709 Mississippi

709 Mississippi 

Growing up, I lived in a red brick house at the corner of 8th Street and Mississippi Ave. As a kid, Mississippi was significant, of course, because it was the official time unit of the playground. Count to 20 Mississippi for hide and seek; 10 Mississippi for freeze tag, 5 Mississippi before rushing the quarterback in touch football. 709 N. Mississippi in Roswell, NM, however, was the place where time stood still - at least it seemed that way for a moment in time. 

I must have been around 7 or 8 years old when my grandparents moved into the small extension my parents built for them next to our Mississippi Avenue home. You could tell the extension was new because the bricks were a darker maroon color and looked more freshly baked compared to the fading, but distinguished, bricks of the original home. The extension was a modest studio-style apartment. A portable divider made of slightly opaque material and black framing separated the kitchen and living area from the bedroom. 

Before construction on the extension was finished, there was a small crevice connecting the corner office of the original house to what would become the closet of my grandparents’ bedroom.  I remember my brother Alex and I would go on adventures together crawling underneath my dad’s heavy wooden office desk into the closet next door. It was a portal into a mystical world - we were like Lucy from the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe discovering the magic of Narnia for the first time.  

In a way, Grandpa and Grandma coming to live with us was like living in our own version of Narnia. Instead of a sleigh ride, we went on bike rides. Grandpa had a blue Schwinn bike with a silver basket in front. I was always impressed by the way he mounted his bike: One foot on one pedal, the other pushing off the ground in a skipping like motion. Then in a smooth, rhythmic glide, he lifted himself off the ground balancing on one pedal while swinging his leg across the seat to the other side. His foot caught the moving pedal without missing a beat and off he would go gliding away to his next destination. It was poetry in motion.     

Eventually, I learned how to mount my bike like Grandpa. I felt like the coolest kid in the world to be like him. We would go on bike rides together. We had different routes. If we turned right from our driveway, we could cross 8th street and enter into the “old” airport. It was a massive area of potholed runways and overgrown grassy areas where an airport used to be. We could get lost there for hours exploring the different parts of the airport and observing the quail and various wildlife that had the reclaimed the former aviation area as their own hub. If we turned left from our driveway, we could ride down Mississippi Avenue and make a left at Riverside Drive.  Here we tried to pick up speed before bearing right on Montana Avenue and coasting down a big dip between the Cahoon Park tennis courts and the Spring River public golf course. We would catch the bike lanes at 4th street and weave onto 3rd street, where we would find ourselves in front of Lola Aida and Lolo Paeng’s house. Sometimes we stopped there for a chat, and other times we would ride a few houses down and eat empanadas and watch WWF Superstars at Lolo David and Lola Andy’s house.  

It was always an adventure with Grandpa around because he always liked to be on the move. Grandpa was an early riser. He would bike around the old airport and around town collecting items in his basket to recycle or reuse at home. One rainy morning, he came home with a surprise for me and Alex in his bike basket. There were turtles!  He found them splashing around the potholes of the old airport so he brought them home to be our pets. This was special because my mom wouldn’t let us have cats or dogs - like our neighbors had. We had an aquarium with fish, but I think we always wanted another pet. Grandpa to the rescue! They were still wild turtles, so Grandpa insisted we let them roam our backyard. He would leave out lettuce and other left over greens from the garden for them to eat. But what if they tried to escape? Grandpa was always a step ahead. He attached a piece of wood at the bottom of the black gate of our backyard where there was a small gap. There would be no prison break on his watch. But he also wanted to make sure we could identify the turtles just in case they did escape. He spray-painted the back of each turtle to mark them as forever ours. 

If Grandpa wasn’t biking around collecting items to recycle, he was tending to the backyard vegetable garden, or building various contraptions and his own special inventions. He created this metal frame to house an electric air compressor. He spray-painted it bright pink and outfitted the frame with wheels and a detachable handle. It was a hand-made wagon to transport air to fill up car tires in the garage, flat bicycle tubes in the backyard, or to bring along on camping trips to quickly inflate air mattresses or blow sand off the tarps. Grandpa even built an entire wooden shed from scratch to store all his tools and welding equipment. He painted the shed’s panels a vibrant, bright red and white. He had a knack for maximizing space. He constructed a covered, outdoor shelving unit out of old, metal closet doors in the narrow space between our house and the backyard fence. It had the vibe of an apocalyptic bunker. I would peek outside my bedroom window and see shadowy shelves filled with tightly-packed rows of plastic gallon water jugs - each  cost a quarter to fill at the Watermill Express next to Lolo David’s house. That image of shadowy, shelves still haunts my nightmares sometimes. But Grandpa was prepared. We would have plenty of water, corn beef, and spam to survive the threat of a Y2K meltdown.  

But not all grandpa’s creations were purely about function and survival. One time, Alex and I asked grandpa to build us a tree house. The next door neighbor kids - the same ones who had the dogs - had an epic tree house. You had to climb a ladder up to the top of a tall tree and enter into a neatly-constructed wooden home. It had a sprawling wooden floor surrounding the tree trunk, and it was enclosed with walls, and a vaulted ceiling. I swear someone could actually live there and be comfortable. There were no massive oak trees in our backyard. We had some fruit trees - an apple tree, a plum tree, and small peach tree that was struggling to survive (you could see the dark, yellow sap seeping through its bark). After much cajoling, grandpa acquiesced to our desire for a tree house. He took some scrap wood from his other projects and attached them to the Y shaped trunk of the peach tree.  If the neighbor’s tree house was the American Dream of tree houses, ours was the Bahay Kubo -  it was just a couple of boards platformed between two parts of the tree. I’m not even sure there was a ladder because it wasn’t so high off the ground. But it didn’t matter because it was our tree house, and Grandpa made it for us with his own bare hands. He cared about what we wanted as kids. So we played our games there. Some days the tree house was a a rocket ship or a doctor’s office; other days it was the base for Peter Pan and the lost boys to stay forever young. Whatever it was, it was another portal for time to stop and for our dreams to be dreamt. Grandpa had gifted us our own, personal, real life Imagination Station. Step aside Mr. Whitaker (if you’re a 90s kid you know what I’m talking about).  

When Grandpa was finished finding up-cycled parts or tinkering with his inventions for the day, he got ready for bed and slipped into his monochromatic, matching sweat suit and oversized beanie. He cozied up into his tiny, full-sized bed and switched on the TV, which sat on a brown, wooden dresser that doubled as a TV stand. We didn’t have cable TV - just an antenna that picked up local stations. But for some reason, from over 1000 miles away, we picked up KCAL 9 -  a local LA station. Maybe they had a partnership with a regional station in New Mexico. But whatever the case, it meant Grandpa could keep watching all the Lakers road games on KCAL with the enraptured voice of Chick Hearn on the play by play. When Grandpa moved from LA to live with us, he was already a die-hard Lakers fan, who religiously watched all the games. I remember sitting with him on his bed and being introduced to Nick Van Exel, Eddie Jones, Cedric Ceballos and the 1995 Lakers team coached by Del Harris. They weren’t particularly great that year, but the real magic came in the dunk contest a year later. That’s when a young, rookie named Kobe Bean Bryant burst onto the scene with his under-the legs, East Bay Jam. This was before Youtube, so I had never seen anything like that before. And I was hooked. There on that wintry, February evening, in Roswell, New Mexico, nestled in a comforter next to Grandpa, I, for better or worse, was converted into the cult of life-long Lakers fandom.  

The thing about sports is that Father-time remains undefeated - despite LeBron James’ best efforts. Players get traded, knees go bad, achilles tear, and eventually stars retire. But fans, we get old too, and all of a sudden, you realize it’s been 30 years since you started watching the Lakers with Grandpa, and now you have your own three year old donning a LeBron jersey and watching Lakers games with you on a red Ikea couch in the Jordan neighborhood of Kowloon, Hong Kong. 

But for those early days at 709 N. Mississippi, time stood still for a brief moment. There was magic in the air. There were turtles, bikes, and peach trees. There was me, Grandpa, and the Lakers.

Thanks for the memories, Grandpa. You will be dearly missed, and we’ll keep counting Mississippi’s until the day we see you again.