was one of Max’s weekends to work so it was just Scott and me. He was wearing his t-shirt that said “My Other Dad Is Gay Too” and we were both talking about his starting College in another month.

“Okay,” I said. “Right after college I lived here for about a year-and-a-half.”

“Yeah, I know, Dad.” Scott said, not that interested. “We’ve been through here before and you mentioned it.”

“But I don’t think I actually showed you,” I said turning down the main street. “Back in the Eighties I lucked-into this job working out of the warehouse down the street here. But it wasn’t in the same town I was living in, I was about ten miles away…”

“At Diggs College,” Scott said. “Yeah, you told me. You know, we play Diggs in basketball every…”

“Anyway,” I said. “One of the guys told me about what he said was ‘a great apartment’ not too far from the warehouse.” I pulled over to the curb and pointed across the street.

There was a line of two-story buildings, most with shops in the basement and upstairs windows looking out on the street.

“You lived next to that old firehouse?” Scott said staring.

“Nope,” I said grinning. “I lived IN that old firehouse!”

“You’re kidding!” Scott gasped.

I shook my head. “True!” I said. “They’d opened up the new firehouse at the edge of town a few years earlier and this one stood vacant until they turned the upstairs floors into apartments. I got the one right next to the fire tower.” I pointed at the little tower with windows all around that stuck out over the building. “It was cheap.”

“Did you ever, you know, slide down the fire pole?” Scott asked, sounding like an excited five-year-old.

“They’d taken that out,” I said with a laugh. “But they had stairs leading to the back entrance. There was another apartment on the ground floor which had a kitchen from the firehouse days.”

“So, you couldn’t park your car in there?”

“Believe it or not, we parked our cars in the old garage right next to it.” I said. “Only cost ten bucks extra a month.” I smiled at the memory. “I could walk to work, even when it was snowing and if I needed groceries the store was actually just a block down the street. And if I didn’t feel like trying to cook there was a…uh, restaurant across the street right next to where the used bookstore was.”

I thumbed at the building just a door down from where we were parked. I saw the neon sign.

“Yeah, what was your beer tab?” Scott said.

I smiled. “Not much. But there were weekends and days off where I’d go into the bookstore and get something by Asimov and sit and have a sandwich or a bowl of chips.” I was smiling with a memory now.

“Was that where you met Max?” Scott asked.

“Oh no,” I said. “That was in Wichita and he was working at the place I went in.”

“Wow,” Scott said.

“Main reason I brought you down here,” I said. “First, to show you where I lived almost thirty years ago. Second, to make sure you don’t ever move into a crummy, poorly heated dump like that!”

We both laughed.

And I remembered stringing an extension cord up to the tower where Robbie Silverman next door had put up a Christmas tree and going outside to watch it as the snow fell. Somewhere I had a couple of pictures.

“But I wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” I said. I grinned at our son. “C’mon, let’s go home.”

—end—