Page 75 - WhyAsInY

Chapter Five
1771 Ocean (and M)
1946 – 1957
Wherein the author takes leave of his splendiferous surroundings at 414 Hampton Avenue, Manhattan Beach (with his parents), and takes us on a tour of his new neighborhood, which is only nine minutes to the north of his mother’s sisters and their families (in light traffic).
After my dad had returned from “overseas” and reunited with my mom, they had to find a new place to live, and he had to find an office in which to take care of the new patients whom he hoped to attract. The solution to both problems would be found at 1771 Ocean Avenue, which would be my home for eleven years.
Seventeen seventy-one Ocean was not 414 Hampton, but I never knew the difference; 414 was a large house located in a beautiful, quiet, and affluent residential neighborhood, but 1771 was a “semi-detached” brick building that occupied a twenty-by-one-hundred-foot lot, inclu- sive of its narrow driveway, near a commercial intersection. For the uninitiated, semi-detached was another way of saying semi-attached, which is to say that one side of the house, in this case the north side, was a party wall, a wall that was shared with another home and was therefore win- dowless. I never noticed the absence of those windows.
The house had a three-bedroom “living area” and room for my father’s office below. There were two front entrances. You reached the
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