The House on Laidley Street

When I was a very little girl,
I lived near the bay.
I had an Uncle and an Aunt
In whose house I loved to stay.

Theirs was a house on Laidley Street.
They lived there with my Nanny.
I didn’t know whose mother she was,
But I knew that she was my granny.

My mom and my dad and my sister and brother,
Lived a freeway away, a skyway away.
We would sometimes drive to the city
If we wanted a foggy day.


We might go to the big park
To see Hippie Dippys
Or go to the Wharf
To eat crab and French bread
And walk several blocks
To get samples of chocolate
From the square place

But I never knew why it was a square.

We might visit our family that lived in the Sunset
The lovely house with the stairs made to bounce
on, and oh, what a basement,
so much room to explore.
I loved that old house, on every floor.

Especially Sundays, when I could crawl into bed
With Grandpa and Bubby, and be all safe in my head.
I watched her put in her teeth and him put a foot on the wall
To help her tie her girdle and I was part of it all.
It made me have a family,
It made me have a home,
Maybe it helped me
Write a warm, homey poem.

If I was real lucky, I would go to Chinatown to eat
That might get me cheering and stomping my feet.
The waiter named Jimmy brought us special new dishes,
Things not on the menu, at least not in English.

The best thing I could do, the best people to greet,
Would be the Aunt, Uncle and Nanny on Laidley Street.

Aunt Ruth was all cotton, white, wrinkled and short.
She cooked and she read books and corrected my grammar.
She used to teach 6th grade, and I guess she expected,
Her nieces and nephews to be her best students.

Uncle Henry was a genius is everything science.
He was a teacher in high school and college.
He knew about stars and he knew about plants.
He used to make us stand on his feet and he’d dance.

San Francisco is built on hills
Laidley Street is on top of one
Surrounded by parks and awesome views
Just getting there was so much fun.

The streets are narrow
The houses were cute
The house we were looking for way up high
I had to look for it in the sky.

Finally we would wind our way
Like a corkscrew round and round
Up to the very top where air smelled cleaned
And you could look
way down

Way up high on Laidley Street
The house was up so high
That you had to climb a thousand steps
Enough to make me sigh

But up I’d climb and inside, too
There were many many stairs.
But the solarium was on the top
And it was worth the climb.
The place I would go when I got to the house
Was the solarium every time.
Uncle Henry was there
Or he would be in the backyard.
Another climb up many steps
It was getting hard
To keep up climbing but there he would be
Bent over flowers or pruning a tree

Always ready to give a lesson to me
And tell me the flowers or at night the sky
He always had answers
I always asked why
He always had answers
Although I would try to ask questions that he couldn’t answer
I never could stump him
He knew so much stuff.

There is a funny thing about my Aunt and my Uncle,
That made all the cousins secretly smile.
We loved my Uncle, he was a great guy
But there was one thing he had
And he seemed to not know
But oh it was so

My uncle had horrible breath.
Now that isn’t so funny
But the next part is
My Aunt was his perfect mate
She had a problem that bugged her a little
Her smeller did not work so great.
So even though he could bring tears to a grown-up,
She thought his scent was first rate.

My Aunt and my Uncle, and my really old Nanny,
Lived a long time on Laidley Street
It was a sad day for me when they sold that old house
And I still miss the bird they called Petey.

The bird that I knew when I was a child,
And I visited Laidley Street.