Between 1956 and 1961, I lived in five different places in Ithaca, New York: four bad, one good.
The first was a cinder-block dormitory room, less a home than a cell, which I shared with a young guy from Virginia who was a not only a smoker but a classic Southern bigot of a type that's pretty much extinct nowadays. No doubt he's changed and matured, but our paths have not crossed these last sixty years. We were both very young, but I was much too young. Childish, when I'm honest with myself. The following year -- 1957-58 -- I lived in a basement apartment in a building that was known locally as the "Indian Embassy" because the upper three floors were all inhabited by men (no women, not a trace of them) from the subcontinent. The odor of garam masala and turmeric, much more exotic then than now, regularly drifted into my apartment. I remember that my kitchen, which I rarely used, was unheated and that it was not unusual to find in midwinter a pot or pan of water, left in the sink, frozen into a block of ice. If the city of Ithaca had any zoning laws, and enforced them, the owner of my apartment, Miss Emily, would have been exiled to Siberia. In my third year in Ithaca I lived in still another beaten-down house on College Avenue. It was also unfit for adult habitation but had a functioning kitchen -- it's there that I learned to cook my own food. In my senior year, I lived in a real apartment -- four bedrooms, three roommates, including one who has remained a lifelong friend. I should have noticed, but I didn't, that the fourth floor of an ancient building made entirely of wood, with no fire escape, was dangerous. It was a firetrap and although I survived, the building didn't, and was demolished a few years after I graduated -- and left the southern tier for good.
My favorite residence during the Ithaca years came during the summer of 1961, when, fleeing graduate school in Cambridge and still attached to Ithaca, we (my bride and I) sublet a small (very small house -- essentially a single room that served as both living room and bedroom) -- at 148 Snyder Hill Road. It was my first experience of living in "the country." There was a cow next door! When I returned to Ithaca in 1992 for my daughter's graduation from Cornell, my house had disappeared and the fields were filled with acres of rich suburban homes -- large lots, big lawns, clean, neat and prosperous.
Our 1961 house, though not more than a tumbledown cabin, gave us a good summer and a good memory.
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