Roundabout Friends

Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. Copyright: Rawpixel Ltd.

In 2008 my mother died. Word circulated pretty quickly, and an impromptu wake sprung up at my parents’ house. It’s a weird house so bear with me for a second.

A friend of the family wrote a fictionalized account of a murder that happened sixty or so years ago down the street from Mom and Dad’s place, and in a dig at them he described the neighborhood as having older houses of various styles, but he made sure to mention the “fake Italian villa.” That’s where I grew up and he pretty well nailed it.

It’s a weird as hell house. The guy who built it had aims on a mansion at the top of the hill but first he had a six-car I garage constructed on the backside and a servants’ quarters constructed on the front. Then a predepression downturn hit him so he just moved into the servants’ quarters. He owned mines, so he was never destitute, but he had to downsize his ambitions. He made changes, but it’s still obvious that it was designed to be apartments rather than a single-family dwelling. As recently as the 1970s it was a commune type place. Roland Sherman, the guy that took that iconic blue silhouette photo of Bob Dylan that graced his greatest hits album, rented a room there. He jury-rigged a darkroom in the basement. The plywood tables he built to contain basins of chemicals are still there.

When we moved in, I was twelve and the real estate agent told me that the builder put underground tunnels in from our house to the garage and there was a split off to go to the proposed but never built main house. I spent the next year tapping basement walls and hoping for a hollow sound, but no. Every so often curiosity or mania grabs me, and I start hunting for the tunnels again. I’ve gone through library archives of the architectural firm’s drawings. I even found the son of the lead architect who owns the largest collection of their drawings, but he housed them in a warehouse downtown and a large portion was lost to water damage.

The way the property was parceled off, the garage belongs to dad’s neighbor now. There is an arched doorway on the inside back wall, the side that’s built into the hill, and it’s bricked up. I’m near the point of asking if I can take a sledgehammer to it with the promise that I’ll pay for it to be resealed.

One of the oddities of the house is what we call the roundabout. The guy that built the place was a patron of the arts and he’d hold all manner of fundraisers. For the Birmingham Symphony he built an acoustic half circle of concrete seven or so feet high. It’s in front of the part of the house that we consider the front because I told you it’s a weird place and built facing where the main house would be so the front is away from the road and the back is what you see driving along through the neighborhood.

The roundabout fits three cars if you want to leave easily but you could cram a few more in. I was told that when it was built in 1911 the symphony was only seventeen musicians. I have no idea how accurate that is but it fits the eye test. There are spots where you speak and are addressed by your echo. My sister had her wedding reception at the house and the band had a blast playing with various spots until they decided on the sweetest place.

There’s a concrete bench that extends the whole semicircle. If a person sits at the extreme east and someone else sits at the extreme west you can have whispered conversations over maybe forty feet or more and no one who’s not sitting on the bench can hear you as the whispers travel along the curved walls.

My high school friends and I used to hang out on that bench all the time. We’d bounce tennis or soccer balls off the wall until we were tired and then sit and talk and goof around. There was a pizza place we called all the time and they knew to come around the back (which was actually the front.) Cell phone contact lists have ruined me to the point that I don’t know my son’s number, but I still remember Rocky’s Pizza’s.

It was Halloween night in 2008 at 11:15 when mom passed. The next day was nothing close to chaos. Two of her brothers were in town from DC and we just sat around trying to figure out what to say. Various of mom’s friends called or came by. We had so much food delivered that we ended up throwing half of it away. My wife and I lived less than a mile from mom and dad and my mother in-law took our two-year-old, so we were there pretty much all day. I remember watching a Kentucky football game. We just didn’t know what to do. She had suffered for months so arrangements were made ahead of time. I think dad edited the obituary he wrote, maybe for the hundredth time, but we spent a lot of time in silence.

Sometime after sunset that changed. People showed up uninvited, but they were so welcome. We separated into groups. My sister with her friends and my brother with his. Dad was subject to everyone’s sorrows and my poor uncles spent the night clarifying who they were to mom and dad’s friends and law partners. I sat on the bench of the roundabout with my wife, and it filled with all the usual suspects I knew growing up. We were an impromptu wake within an impromptu wake. We were laughing. There were so many stories.

I’ve been thinking about the nature of friendship lately. I’m sure of one thing: roundabout friends are solid. There were several that circa 2008 I hadn’t seen in years. We were in or at weddings and knew who had children and who got divorced, but that was dressing, and we took up as if no time had passed. Sitting on the roundabout that night there were no echoes or whispers. All the meaningful stuff was unspoken.