For Sale_ This Old House

[Van Canna]

[Van Canna]

This steep trail in my home town leads up to an old medieval king's castle with fabulous panoramic sights of the sea down below.




Often I would trudge up it as a personal challenge.

Much time has past since when I first began the arduous climb full of curves, bramble bushes, and other dangers, but also rich of colors, of sweet fragrances, and joyful laughs. Life seemed so gentle in those days.

Now it seems as though I were walking up _ the 'trail of time'….at the start…uphill…then at the top….where all alone… I would look behind me at the traveled steep pathway that I could see rising from below. Hard to believe I would make it to the top…such an intense effort taxing my lungs.

Memories of the traveled distance, of missteps, of slips and slides, of the hard and sweaty laboring up hill…memories of happy moments, of incredible panoramic views, of joys felt at the overcoming of every obstacle.

Looking back….Now at the top I see myself gather the strengths in preparing to continue my trek …but it is down the slope of the mountain.

Walking downhill seemed easier to cover distance, but more arduous to manage the body weight upon my knees wanting to bring me to the ground. The legs do grow very strong and powerful for soccer and rowing, the coaches would say.

Having made 'treasure' of what I had tackled until now… I can't help but to think that at the end of the downhill descent, I would be tired, that I would sit and reflect on the journey …on all that I had met while climbing up and down…I would reflect on who overtook me and on whom I had left along the trail and would arrive at the top later, after me.

Down at the bottom, while sitting and resting, then a silence would envelop me as a deep fog …I would remain intent in looking at shadows ahead of me_
All that will be left would be the hope of the next journey…but where will I be headed?

[Van Canna]

This Old House

There are fifty liquor boxes in my hall
And a hundred empty nails on my wall
There's a sign out in my yard that reads "For Sale"

And if this old house could cry the tears would fall
There are bargain hungry vultures everywhere
Buying broken toys, old clothes, and Tupperware
The phone's been taken out, they've stopped the mail
And if this old house could talk I'd say a prayer

I've been strong and I've been sturdy
And I've weathered every storm
I've always kept your family safe and warm
Now you're packing up the laughter
And you're sweeping out the tears

If this old house were built on memories
I would stand a thousand years
This old house, this old house
If this old house were built on memories
I would stand a thousand years

Take another look before you lock my door
Where your shoes have worn the finish from my floor
Listen to my banging pipes and my creaking stair
Let your boy slide down my banister once more
I'll remember where you hid the extra key
Where the hammer and the band aids used to be
I will smell your morning coffee in the air
And I'll see you hanging tinsel on the tree

I've been strong and I've been sturdy
And I've weathered every storm
I've always kept your family safe and warm
Now you're packing up the laughter
And you're sweeping out the tears
If this old house were built on memories
I would stand a thousand years

This old house, this old house
If this old house were built on memories
I would stand a thousand years


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Written by Craig Bickhardt and Thom Schuyler
©1986 Colgems-EMI Music Inc. (ASCAP)/
Bethlehem Music / Screen Gems-EMI Music Inc. (BMI) Lawyer’s Daughter Music

[Van Canna]

And now the inquietude, nostalgia and desire to return to the roots, take me away for a few weeks from where I have made my home, so I have traveled all night long and all night long I have dreamed.

Two childhood friends, having met and planned the 'return' …we are now seated in a train that runs at high speed _ clattering and rattling.

It's going to be a long trip from the north to the south. We decided to take the train and live the anticipations on 'extended time' same as we did in the past, and to savor the wondrous landscape.

The stations inevitably arrive one after the other with the 'funky' names of towns I have always loved and projected into mentally _ to get a taste, a feel of what life would be like, is like _in strange towns full of people and ways unknown.

At the stops the passengers get on and off in an orderly manner…and in the air and in the building structures I sense familiarity of people and places. The train going home has retained those vivacious colors.

Then the thought comes to me: my beautiful old town will also be full of strangers, will I recognize anyone? Will anyone recognize me? Daunting thoughts but my friend and I have often discussed and accepted the disconcerting feelings up ahead.

So much nostalgia _ I will be in the grip of _ in treading those sun drenched streets that remind me of when I 'meditated' of 'Running off' to more welcoming? Places.

[Van Canna]

Evening beckons…

I doze off, my head dangling on a small pillow propped against the window…and I dream more dreams in the drone of the rail tracks.

I dream of a solitary man singing to the sea with tormenting ardor …it is not a song but a whisper that 'lacerates' the air.

At times it seems a wail; he sings of sadness but with warmth…phrases and words that sound senseless. Then a scream of pain perforates the dream and its echo reverberates in the ears.

Singing of sorrow and maybe this unknown person is caught in the labyrinth of atavistic melancholy that reminds how life is but an instant. It is the soul that escapes from the wrinkle of life.

An evening that visits and calls out the memories that lights the joy and opens a precious box that conceals feelings and words.

I dream of a gloom in ambush that fractures the hours and then dissolves in the darkness of the first strange shadows of the night.

But wait…in the dream I see that I have decided not to sleep…that I cannot get to sleep…that I don't have much urge to sleep…

In the dream I see myself leaning against the window of my hotel room, looking at a night clear and radiant, and all the stars of the prodigious sky dazzling in a charming frame.

It is night but down below it seems almost daylight, and the centre of my beloved old town at the edge of the ocean, is still pulsating.

All the store windows are brightly lit, and the peal of the Old Cathedral bell intones the hours that will never again return, while in the gardens by the sea I hear songs, music, and I see dancing…

Time flows as a radiant river: all is life. The bells toll three AM…but I cannot take my eyes away from that celestial scene still all fresh and colored.

The promenading of the narrow and wide streets continues all night long…indifferent, lovers kiss, friends chat and laugh as the night were to last forever with no end in their thoughts.

a night so far and mysterious during which I want to listen to the music of the beauty of life.

[Van Canna]

And so in my next dream _as an adult, I am in my old childhood town and see the beautiful train station.

My love of trains reawakens with a jolt back to my early days when I would lull myself to sleep at the sounds of the late night railway's cacophony …. Longing for dreams of adventurous trips to distant cities I could explore and the beautiful people I would meet.

I walk to the station and there was a steam train and, on another track, the more modern electrical 'littorina' …that eventually had replaced steam locomotion.

My first love had always been the steam train…passenger cars hooked to a majestic steam locomotive with all the whistles and huffs and puffs that reminded me of a laboring giant.

I board the steam train and I am surprised it is in full readiness to depart with so many passengers in their seats. Why would that be, I wonder….this steam train, I remembered it as placed on the storage tracks for eventual disposal…so why is it fully functional?

I went to a ticket box….what ticket box? There was never any such box on this old train of my memories…you would stop by the ticket office, just inside the entrance way to buy the tickets.

But now at the ticket box on the train there was a well spoken lady in her thirties, beautiful; wearing glasses on a chain round her neck that looked at me. I asked for a ticket to a particular station which was the old station I always went to…for most of my train trips as an adult.


Just as I uttered where to go, another older lady turned up by my side and asked to go somewhere while touching my arm with her hand.

The ticket lady served her and then turned to me and said "your 'Gragnano' ticket sir", I said, "I don't want to go to Gragnano, I want to go to ..............".

A man sitting by the side of us said, "You should say where you want to go; now you're going to Gragnano ". I said, "I don't want to go to Gragnano I want to go to........". The conversation ended.


I sat in the train, which now seemed be like a kind of tram, and seemed to be traveling on faint tracks through my old town and on through the crowds. The tracks went all along the roads and didn't seem to be rail tracks at all.

People seemed to be disembarking and one of the people was a younger version of my uncle.
The train just seemed to go on, and on, and on.

Was the train waiting for me to give it a destination? I always seem to dream of my old childhood home town. Perhaps this could be me remembering my old carefree childhood days?

Members of my family always seem to turn up also in these dreams, are they there to guide me?

[Van Canna]

We are told that events, memories of events, and emotions in our waking life trigger our dreams. If we repeatedly have the same or similar dreams, our subconscious is trying to send us a message. Yes but what message?

My old ancestral home was very large with several attics containing remnants of old family vestiges in seemingly dark and secluded corners. Why was I so afraid as a child to climb the ladders to the attics and look around?

When I did, it was ever so briefly, and the things I saw they had all become pale and covered by dust …yet looked familiar somehow…even as grayish and vague in slivers of light.

It was this unexplained familiarity that caused me to be afraid and back pedal down as soon as I could to run out into my garden to smell the flowers and listen to my beloved trains just over the wall.

When I did look around, as brief as it went, my child's eyes foraged for old toys that surely must have been abandoned/put away in the attics waiting for tomorrows.

Once I found a small box with old coins and took it hiding it somewhere in my room then promptly forgetting where.

Then as an adult and visiting my old uncle who had been away in another city for all his life, I was stunned when he presented me with some of the same old coins as a 'particular' gift he said…but he would never explain the 'particular' only saying that one day I would understand…still waiting for that day.

But where could those old coins I hid in my room be today? I wonder if they were ever found or if the ones given to me by my uncle in my adulthood are in fact the same old coins I whisked away from the attic in jealous possession…very strange. But my uncle would have told me had he been the one to find them. But then how could he...he had been gone from the ancestral home for dozens of years.

I have a few rolling through my fingers at this moment…hard to describe my mysterious feelings they evoke at first touch.

And my room…as well as I knew it…at times it is really impossible for me to define its real size as rooms can change their emotional dimensions…like when you return home from a long absence all at home seems strange and different __ it can look larger or smaller but strange some way.

In my memories, I see a huge room with lots of nooks and crannies. I saw it many times in my dreams and some time I couldn’t enter the room for some reason.

I even tried to figure out its dimensions in my mind, putting the pieces of furniture we had there. It couldn’t be huge, just rather large. But my memory doesn’t want to agree with such a statement. I understand _ I was small myself then.

I think, I remember our old house rather well in my mind. I can see with my inner sight many of the things we had there: a piano, two big sofas, several big round and oblong tables, my big arm-chair-bed. I see old heavy doors with old bronze door-handles. But we had so much more that had been left here by my ancestors and never removed when the house was inherited by my father.

In the other rooms, the furniture was really old and old-fashioned: a huge dark-wooden cupboard and a wardrobe, a table with turned legs and some chairs with curved backs and round seats. A library, paintings, some old ivory handled knives, and the large radio room with the big radio of the old radio days.

The 'off limits' living room that seemed huge with the fancy carpet upon a red waxed floor and the Luis the 14th furniture. Something like this.

And then my memory helps me to recall the other things about my childhood - I can’t see them in the attic because they are invisible

[Van Canna]

In returning to my old ancestral home, I have once again descended the stairs into my beloved old garden of so many pleasant memories.

The flowering garden of my childhood world, now reposing in the distillation of experience, gravity, tenderness, and delight, where _ I now drift into a trace of longing, a trace of melancholy and devoted tranquil love.

Often I would leave my ample busy house, crying, and take refuge in my garden that I had shaped in my mind as my secret place to dream future adventures, to inquire about life, and to protect what was to be mine_ beloved children of a time yet to come.

But now the children seem to have disappeared, secret and intent, into lives and preoccupations of their own; still in the garden yes, but for this mysterious moment in time…invisible.

And I, even as strong and vigorous _ cannot either find them, or cannot find one, to guard him and protect.

Where is he_ I search for him_in the past, in the present, in the depths of intuition and thought…

And then I range my search through house and garden, through provincial streets, touching vanished scenes alive, but encountering mostly my mother and my early self.

Suddenly I touch upon a glimpse of him harboring his own poignant and mysterious retreat.

[Van Canna]

What a magnificent place the world is , you think. What a great stage for a life, short though as it is...and the realization that as people die the world does not_it is immortal....

Your eyes are suddenly heavy _ You doze off, and dream that you were standing in the huge square of your beloved city, among hundreds of people, and that you see a person emerge out of the crowd again and again_

_ you see quite clearly an older woman with dark glasses and a brimmed hat...she is staring at you with an expression you find hard to interpret. Is it sadness? Or distress? Or despair?

Then slowly, with lips moving, she waves a black gloved hand at you. What is she trying to say?

She is pointing her finger…

Your hands are beginning to sweat... you look in the direction the woman is pointing. It is freezing in your soul now and the darkness you begin to feel inside is matched only by the limitless emptiness you now perceive to be in your future.

You focus your eyes in the direction she is pointing....yes it is your son walking and suddenly turning looking at you, trying to speak...



‘Don’t say anything dear son of mine’ you blurt out with almost no air left in the lungs.

“Keep going; don’t stop my son_ I am the beginning and the bridge. The beginning of your life and the bridge to eternity”

[gmattson]

"What makes old age hard to bear is not the failing of one's faculties, mental and physical, but the burden of one's memories."
... W.Somerset Maugham

[Van Canna]

I have always known that certain places, certain particulars _ will evoke, awaken, emotions we thought had been forgotten forever_ but that instead had been hidden in a tiny angle of the soul. They are images that do not give life back to an extinct feeling_but to reawaken it from the deep sleep it had fallen into.

And so it is that the sight of a thing dear to family members who have passed away_ a particular car, a wear item or an object much loved _ can renew a sorrow even as mitigated by time, or a place where one day there had been happiness together, can reawaken the desire to hug an old friend.

I think that the more we think of the past, the more we realize that our lives have been lived only a short time ago.

I understand for example that time flies at enormous velocity…and that the only way to realize the passage of time is to turn around and look.

We, distracted by the present, do not become aware of the flight of time also because its passage is very silent.

Maybe the only way to double the time of our lives is to participate to the joys and sorrows of dear friends so as to contemporaneously live their lives and ours.

[Van Canna]

It is always summer in my old town. All it needs is a ray of the sun and the noisy laugh of a child.

In the cool of the evening I strain to capture the last sighs of the mountain mating with the ocean below so I can then narrate them to my dreams.

Mentally I retrace the entire town's streets, they belong to me, they are mine, I walk them untiringly, the sunlight had retreated like fading watercolors. At the end of an alley I hear someone crying.
Life can be so sad.

Some Chalet restaurant busies itself in repositioning tables as pieces on a chessboard, at street corners _the heads of improvised street vendors peep out.

In the dusk of the evening that slowly shows up, the sea promenade awaits the sons of the city to rock them back and forth, up and down, as a perennial cableway ride, while the sky gifts a sunset that gets lost in the eyes of the heart.

Stars, still invisible, twinkle secretely as custodians of my memories.

I remember how my grandmother would sometimes cry desolately at the thought her son might never return.

I find myself trudging to the antique center of town to try and find my grandparents' home.

[Van Canna]

Yes, it is still there and inhabited by elderly owners from this same quaint neighborhood_ and except for some minor changes, the owners have left the house almost the same as I knew it both inside and out.

This old part of town is kept shrouded in antiquity_ almost a town within a town.

I am graciously invited in for a cup of coffee once the owners learn who I am and why the nostalgic visit. They are old enough to remember much of the previous owners' histories.

Once inside…I realize that in all the years I have been alive _ the house has changed very little indeed.

Many of the same nooks and crannies … and smells, and …feelings. The home just holds so many feelings…

I know this is the last time I'll see the house as it has been for decades…
I can hear people singing in the street below.

Today I'm saying goodbye to this old house_ to the house of my grandparents.

It doesn't know I'll never see it again — it has no idea that this will be the last time I'll walk within its walls. It doesn't even recognize the sheer volume of memories it holds; how many tears and smiles and adventures it has seen.

A home where my own mom played with dolls …a home where I so often came to holiday dinners_ a home where I cried tears of wants and needs, physical and emotional.

And so I am here to say goodbye. It almost feels as if I'm visiting a dying relative and saying our last goodbyes; I'm lingering almost embarrassingly as if I want to address each wall, each room, each hallway individually and say, "thank you for the memories."

I walk around with my camera and document each room, each little vignette that I remember so well, each of my favorite spots I went to as a child, and then as a teenager, to hide and dream.

Part of why it pains me to say goodbye is also the fact that I will no longer be able to visit my younger self. The 7 year old me sitting out on the balcony marveling at the noise and voices of the crowd below_ The 13 year old me once living there for two years because of shifting family plans…then yet so happy to move out.

Forgotten memories resurface, and old smells and sights allow me brief glimpses of the world I saw _ as a child _ inside those walls and out in the narrow streets down below.

I greet each memory one last time. It's amazing to me how a house can be a living, breathing thing — it's inanimate, but it's also so alive in my soul and always will be.

It reminds me that an old house is more than furniture, rugs, countertops, and paint colors — this is a real reminder for me that even the beloved home of my grandparents, same as my old childhood house, is a collection of feelings, emotions, dreams and desires.

I can only hope that one day my very own home evokes the same kinds of nostalgic and bittersweet sentiments in my kids and grandkids — what a wonderful testament this old place is to our families.

But it's time to move on; it's time for me to go out of this old house I was so familiar with…the tears well up upon a sad smile...I am now an intruder.

[Van Canna]

As I leave never to return...I ponder...There were uncertain times, even back then... Times of fear and want...at times of desperation...

There where whole years that now seem to have dropped out of time, like years spent in limbo.

Times when I was sure that I was the most clueless ... Years when I seemed to watch my family'struggles ... from a great distance... as maybe ...
in one of those bad dreams where you see someone about to drive off a cliff and when you try to call out to them_ your voice comes out as a strangled whisper.


But these wonderful memories—remind me that I’m not the only one who misses the irreplaceable closeness and magic of those early, innocent years.

[Van Canna]

With short steps as I leave the neighborhood and get to the center of town… I realize I had learned to understand and accept myself far more from my visits here than I had ever expected.

Suddenly I find myself immersed in the festivities of the first of May, the 'Labor Day' holiday in the town…a chaotic event with much merriment_ concerts…what a glorious day it is…

But my mind is elsewhere…as I keep realizing that 'May Day' for me is no longer a date, a recurrence…

…for me it is and will always remain a 'place' constantly alive in the depth of my emotions…enshrouded by the darkest of cloak.