The House on Clydedale Drive

I hadn’t thought about that little house in years. Then I stumbled across a Google Street View image of it — 3154 Clydedale Drive — and suddenly it all came flooding back. Not just memories, but sensations. Smells. Moments that had gone dormant, tripping and tumbling over each other like kids racing down the sidewalk.

And then there was the tornado. One of the most destructive in Dallas history. I was five years old, standing on the driveway, looking straight up into the swirling belly of a funnel cloud. It hadn’t touched down yet, but it was close.

That house was one of thousands thrown up in a postwar boom — a squat, boxy tract home just north of Love Field, built fast and cheap to shelter the growing middle class. Clydedale and the surrounding streets were lined with them, each one a modest stage where entire childhoods were playing out. Soldiers-and-sailors-turned-fathers, homemaker moms, and kids like me — just beginning to figure out the size of the world.

We lived there for only a couple of years — sometime in 1955, I think, until early fall of ’57 — but somehow it burned itself into my wiring. That’s the house where I learned to tie my shoes. I was sitting on the edge of the bed, and my dad knelt in front of me, showing me step by step. He made me do it over and over, just like he did, until my fingers finally remembered. That moment stuck.

It’s also where I learned to ride a bike without training wheels. I remember Dad steadying me, jogging alongside while I wobbled and protested. And then, suddenly, I was riding — on my own. I looked back and there he was, standing in the same spot where he’d let go, arms akimbo, laughing with joy and watching with that quiet pride only a father knows. It was the first time I felt the thrill of independence. The first time I realized he trusted me to move forward on my own.

And then there was the tornado. One of the most destructive in Dallas history. I was five years old, standing on the driveway, looking straight up into the swirling belly of a funnel cloud. It hadn’t touched down yet, but it was close. The sky was that wrong color — greenish and strange — and everything was still. I wasn’t afraid. I was just staring, wide-eyed, not knowing I should’ve been terrified.

I remember getting in trouble for turning away from my breakfast to watch Captain Kangaroo on TV. Mom scolded me for not finishing my cereal, and when I turned back around, the show had ended and the station was shutting down for the day. Only that Indian chief test pattern remained with a high-pitched squeal, followed by nothing but “snow.” Then, just a white dot in the middle of the screen when my dad shut the TV off, yelling at me to turn around and eat my cereal. That dot felt like the world itself was powering down.

Decades later, sometime in the ’80s, I came back, not intentionally, exactly, but to look at a pop-up trailer that was for sale. I didn’t realize where I was until I saw the address. Same house, now painted a royal blue. Out front, the stumps of the mimosa trees my grandfather had planted were still there. Ghosts in the soil. The husband greeted me and I told him I’d once lived there. Over the course of our conversation about my family’s history with the house, I remarked that my dad was working out on Kwajalein — in the Marshall Islands — as a pilot. He looked at his wife, then back at me and said that his wife had grown up on Kwaj. It startled me. It was one of those odd coincidences that seems too precise to ignore. I hadn’t yet visited Dad, but I would within the year.

I saw my dad step on a scorpion once — barefoot, in the hallway. I watched him hop into the bedroom, cursing and flailing, before collapsing onto the bed. It was chaos for a minute, but we all survived it. I can still hear the thud of him hitting the mattress.

And then. . . there was Marilyn Monroe. My first sexual fantasy — if you can even call it that. I was four, maybe five. It wasn’t long or involved, just a flash. A spark. But it stayed with me. It never faded. I’ve thought about it often over the years, how it shaped the way I understood attraction, even before I had the vocabulary for it.

This wasn’t just a house. It was a whole world contained in a thousand square feet. A world of firsts — first fears, first fascinations, first glimpses of the great, confusing vastness of life. The years passed. Paint faded. Renters came and went. But that place—like so many of the places we outgrow — never really let go.

Looking at the image now, I don’t see an old tract home. I see my dad kneeling in front of me. I see a tornado forming overhead. I see a flicker of Marilyn Monroe on a TV screen that hummed with static. I see the mimosa stumps holding their ground. And I see the shape of a life beginning to form.

Not a grand life, maybe. But a real one.

If walls could talk, which house from your past would you revisit for a conversation?

— Lawrence

Thanks for reading Still Stories! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.