The Yellow and Green House on Old Route 12

Reading the local newspaper this weekend and the big, famous papers on-line, it looks like we're changing the direction of the circles at the national political level, while here in the Land of the Round Door Knobs we've cultivated 'tsk-tsk' as a tool of counterpoint and repartee as the state's operating budget hemorrhages money and Connecticut town's and cities brace for organized can and bottle drives to help control deficits.

A lot of us are really angry about where we are and have pretty strong feelings on how we got here. Most of that seems to involve blaming someone else, because, let's face it, you and me are pretty decent people, right, and we didn't come up with sub-prime mortgages and all the other magic bookkeeping that caused things to get so stupid that General Motors didn't just lay off employees, they laid off divisions of car companies (Saturn and Pontiac joined Oldsmobile on the dustbin of history). So much for too big to fail? Did we miss the iceberg warning?

I drove on Route 12 yesterday from Norwich to Groton, not because it's scenic, though it's pleasant enough but because it's how I go to work and have for the last eighteen plus years. It's a pretty straight shot, even if don't always know the names of the streets--Washington down past the Harbor, right over the Laurel Hill Bridge onto Route 12, straight on until morning. Yes, after a while, the car drives itself and I just slightly steer.

I used to drive, for well over a decade, the same route in both directions, going to and coming from work. Some years ago as the Laurel Hill Bridge was being reconstructed and my time is so important I couldn't waste any in traffic, I started coming up with other ways to go home-sort of a game, just for my amusement. Some of that has stuck around as the construction is long done, but I tend to bug out over the Mohegan-Pequot Bridge to cut back to Norwich on the way home.

Obviously not during the winter, when it's pitch black at both 4:30's on the clock but more in the Spring, heading to work, I'd passed on "Old Route 12" (it's where, I guess the road once was, and then it gotten straightened and became a loop like in a shoelace) four or five houses on good sized plots alongside of one another. The yellow and green house used to have kids' toys strewn across much of the lawn. It was set far back on the property and since the 'real' Route 12 was above, there was little traffic. Sometimes in the afternoons, I'd see children on the lawn and it was just a matter of course as they went from playing catch to kicking footballs to seeing sled tracks in the winter time.

I think in all the years I've passed the house, I've watched two, maybe three, sets of moving vans turn up and depart as new families made a home in the yellow and green house. I missed the last van, I guess, or perhaps the people who lived there just scattered pell-mell in the dark of the night. I'm not ever going to have a lucrative career as a spy or observer, because I'm terrible at connecting the dots. In my defense, I'd point out that I'm not laone.

At some point, perhaps two years ago as the first rumblings of the economic tsunami were being felt in boardrooms( the equivalent of first-class staterooms over the rest of us in steerage), the yellow and green house became suddenly empty. Over the course of the following months, all the various toys, soccer goals, and the small child's swing set, all disappeared, the grasses grew higher, but then I suspect the neighbors intervened to keep the lawn in check. The house was abandoned in place. There are no curtains on any of the windows and I noticed some months ago, the front porch has started to collapse, pulling lower the roof that I imagine the master bedroom upstairs once looked out upon as the parents' gaze continued to their children playing on the lawn.

Yesterday afternoon, coming home I got a good long look at the yellow and green house. I could see insulation and what looked like roofing material in the window that I've always assumed is the attic. That can't be good for anyone. And that's when I realized, for me at least, how we have come to be here in this precarious predicament, so far, without a happy ending. When banks and brokerage houses needed rescue, we did, because saving and doing big things is incredibly important. And because of all the energy and effort we expended there wasn't enough money, or time or concern or interest in saving the people whose family had lived in the yellow and green house, whatever color it was, on Old Route 12, or wherever in your neighborhood, the dream died.
-bill kenny