It’s wonderful to witness the emergence of your children’s sense of humor. One of the great things about parenthood is having these little people around to make you laugh — from the delighted giggles inspired by a newborn’s first smiles to the proud guffaw after she makes up her first knock-knock joke that’s actually objectively funny.
Both of my daughters are funny in ways both silly and smart. My youngest, Fiona, can own a room with her oddball antics but also seems to grasp more nuanced humor, or at least that’s how it seems to me (and I’m not biased, not at all…). And my oldest, Sophia, well, she has developed into quite the comedienne. She’s sarcastic as hell, sometimes to a fault. And she can make me laugh better than anyone.
Recently she and I shared some big laughs while listening to ‘The House That Built Me,’ a touching song from Miranda Lambert’s Revolution album. It’s ironic that this track is one that would strike us so funny because it’s really quite a moving and bittersweet tune, and beautifully performed by Lambert. It’s a cover tune written by a couple of classic country music songwriters that taps into a poignant nostalgia about the places we come of age. Lambert was particularly moved by the track when she happened upon it on a demo, as she explains in the buildup to the live performance I’m featuring today.
But back to the funny stuff. When Sophia first heard this song, playing in the background while we drove somewhere, she only started paying attention at the chorus. She blurted out, “What kind of woman is this? Her own daughter has to ask to come inside the house?” I explained that no, this was the singer’s childhood home but now somebody else lived there.
Later she heard the part about the dog buried under the live oak and that really threw her for a loop. “If somebody came to my door and told me there was a dead dog buried in the yard, I’d pack up and move.” And still later, “If they loved the dog so much why did they leave the house with it buried there?” Good times.
I love watching her have those snarky thoughts, and I love the thought that my laughter reinforces in her the instinct to be a smartass. That’s an important instinct to have, I think, and though I wasn’t very diligent with the mathematics flash cards when she was younger, I can rest easy knowing I’m front and center coaching her where it really matters.
I just had to come back one last time
Ma’am I know you don’t know me from Adam
But these handprints on the front steps are mine
Up those stairs in that little back bedroom
Is where I did my homework and I learned to play guitar
I bet you didn’t know under that live oak
My favorite dog is buried in the yard
I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me
Mama cut out pictures of houses for years
From Better Homes and Gardens magazine
Plans were drawn and concrete poured
Nail by nail and board by board
Daddy gave life to mama’s dream
I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me
You leave home and you move on and you do the best you can
I got lost in this old world and forgot who I am
I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could walk around I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me
Meet Me In Montauk 
I’m with Sophie on this one. I don’t want to find out I have a dead animal buried in my backyard when the woman who used to live here as a kid comes poking around in an attempt to heal her brokenness. If she’s that broke, poking around my house isn’t going to make her feel any better.
If anything, walking around a house that used to be yours but now is completely inhabited by someone else’s family would make you feel even worse, I’d think. I hate driving by houses I used to live in and seeing that the new owners (several times over?) have painted in another color. What was wrong with our choice?!
As for raising a smart ass, you just keep up the good work there.
Love to read your blog when it’s about your daughters and I’m not biased (not at all) 🙂
I don’t know how I’d feel about somebody tromping through my house, but I would like the opportunity to walk through the various “houses that built me” if I had the chance. Not sure I’d be so bold as to ask the owners, though. I’d wait until they left town and then go through a window.
A few years ago, I returned to the house that built me—our family home in Keystone Point. I very much wanted to see again the structure and fixtures that had formed the settings of my childhood memories. Unfortunately, the home had been through a “convenient fire,” and had been so substantially rebuilt and redesigned that it was virtually unrecognizable. Walls had been removed and new walls built. The dining room where so many laughs were shared over dinner was now part of a much larger kitchen, the family room where our family watched our seemingly enormous at the time 25 inch console TV was now a dining room. My bedroom had been made smaller, and my bathroom completely gone (moved across the hall where there was once a walk in closet).
I searched the house in vain for some part of the house that remained the same–some piece of my past to spark a memory, but none could be found. Soon, my search for the familiar was replaced by a fascination as to how the house had changed structurally, architecturally. I began to evaluate the house as a potential buyer would–kitchen too big, bedrooms too small, no longer a home suited for a family–certainly not my family. I did not leave with a sense of loss though–I left as I walked in–full of memories of the house that built me, memories that remain warm and vivid in my mind. Memories that define who I was, and who I am.
And later that day I returned to my home–the home where new memories are created daily. The home that my wife and I built, and that has built my children. I looked in on our dining room where our children’s peels of laughter can be heard over dinner nightly, the family room with our enormous 50 inch TV where we gather to root for our American Idol, the bedroom where books are read to our children. This is now the home that built me, and built my family.
Perhaps someday we will knock on the door of 1309 Harrison Street and let the current owners know that there is a bunny rabbit buried on the side of the house. Then again, as Sophia might quip, “If they loved the bunny so much why did they leave the house with it buried there?” Perhaps we never will.
That comment makes up for Dana wanting to institutionalize me for not agreeing to sell our house for twice its current value 🙂
Of course, his comment also plays up the tension inherent in the lyrics and the reality of the houses that build us. The memories exist in our minds, not in the walls of our houses (though sometimes those walls do tell stories, too) Still, it’s difficult to leave the homes where so many of those memories were made.
Look, all sentimentality aside, give me twice the value for our house, and I’m gone.:)
With or without the bunny…