Today was the last time I think I'll see this door.
It has alot of history.
Through these doors my own parents walked in single and out married 66 years ago. As such they turned up now and again in ancient family photos -- a lovely young grinning Mom and handsome smirking Dad with these doors framing them.
Forty years later I started walking through these doors and down the ashphalt tiled steps inside twice a year for the St Stephen's Mother's Day and Chrstmas dinners -- sometimes happily part of another family, sometimes resenting the hell right out of being there.
There are pleasant memories of the hall behind these doors -- warm thoughts of raffles where we won half the prizes, of Uncle Walter's toupee, sneaking smokes with Dennis and Polish meatballs. In my attic there must be at least six dolls in crocheted dresses one of us won here. Here Joe and Jim had their five dollars in an envelope and toaster triumphs and those dark days when all they won was a kitchen towel. In days back when the dinners had a band with a saxaphone player and the pannis spent a week hand making a thousand or so peirogis. I used to actually feel like I belonged here sometimes.
In 26 years I walked through these doors fat and skinny, single, pregnant, toting a diaper bag, going through menopause -- a stay at home mom, a "famous" artist, a "professor" at a "famous" art school, a bookstore clerk, an unemployed laborer -- relatively well to do, dirt poor and everything in between -- dressed and painted up, plain and sloppy, a dishwater blond, a redhead, a brunette, a peroxide blond and grey depending on my mood. I watched the neighborhood around these doors decay and crumble away under layers of graffiti and abandonment.
Today I said goodbye with great dignity to a family, a husband, the woman who silently overshadowed my life for 26 years and these doors with all their memories beyond them. It wasn't as easy or as hard as I would have thought it would be.
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