#WhereILivedWednesday : 10 North Henry Street

Last week I passed an apartment building, recently razed and now a hole in the ground.

Sometimes when I drive by former apartments, or visit cities where I once lived, I picture my life still existing in the space as it did at the time. I imagine peeking in the window to see myself practicing fan choreography in a rehearsal skirt, while sipping on a warm glass of White Zinfindel and watching Friends.

I half-close my eyes and see myself dressed in some early The Ellen Show-esque dress pants-with-tennies; I’m pushing my firstborn in an infant swing at a Chicago playlot while trying to discern signs vs. symptoms from DSMIII diagnoses.

It’s been years since I started a meme, but if you’d like to join me, I plan to write about these former dwellings once a month and you can link-up. No rules on what/how you write, just that it describes a place/state of mind you once inhabited. 

10 North Henry Street

Mary keeps throwing donuts and hot dogs out of her second-story window to feed the birds. At least once a week she brings my roommate Steve and I industrial-sized sour cream containers full of leftovers from the state cafeteria where she works. Sometimes she presents us split pea soup with ham, sometimes macaroni salad, and it always tastes revolting. We don’t even try it anymore. When she first brought us food we sampled it, but now we smile and thank her and bring it directly down the back stairs to the dumpster.

When we try to tell Mary we have all the food we need, she answers  “that’s what the freezer is for.” She also gifts us garbage bags full of days-old donuts with sopping-wet glaze, and dozens of foiled-wrapped hotdogs already in the bun. Steve takes the bag, but holds it at a distance in case it leaks. Mary doesn’t drive, so I don’t know how she carries all the food on her walk home from the cafeteria. After feeding us and herself, she “feeds the birds” from her second story window. The birds love Mary’s delivery as much as we do, so our landlord has to come and clean it all up so it doesn’t attract rats.

According to Mary, she used to figure skate professionally and do hair, too—she wants to show me her costumes sometime. At 70 years old she still wears her hair in a bee-hive most days, and royal blue eyeshadow on her heavy lids. Her glasses magnify her eyes and she smells like lilac perfume and Salisbury steak. She lives in 2A and we live in 2B–our apartments share a wall. Whenever she hears us coming up the stairs, she cracks her door to say hello. The door doesn’t open all the way because of the piles. When she peeps out you can see stacks and towers of who-knows-what and hear the TV. Mary watches ballroom dancing. On Tuesday nights she takes a cab to Bishop’s Buffet with her friend Boots.

I don’t ask Mary about her family. I think she would’ve told us about them by now.