![['Old Brick, Helena,' Montana, winter 1928. 'Here was the hub of my Universe.' --LRH.]](img/pg13_1.jpg)
When I was very young I was pathetically eager for a HOME. I can remember the trumped-up belief (by me) that Helena was my home. I knew a few children there. I had gone a year or two to school there. And I well recall one time, returning there in a car from the Pacific Coast (I was seven) how I wept with eagerness at being as near home as Broadwater, a resort near Helena, and how I went hot and cold and laughed and grew hysterical at the realization that I was coming near what I called my HOME. Where I KNEW somebody, where I BELONGED. My grandfather had a big red brick house at the corner of Fifth and Beatty Street, several blocks west of the big state capitol and here were my aunts, my grandparents, my own small possessions. Here was the hub of my Universe. “The Old Brick.”
I saw that red brick between the ages of four and seven (living part of that time on the “Old Homestead”) and saw it again, briefly, when I was eleven, again briefly when I was sixteen, again when I was eighteen. My grandfather Waterbury, to whom I was “Buster” died when I was eighteen. The aunts married and were scattered. Recently —— four years ago —— the “Old Brick” was destroyed in a series of earthquakes.
But the dispersal of people and the final destruction of the house were not what took me out of what was my HOME. My childhood memories consist of being insufferably hot in a swing in an Oklahoma yard (with two goats which butted), of trying desperately to make a little Christmas tree in Kalispell for my mother who was ill and confined to her room, of watching bluebirds from a tent at the “Old Homestead” (and of the tent blowing down in a screaming storm and my Dad eating cold flapjacks from a bucket in the barn, flapjacks Mother had cooked for him while he thwarted the gale’s battle to overturn the stovepipe in the tent), of having lots of fistfights with kids in Helena, of being sickeningly lonely in San Francisco, of Dad carefully abstaining from water when the car broke down in a limitless Nevada desert, of rain at night in San Diego, of my uncle Bob’s coffee store in Tacoma, of the Olympic Mountains, of the awful abysses below the curling mountain roads of the Rockies, of, in short, many cities, many countrysides....And all this before I was ten. I had seen most of the United States when I was fourteen. But sometimes I had gone HOME.
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