Little Pink Houses

For you and me

My second husband was a California Navy brat. Yeah, he’d lived all over, but his head was in San Diego. We were an improbable couple — I was nine years older, we had little in common culturally, and our marriage was a tempest of difficult personalities that produced a prodigious book collection, a law degree, one precious child, and fifteen years of heartache. We separated in 2010 and the divorce was finalized on Halloween, 2013: 21 years minus one day after we had filed into a courtroom in Fishers, Indiana to tie the knot on All Souls Day in 1992.

When I married John, I lived in a farmhouse that sat on land my family had owned since the 1830s. A lot of people thought it was a Sears and Roebuck kit house, but the timeline didn’t add up. I know from family photographs and land records that the house was built no later than the 1870s, and Sears kit houses weren’t shipped until 1908. But I understand why people made the mistake; the floorplan and footprint were almost indistinguishable.

John and I had a profound disagreement about John Mellencamp.

Some background: I took an undergraduate degree at Indiana University from 1975-1979. As was usual back then, even though Indiana had a 21 drinking age, I had an iron-clad fake ID and went to the bars on the Kirkwood Ave strip with impunity. One January night in 1977 I slipped into the Red Dog Saloon to hear an live act fronted by “Little Johnny Cougar.” And got to drink John Mellencamp from the proverbial firehose. He and his backing band were on fire.

I didn’t think any more about this until the video for “Jack and Diane” turned up on MTV in 1982.

John always asserted that the lyrics to “Little Pink Houses” were degrading — a mockery of “people like me.” (Not that he had any problem mocking ‘people like me’ but that’s a separate post.) He thought they were hipster ironic. I don’t think so. I’ve seen those little pink houses. I’ll bet anything John Mellencamp’s grandmother lived in one of them. And I’ll also bet there’s a generation born after 2001 who would be *thrilled* to be able to afford a little pink house.

I now live in a town littered with ‘little pink houses.’ We’re a struggling but not yet beaten community. I think we’ve hit bottom and are on the way up. I live here both because I can (thank you 8A minority contractor employer who figured out that commercial lease was dumb and we can all work from home) and because this town reminds me of what was great about the farm town I grew up in. A town where I can walk/bike to restaurants, shops, and parks. A town where I know if I got terminally pissed off at the town council I could run for a seat and have a chance to win. A town where I know the names of all the police officers, the librarians, the town clerks, and the mail carriers. A town that doesn’t feel like everyone is just waiting for a ticket out.