Whizzing Through America: Living Memories Tour, Westbury-Houston

Our first house together needed work, a lot of it. Once we moved in our trips around Texas ended for a long time.

First, the previous owner smoked, like a chimney. Before we could paint we had to wash the walls, rough textured walls. We went through several rags and bottles of Formula 409. The walls ran with brownish-orangish runoff. Eventually we replaced all the carpets because several steam cleanings just didn't get the smell completely gone.


We leveled the house. Most of Houston is on top of clay, which inflates with moisture, shrinks with dehydration, and flows slowly. Even though the unleveling of the house broke some brick and cracked grout, the leveling did even more.

In addition to being a great tour guide, Marilyn was also a great general contractor. She always found the best person for the job, whether it was skip troweling drywall or color matching oddly colored grout and matching replacement bricks for the soft adobe kind.

We replaced the roof after hurricane Alicia. One time when we were painting our largely empty front room, the children's play room at the time, a couple knocked on the door and asked when the place would be ready to rent.


We chopped out about eight feet of bamboo in the back that had encroached from another yard. My grandmother even helped. They got rid of the Mimosa Tree.

Yes, a lot about living in Westbury was about the house. Even more was about our family, which we were having trouble getting started. In fact, we were just about to go in for fertility testing, me, when we had a relaxing orientation trip to Amdahl Headquarters. Then we couldn't stop them. (There must be something about Houston. My sister moved down and had four children, the last birth twins.)

What to do with three young children? The two oldest got to go to the Jewish Community Center's day camp. The oldest went to a church sponsored Nursery School where one of the "instructors" tried to teach her to be right handed. We also got a note from the school that she was stealing other children's Cheetos. Our favorite destination in Houston was Bayou Bend, Ima Hogg's place left to the public. Children weren't allowed in the house itself but we could pretend the massive front yard and garden were ours.

Our neighbor across the street became a local "grandma" to our oldest, even coming to visit us in Fremont after we moved. The neighborhood was filled with children around the same age as our own. It's hard to believe that we allowed them to roam around so freely. And freely is certainly the operative word for my son. Once he found water, he would get his diaper soaked so it came off easily. He liked to roam free. (Most of the time this was in the back yard.) He also liked to climb. The combination of chairs, booster seat, and miscellaneous other stuff he put together to reach the cookie jar... He made it past his fourth birthday, and then we moved.