Under One Roof: How a Tough Old Woman in a Little Old House Changed My Life. Barry Martin

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СКАЧАТЬ Edith. This is Barry. Everything okay?”

      “Why yes, Barry, everything is fine. Thank you so much for asking.”

      There was a long pause. I had the feeling she was searching for the right words, so I just held tight and waited.

      “I would like to ask you something,” she finally said. “I don’t feel comfortable driving today. I was wondering if you might drive me to my hair appointment. I’d certainly understand if it’s too much trouble, of course. I know you’re a very busy man. I certainly don’t want to be a bother.”

      I was surprised at the request, because I already had figured out that she valued her independence above just about anything else. Like when I’d go check on her, I had to make it look like I was just happening by, or she’d get angry. Edith seemed like the kind of person who didn’t like you to do things for them – or didn’t want to appear to be asking, anyway. So that’s why the call kind of caught me off guard. Still, it was almost a relief to me, because every time I saw her get in the car to drive, I had the sense that the opportunity for an accident was pretty high.

      “Sure thing, Edith. No problem. What time?”

      “The appointment is at one thirty,” she said. “Perhaps you could meet me at a quarter after.”

      “Not a problem,” I said a second time. “I’ll meet you by the car. See you then.”

      “Thank you,” she said, slowly and sincerely. “That’s very kind.”

      A few minutes later I told my project manager, Roger, why I’d be gone for a little while that afternoon. No sooner were the words out of my mouth than he started giving me the business. “Hey, so you’re going to be driving Miss Daisy, huh? Well, I’m gonna have to record this moment for posterity.”

      At a quarter after one, I was out in front of Edith’s house, standing next to her 1989 blue Chevy Cavalier. It was a sturdy little car, with a dent in the right front fender. She’d inherited it from a friend she had taken care of; she’d helped him through his dying months, and when he passed, he left her all his stuff, including the car.

      As I helped Edith into the car, there was Roger, grinning from ear to ear, snapping away with a little digital camera. He was being polite about it, so as not to embarrass Edith, but after I got her into the car and was walking around to the driver’s side, he started in again: “Have fun driving Miss Daisy,” he said under his breath. Funny, I had never seen that movie, and wouldn’t wind up seeing it for a couple of years, but when I did, I couldn’t believe how much of that movie we had lived, Edith and me.

      I could have taken my truck, but I just thought it would be hard for her to climb up into the cab. Still, it was a bit odd, getting into her car, she had a kind of straw booster seat on the driver’s side; I guess it was the only way she could see over the steering wheel. I had just about sat down when I hit my head on the inside of the roof, and I had to wiggle myself back out and move that booster seat into the back. Edith looked over and laughed.

      “I guess you’re just a little bit bigger than me,” she said.

      “Yeah, well, getting a little wider every year, too,” I said.

      On the way to the hairdresser’s, Edith and I started talking about how much we liked Ballard. It still says Seattle on the map, but Ballard’s always been a world unto itself. It used to be more of an industrial enclave, although one with a real neighborhood feel; the industry and the residents fit together like a hand and a soft old glove. It had become kind of seedy and run-down over the last couple of years, but it still had the feeling of a community of people who cared about one another. The old Ballard crowd seemed to have known one another for a million years, Edith included. And run-down though the neighborhood might be, they were pretty united against the yuppie paradise that they thought Ballard was becoming, now that the development had begun.

      I guess I could see their point, in a way, although I had to admit that the development was helping put food on my table, so I couldn’t complain too much.

      We drove under the ramp of the bridge that goes over the ship canal, which connects Puget Sound to Lake Washington. The bridge itself connects Ballard to Seattle proper, and it’s central to everything that happened. At some point, people started realizing what a great place this would be to live – right on the water and, thanks to that bridge, such an easy commute to downtown. Only the folks who already lived here didn’t see it that way. They saw this all as an invasion. Edith and I were driving past a few of the new condos that were going up, the ones that all the Old Ballard folks were all upset about.

      For a while, the condos were popping up like popcorn. At one point, in fact, they put a moratorium on residential construction and set aside five thousand acres for industrial use, because all of the industry was getting pushed out and everybody was up in arms about losing the heart and soul of Old Ballard. Most of the condos that had gone up so far were actually a little ways to the south, and I was surprised, at first, that the developers were putting up a shopping mall here on Edith’s block, because I didn’t think there were enough people to warrant it. But when I heard about all the new condos that were planned, the project seemed more like a no-brainer.

      On the opposite side of the canal was the spot where they park the boats for the TV show Deadliest Catch. You couldn’t quite see it from where we were driving, but I’d passed it earlier and seen a tour group forming on the dock. I mentioned it to Edith, and commented on how much Ballard had changed since the last time I’d been here, which had been a while ago. I’d come down to go to the locks and walk around, and there was a construction supply place I used to go to every once in a while. We were just down the road from that place now. I asked Edith if all of the change that was coming to Ballard bothered her the way it did some people.

      “No, it doesn’t really matter,” Edith said. “Change is change. You know, that building you’re going to build, twenty years from now they’ll tear that down, too. They tore down the Kingdome, just twenty-five years after they built it, you know. They still owed twenty million dollars on it. That’s just progress, Barry. That’s just how things go.”

      “Well, that’s pretty philosophical of you, Edith,” I said.

      “Not philosophical at all,” she said. “Realistic. World of difference between the two. Things are what they are.”

      I wondered what it was in her life that made her so accepting of change, and at the same time so stubborn about it when she wanted to be.

      As we drove, I mentioned that I heard they were thinking of tearing down the Denny’s that had been a fixture in the town since the sixties. I’d been driving past that Denny’s every morning on my way to work.

      “Well, the plans are all messed up,” Edith said. “Some folks are trying to get historical status for it. You know those big, sweeping beams it has in the front? Some famous architect from Seattle designed it.”

      “Can’t believe they’re going to take it down,” I said.

      “I don’t know why everyone was so up in arms,” Edith said. “Historical status for a Denny’s? It’s ridiculous. Change is change,” she said again. “It happens. You need to learn to live with it.”

      Maybe so. But as we turned right up toward Market Street – the first time I’d been over there since before we started the project – I was kind of shocked at how different it was. Not the buildings themselves, but the businesses in them. I could almost see СКАЧАТЬ