Wheat Street (Part 1)

It’s my favorite street in Columbia, a street of dreams, if you will. Every time I’m in that city, I make the pilgrimmage up the Harden Street hill at Five Points, then turn left at the light, and on down to the house where it all began — my adventures on the road of life after college and on my way to independence and adulthood.

It was late August during a typically hot South Carolina summer, and I was almost desperate to find the right place to live before starting school as a special student in journalism at the University of South Carolina. I had lived just a couple of days in a furnished room about a mile or so away, but I felt very confined there. It just wasn’t right. I moved to a furnished basement apartment on Harden Street next, but, as I told the nice couple who rented it, I just couldn’t stay there. It was old and musty and the street had a lot of traffic. It was wrong, all wrong.

Finally, reading the want ads, deadline for settling in a place rapidly approaching, I came across the ad the changed everything and led to my place of residence for the next year and a half. It was just three blocks from the basement apartment and was a second floor room for rent ($70 per month, including fresh linens and towels each week). It was on Wheat Street, arguably the prettiest street in all of Shandon, the old neighborhood that was one of the first residential suburbs of Columbia. The house was built shortly after the turn of the century, I believe, and the elderly lady who was renting the rooms (three in all) had lived in that house most of her life.

She was about 80 or 81, then, I believe, not a thin older lady by any means, and she was not in the best health. Her vision was very poor and the ravages of age had taken their toll on her body, but her mind and spirit were alive and quite well. She loved people, and especially younger people whom she doted over, as I was to discover, and loved being around. She lived in the first floor, back bedroom in the quite comfortably large house. She had a small sitting room in front of her bedroom, and there she spent most of her days, watching TV or talking to visitors. Her over-protective and rather odd daughter, whom I liked and yet didn’t quite feel right about, either, was often there, hovering about.

I remember the first time I met her. I came into the sitting room to be interviewed by Mrs. B.__ and her daughter. I was a little nervous because I knew, immediately after seeing the beautiful and quiet street with its huge oak and hickory trees, that this was the place I wanted to live. I could afford it, and it was only blocks from campus. A near-perfect location.

The interview went well, and I was writing a check when someone else came to the door inquiring about the room. Mrs. B.__’s daughter had to tell him it had just been rented. I made it just in the nick of time.

I was not unaware also of all the tales from Southern literature about boarders and boarding houses. I had read Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe only a year previously, and had all sorts of idealized notions in my head about what the experience would be like. Wolfe’s mother, as you may know, ran a large boarding house in downtown Asheville, N.C., for many years, and young Tom had some of his most memorable early experiences in that house. When I at last visited it two years ago, I was entranced, fascinated beyond words.

My room was in the back corner, not too large, but very nice, with a large and comfortable old double bed with the sort of cotton bedspread you remember from your childhood. There was a sizeable old dresser-drawer, and I shared a bathroom with the boarder in the adjacent room, which was obviously the master bedroom of that grand old house. Most of the time I was there, it was occupied by a Chilean professor who was very polite and soft-spoken, but whom I never really got to know very well. His family was back in Chile (this was also during a period of much change and turmoil in that country) and he was concerned about them, and obviously homesick. In the other room, the one that faced the street, lived a young social work grad student who truly was one of the most striking and beautiful women I have ever seen, before or since. We were about the same age. I was 22 and she was 23 or 24, I believe. I got to know her somewhat, but she later had a boyfriend and was gone a lot. She was very nice, however, and we’d sometimes talk when we came down to the kitchen to heat up some soup or fix a snack at night.

We had limited kitchen privileges, I recall, but I mostly fixed soup and had cereal for breakfast. Honestly, I can’t remember what I did for most of my main meals. I ate at the college some. There was a Dairy Queen-type place down the hill on the corner, known as Zesto’s, that had great hamburgers, fries and milkshakes (the real old-fashioned kind), and I went there a lot.

(Continued)