A Place of My Own Read Online Free PDF

embarking on any new construction project was so far out of the question as to be laughable. Our contractor was running four months behind schedule, he’d just admitted that he had no idea where to find the “neat” postage-stamp-size windows Charlie had spec’d for the gable ends, or how in the world he was ever going to bend a four-by-four piece of lumber to form the porch’s “neat” curving lintels. Our savings had been cleaned out, and we were about to return to the bank for a second mortgage. The very last thing we needed now was another neat idea from Charlie.
    I decided the best thing to do was just to let the suggestion lie, even after Charlie, warming to his plan, offered to design the new building free of charge. I didn’t know whether to regard this as an act of generosity from a friend or a particularly flagrant case of the monomania to which members of his profession seem to be prone. The odd thing about it was, I had never thought of Charlie that way. Compared to the Ayn Rand stereotype of the architect as a power-mad empire builder, a chilly figure at home only in the realm of his own ideal forms, Charlie had always seemed to me a fairly contented citizen of the real world, somebody with a deep appreciation for life as it is really lived, in all its unplatonic messiness. Yet here he was, actually suggesting that what the view from the window of his new building needed most of all was another Charlie Myer building.
    I thanked him for the generous offer and promptly changed the subject to something compelling, like plumbing fixtures.
     
    But I guess the notion had been planted, because many months later, when my thoughts turned to a room of my own, I found it was from the bedroom window that I invariably imagined it. Eventually I constructed a fairly detailed little daydream about the place, in which I followed myself walking down the garden path on a dewy summer morning with a cup of coffee in my hand, stepping under the rose arbor, ambling up the hill into the woods, and eventually coming upon my hut, which was planted somewhere far enough from the road that the world outside its door faded to rumor. What did the hut look like? The particulars were indistinct, except that the building seemed more woodsy than the house. It was shingled rather than clapboarded, for example, and had a steeply sloped gable roof.
    Rehearsing this scenario in bed late one night, during one of the frequent bouts of sleeplessness I credited to incipient fatherhood, it occurred to me that my image of the building was based at least partly on a tree house I’d had as a child, growing up on Long Island—the last time I’d had a room of my own off in the woods. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t a tree house, since there were no trees involved in its construction, at least not living ones. It was more like a little cape on stilts, a gable-roofed room maybe ten feet by six, and raised five feet off the ground on four pressure-treated posts. My father had hired a contractor named Goeltz to build it for me. Together they’d knocked off the design from a picture of a fancy playhouse my father and I had admired in the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog.
    The reason I didn’t have a normal, dad-built tree house is that, as I’ve indicated, I didn’t have anything even approaching that kind of dad. He was, and remains, one of the world’s great indoorsmen, a delegator of all conceivable outdoor tasks—lawn mowing, car washing, gutter cleaning, and tree-house building. By the time I was ten, which was when I’d kicked off my campaign for a tree house in the woods behind our ranch, he didn’t even own the tools needed to build one, having “accidentally” nailed his tool chest behind the walls of a cedar closet he’d tried to build for my mother in the basement. Whether consciously or not, my father had clearly wanted to make sure the cedar closet would be his last do-it-yourself project, and it was.
    Not that I’m complaining,