I keep getting assaulted by these bits of memory from when I was very very young, about impressions and observations I had about adult men my own age currently. Some on TV, some real. John Ritter and his apartment in Three’s Company formed the basis of what I expected adults living in apartments in cities lived in. It paired very well with Sesame Street, one of my other windows to the world.
The 80s had its own style around the margins and among the rich, but for the bulk of us it was like the meme suggests: rotting leftovers. Dark wood paneling, overgrown lawns, and a largely decaying infrastructure that was only new back in 1942. The kitchens with their high ceilings, linoleum, radiators, and old chrome plumbing. Rotting, old- but fucking awesome, one of the last big hurrah’s of the untouched remnants from the gilded age.
John Ritter’s apartment, with the dark wood paneling by the door, just like Mr Rogers, and the dark ferns there for decoration, with the bright yellow 1940s kitchen, which happened to match the bright yellow 1940s kitchen I remembered from when I was very VERY young in our own house, all painted the rules for a world that I had built in my head, at the time.
A world that is so long gone, that I feel like I am the only one who maddeningly remembers it. All of those kitchens have been gutted and redone. At least for “normal folks” kitchens. And normal folks matter, in this context.
I think about old people I remember seeing when I was very little. Houses I remember being in with my dad, of people much older than him, as he talked to them. All long, long gone. Their houses, and everything that meant something to them- gone as well.
A number of our customers die every year- as most of them are quite old. And it’s always sad to see these houses that I often know better than they do just evaporate under a new owner. Stripped and remade into future meaning for someone else.
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