... next to last house on a dead-end street.
Everything about it spelled death and defeat.
Sometimes you call an ambulance, or maybe it’s worse.
There’s the undertaker at the wheel of his hearse.
Doom, by T-Imenem
There are lots of cul-de-sacs in Lake Country, but I’m beginning to wonder if they might be the source of endemic unhappiness.
A Feng Shui practitioner will tell you that cul-de-sacs are filled with restless spirits who can’t escape because there is no outlet on the street. As a result, residents are subject to loneliness and desperation.
So, if you are considering a home on a cul-de-sac, don’t buy it.
If you already live in a house on a cul-de-sac, move.
If moving is impossible, at least sprinkle some salt around the windows and doors to keep the evil spirits out.
Trust me, I know what I’m talking about, because I was literally raised in cul-de-sacs.
When my parents brought me home from the hospital, they took me to the next-to-last house on a dead-end street.
After I learned to walk, I fell on the floor furnace vent and burned intersecting straight lines on my palms, which looked like a map of Atlanta. (No cul-de-sacs on the map but plenty of one-way streets, which are almost as bad. I lived on a one-way street when I was married.)
My dad was so upset about my injuries that he tried to stomp the furnace vent into the crawlspace.
Then we moved to another dead-end street when I was two.
Our new street had a mild downhill grade coming out of the cul-de-sac end, which was good for bike racing. My friends all had Western Flyers, which came from Western Auto stores, so my dad bought me a Flying ‘O’ from Economy Auto. The Western Flyers seemed faster, and I lost most of the races.
One day, while I was sharpening my racing skills, I hit the curb with my front tire and broke my fall with my face. I was knocked unconscious, and my cheeks looked like I had tried to shave with a belt sander.
At some point during the healing process, I peeled off a scab the size of a potato chip.
A few years later, some older kids built a tree house that wasn’t much more than a triangular platform nailed to some oak trees. After the first level was completed, they decided to add a platform above it. And another. And another. And another.
I dropped by one day to see if they had reached the stratosphere yet, and someone dropped a hammer from the fifth level, which hit me on top of my head.
I now consider the incident part of my own origin story: Spiderman gets bitten by a radioactive spider and becomes a superhero; I get hit in the head with a hammer from heaven, and I become a writer.
My parents decided to move again when I was in the last few weeks of sixth grade, and guess what?
Cul-de-sac! “Look, son. Another dead end! Get used to it, boy.”
Not long after we moved in, a Methodist preacher from Guatemala who had a son about my age moved into the parsonage across the street. He taught me how to say “m_____,” which is a Spanish word for “s___.”
His son and I became friends, and we often accompanied him when he went out in the woods in search of arrowheads, musket balls, and glass insulators.
Then one day, he backed into a tree while I was standing on the back bumper of his Jeep. Fortunately, I never ate any of the foods my father told me would “put hair on my chest,” so I was thinner than the bumper and survived unharmed.
After my sister was born, my grandfather built my parents a house not on a cul-de-sac. Perhaps it was so she wouldn’t be cursed by the negative chi that had so adversely affected my life.
Good times followed in the new digs: I got my first car; I graduated from high school.
However, I struggled a bit financially in college.
So, I asked my parents if I could move back in with them for a while since they had just built a new house.
It was easy to find. It was the next-to-last house on a dead-end street.
Selah.