When a house is a home

We could barely afford it. That is how it works when you buy a house. You stretch to make it happen, and then it gets easier. For a month, before we moved in, I painted the inside. I also removed aqua-green, flocked wall paper from the stairway and, on another wall, a map of every airport, runway and landing strip in the United States.

That was 45 years ago. No doubt, by now you have figured out where this is going. I am moving out of my house to an apartment in San Carlos that I hope will become my home. It is time, and what a time it was.

The view out the back may have been what sold me, but the front proved as important. I have lived in a true neighborhood. The people around me became friends — as close as family in some cases. The street is a quiet one — ideal for teaching my boys how to throw and catch a baseball, or to ride a bike. We put up a hoop over the garage and spent hours playing basketball. The neighbors knew my sons by name. One Fourth of July, we closed down the street and had a block party. And in the 10 years since my wife died from breast cancer, my neighbors were there to pat me on the shoulder or hold my hand or include me in family get-togethers. Especially the Conklins.

***

They had moved in a few months before we did. I am certain the first neighbor I met was Jim Conklin. Jim was the essence of Redwood City — raised there, played football on an undefeated Sequoia High School football team. He and his wife, his high school sweetheart Barbara, raised three girls and fought through health, financial and family ups and downs. Jim had his own business, providing steel materials for construction projects.

He was extraordinarily smart — he understood machines and processes. He was a talented woodworker. He was supremely capable and generous. He was burly and strong and had a deep voice and the kindest, tenderest of hearts. During a long wait in a hospital while my wife underwent complicated surgery, Jim was among those who came and sat with me for hours. He was an uncle to my boys. He made sure I was invited to family dinners. He would come to my house to help with some project, which meant he would do it while I would hold something up.

On Sunday, he came to my house to help his daughter take away an extra refrigerator I had in my garage. We loaded it onto a truck. Jim collapsed. In a matter of seconds, he was gone.

My life will be touched by him always.

***

I have been packing up a life of 45 years. It is everything you can imagine.

Friends have offered to help. But it involves almost moment-by-moment decision making about what to take, what to give away and what to throw away. We lived through the era where you would take film to a store and they would give you double prints. We bought artwork from the places we traveled. I had work clothes for jobs I no longer hold. I am purposely moving somewhere smaller, so I should not take everything with me. I have had to sort through memories and emotions and the things that make a house a home.

Since my wife died 10 years ago, I have lived alone in a two-story, four-bedroom house high on a hill in Redwood City.

Sometime in the last year or so, it became time to move on, to let go — to downsize, in the parlance of the day.

To make a different life, touched by the past, but new and distinctive. To travel someplace new, without discarding all that it took to make me who I am.

I will always be who I have been — to my wife to my sons, to my friends and my neighbors. I am excited about what is next.

Mark Simon is a veteran journalist, whose career included 15 years as an executive at SamTrans and Caltrain. He co-hosts a podcast/videocast that can be found at TheGamePeninsula.com, and he can be reached at marksimon@smdailyjournal.com.