When we had to move out of the Crest student housing because I was no longer a student, nor was Shirley, we were no longer eligible. We had to find somewhere else to live.

After a short stint in a temporary house on Franklin Avenue, we found by the luck of serendipity an available house on Blaine Street, which became 3rd Street when the name changed to match the east/west avenues into town – Sixth Street, and Seventh, a particular favorite, and Eighth which was changed to University Avenue because people were just becoming aware of UCR at the upper other end of town.
The house was a two, actually three, story home of a gentleman farmer who had built his fortune on orange groves. It was wood with a sense of craftsman style and a wrap-around porch along the front and side.

This was the time when housing was still affordable. Our Crest house had gone from $50 a month to $60 a month. Now, because I had a job teaching school and thus a steady income, we were able to move into what we felt was a mansion at $115 a month, they would take a check. The realtor was glad to rent it to us, partly because he had just been able to end the lease of the previous occupants who had been running a “Free School” in the house, which involved a lot of boys and girls living there together, and apparently easy access to drugs. We knew some of those previous tenants as friends, so the transition was painless and uncontested and they backed off and moved out, and we moved in.

To us it was a Big House, more than we needed, but were glad to ramble around in. The beautiful wood entry door with a large beveled glass four-foot oval window, opened onto a large living room with a fireplace, and through a lovely wooden archway on the left, an equally large music room with its own fireplace backside to the other, and a large square grand piano sadly out of tune.

A stairway with a beautiful spindled balustrade climbed to the right and turned at a landing to the second floor, and the other way, down into the dining room. The dining room with a wooden floor and a row of windows was so large that I put in ballet barres and mirrors and Shirley conducted her ballet classes right at home. A rear door from the dining room opened onto the back library with built-in bookshelves on either side of a separate fireplace, probably my favorite room. The door to the kitchen opened from the left of the dining room with an adjacent pass-through for the butler to bring trays and platters to the table. The kitchen itself was spacious and airy and we painted it in bright colors. It had room for a smaller table at the side and the three chairs for us. The back door opened onto a screened-in porch with the laundry facility of a large sink, and a closed-door bathroom that was really only a closet toilet. You had to wash your hands in the outside sink on the closed-in porch.

The staircase was a lovely upward row of warm light-brown spindles supporting the railing to the turn, then up to the second floor. The second floor opened from the hallway to a master bedroom with an adjacent screened-in sleeping porch for summer, then to the right, sharing a wall, another large bedroom with a doorway to a kind of outside balcony or observation deck. Another smaller bedroom opened from the corner, and down the hall, the last bedroom on the right good for occupancy or, in our case, storage. At the end of the hall was the only real bathroom in the house, a porcelain claw-foot tub with an overhead shower, a toilet with a pull chain to release the flush water from a tank high overhead. A back door from the bathroom opened on a little balcony where you could stand and look out over that end of the city, and the mountains to the right. The sink was outside the bathroom in a corner of the hallway, open so you didn’t have to enter to wash your hands.

There was another smaller staircase leading to the attic. The realtor showed it to us once, a large open room with windows, and rows of slot machines collected by the owner as a personal obsession, locked away while he was overseas in the military. They called him The Colonel. We were not allowed the key, never saw that upper room again, but already had enough house to occupy.

Outside there was a single row of orange trees on the left, just before and along the sidewalk, a tribute to the memory of groves long past. At the back of the overgrown driveway to the right was an old barn, two stories high, large open carriage door on the ground floor, stairs leading up to a hay loft and the meager room housing the carriage driver in the days when the gentleman in the house had servants living on-site.

We settled in.

We went thrift shopping and bought a stove. Value Village, at the end of town where the street drops down below an overpass, a store that had for many years offered nearly everything you could ever want or need. Fifteen dollars cash. We bought the stove and trucked it home. It was heavy and solid and came from former days. The brand name was Reliable, and it lived up to its name. It had four burners and a firefly, where you push a middle button and a little flame shoots out to ignite the burner you’ve selected and turned the lever for, adjusting the height of the burner flame up or down. We liked playing with the firefly until it clogged a little and became less than reliable, and then we just used matches. There was a large several-shelf oven with an adjustable knob on the outside left where you turn to the number of the temperature you want. Just below the oven was another drop-down door to the grill with a shelf where you could slide in meat or bread or anything you wanted to grill or toast just under the same flame that heated the oven. To the right of the broiler was a drawer for utensils and kitchen tools, and below, side-by-side slide-up doors covering a space for frying pans and muffin tins, and below that, a deep enough space under the stove on the floor for a bowl of food and water for a cat or two.

We loved that stove and cooked everything on it and took it with us when we moved to Altadena. With a stove in the kitchen, we were ready to throw a Riverside party.

We had been making friends all over town, and all over the university. We invited everybody. Friends and former neighbors who were still living in the Crest on campus. Professors and their families we knew from English and History and Music and Theater and Dance. Friends from the Library where I worked briefly. Friends from where I was teaching. Friends from Stage One, the Foreign Film Art House Theater where I worked as assistant manager to earn a little more money. Parents and students from Shirley’s ballet classes. Friends from as far south as San Diego, and as far north as the Bay Area, Berkeley, San Francisco. Friends from abroad who were teaching or studying at UCR, from India, Nigeria, Uganda, Argentina, and Germany, and Austria. High school friends we could still stay in touch with because Riverside was not that far away. And Shirley’s family, and my family.

That’s a lot of people.

But it was a Big House, with a lot of rooms, and we, especially Shirley, loved parties and people and getting both together.

We planned a kind of autumn-fall all holiday party to cover Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s and everything before and after and everything between. So we decorated the whole house inclusively, top to bottom.

We had noticed, walking along Third Street toward town, chain link fences in front of industrial buildings, flowers planted that grew through the fence onto the sidewalk. They were there for the picking, and we did. We took armloads home and filled vases and made garlands and hung them everywhere. We collected evergreen boughs and branches where we were allowed, and made aromatic ropes of pine and fir and laced and strung them up and through the spindles of the staircase so it was like climbing up a forest, and we hung them over the doors and around the windows, with a giant wreath on the front door. The house smelled wonderful, like a pine forest with roses and daffodils and morning glory.

We wanted the party to appeal to the whole person, the senses and the mind. Since so many of the guests were UCR connected, we knew we could count on them to take care of the mind. We monitored conversations to be sure things were going well, jumped in as needed, and saw new friendships form. We saw contingents intermingle, the L.A./Pasadena/High School Group meeting the UCR/University people and the international crowd, finding they had much in common, and enlarged their lives together.

We wanted to make sure everyone had enough to eat and drink to keep them happy, and we put out large bowls of punch. We had recently discovered sangria, we had ready access to local wineries, we were in the land of grapes and vineyards, and mixed the freshest grape juice with the ready red wine and enough other fruits to make the nectar of the gods that we continually refreshed and kept flowing. We had learned about mimosas, and we were in the land of the orange, groves still filling the landscape, fruit fresh for the picking, they told us go for the large fruit hanging close to the trunk, passed over by the low-salary pickers in a hurry to fill crates, and you can reach under for the heavy hidden fruit they’ll never come back for and which will only be lost to gravity, so go ahead, and so we did. And the sparkling waters were everywhere available, and the punch bowls filled and emptied and filled again, and everyone got happier and happier.

And we used our new old stove to toast offerings, labor intensive in the sense of eternal vigilance needed to withdraw and replace new under the broiler, and helpful guests and friends took turns monitoring the food as participatory democracy became real in our world. Friends also rotated monitoring the peripheral areas, enough wood for the fireplaces which attracted their own crowds as people warmed into the evening. The doorway to the roof terrace needed a watchful eye, because children, and there were some as there always are, have the tendency to take a pillow case onto the roof and jump off to see if they could fly.

We had a real piano, an upright that was playable, and people who made music for a living. There was music and singing. Someone brought a guitar, and more music, and dancing.

Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the party, and reveled in their participation to make it what it was, an event for the ages, a memory for the remembering mind. For all of us, time stopped in the joy of the moment, and people said, “We must have more parties like this.”

You came through the front door into a forest garden of enchantment, and every visitor to the party at the end left changed, having lived for a little while in a better world, leaving with the realization that the outside real world could actually be like that, better too, and they wanted to help make it so.

That was our plan. We loved the friends and the party fun, but we knew the joy of life itself, loved sharing it, knew that as more and more people know that joy, they want it everywhere and for everyone and won’t stop working toward the vision clear before them.

That was us, the good friends party people, good to know, fun to be with, altruists with a shareable vision.

That’s a vision I’ll never let go.

I hold Shirley’s now not present hand, and with the other hand reach out to the world.