The House That We Called Home

The new owners of my childhood home are very sweet people. In February 2022, in honor of my parents' birthdays, my wife and I took a trip to Huntington Beach and got to walk through the newly upgraded house on Cambay Lane. I choose to write the below for the new family members so they had some history on a home that will always mean the world to me. 

Oh yes, so many memories. Honestly, too many to list.  

Really, it was a simple house, on a regular street, with friendly neighbors and an innocent childhood. At least that’s what it looked like from my point of view. 

It’s the house on Cambay – 15422 – where I grew up.

My folks – Jim and Patricia Ellis - bought the home in 1962, one of the original owners on this street. My dad used to tell the story how he wasn’t even interested in purchasing a home when he was invited by some friends to take a tour of a new housing track in Huntington Beach. Though he went along with a couple of friends just for the ride, my father would be the only one to purchase a house on this track, locking in an at-the-time whopping 30-year loan for a monthly mortgage payment half of your what you'd pay for a car today. 

By the time they moved to Huntington Beach from Redondo Beach, by way of Detroit Michigan, they would be bringing with them a daughter, Mary Lynn, who was two years old at the time. I would show up a little over a year later in November 1963. And another sister, Kathy, would make her appearance in August 1965.

This would be the home for these five Ellises. After originally setting in, my parents would live here for the rest of their lives – my mother up until 2014 at the age of 82 and my father up until 2021 at the age of 93.

In between there would be a lifetime of memories, ups and downs, joys and sorrows, personal growth, and family love.

• The wonderful Cambay block, with neighbors who knew each other’s name up and down the lane, with the children who would have fun with games on the Ellis’ front lawn, standing in as a baseball diamond, track and field arena or football field, after the parents’ call to action: “go outside and play.”  
• The same field where I would get knocked out after hitting my head on Mary jo’s knee, and where Keith would break his leg and then crawl all the way home when we didn’t believe he was really hurt. 
• The front yard where the white light pole would be claimed to be the “free” base during hide and seek games.
• The front yard that had bushes and plants and white rocks in front of the house, in a distant memory, before the clearing and arrival of the cement truck in 1973.
•  The house that saw many, oh so many, a sporting events on TV, where neighbor Dan would walk over those Sundays to catch the latest LA Rams game. 
• The rounds of “catch” in the backyard as sister Kathy honed her softball pitching skills, with more than a few times of having to ask the neighbors on either side, “Hey, can you throw our ball back?” 
• An avocado tree back there, planted by me from just an avocado pit I threw into the ground, while helpful neighbors told me it wouldn’t grow, and if it did, it wouldn’t produce any fruit. 
• The bags and bags of avocados we would have to give away, since we’d be overloaded with such a hefty harvest. 
• The avocado tree that would be taken down, per my mother’s directive, after I moved from Cambay Lane. 
• The farmers field that went for miles just beyond our backyard fence, and tractors that would plow along every now and then, preparing way for the likes of lima beans. 
• The fence we’d look over towards the northeast so we could watch on as Disneyland had its nightly fireworks show in the summer. 
• Mom doing her garden back there, before the arthritis took it away. 
• The O'Keefe and Merritt oven with the light that would be used to help mom trace our countries for our book reports … since we waited until after dark, missing out on the chance to trace it over a sunlit window.  
• And of course, Rags our dog, Fidrych our bird, one hard-to-catch Chinchilla, and then the dozens of cats Lucy, Nicky, Ragamuffin, Blackie, and the litters born in Kathy’s closet. 
• The end-of-the-year holidays that somehow were routinely accompanied by the annual colds, soothed only by rest, soup and more rest. 
• The holiday celebrations – colored ribbons around the poles separating the dining room, and the Christmas trees in the living room, where Kathy and I once announced we’d remain there so we could catch a glimpse of Santa Claus.
• The hilarious Halloween when all of us were too shy to answer the door to trick-or-treaters, providing the way for the loudest, longest and perhaps scariest laughing attack.
• The Thanksgiving dinners – starting in the dining room, and then on subsequent Thanksgivings spilling over into the living room where we’d be accompanied by the Cowboys and the Lions.  
• The living room that was somehow the sleeping quarters for everyone but me – ma on the couch, Kathy on another couch, dad in one chair, Mary Lynn in another chair and niece Emily nestled somewhere on the floor. 
• The times the family practiced the sounds of silence, unable to bridge gaps of misunderstanding and miscommunication – resulting in a hole in a door … or two. 
• And on the other side of the pendulum – two sacred weddings, one in 1987 with Mary Lynn and Michael in the back yard, and the other me and my wife Jennifer in 2012 – just me, her, a minister, my dad and my bed-ridden mother. 

So many memories. Too many to count actually. But reside they do … and reside they will. Forever. 

They will be there because we were all able to live and grow, in a wonderful neighborhood, on a picturesque street, and within a house we called our home.

15422 Cambay. May it continue to be blessed … and may it be a blessing for families, friends and memories to come.