Last modified: Sunday, May 4, 2008 2:00 AM EDT D'ARCONTE: My life a Realtor's nightmare This mortgage crisis makes me think I must be a real estate agent's nightmare: I've lived most of my life in only two houses. The first was my gandfather's house, a narrow three-floor row home with a yard strecthing to the alley. His barbershop was in the front, two chairs, a huge ornate mirror on one wall, a pedestal sink in the middle of the room, a big dusty window to the street. The living room was upstairs until they added a kitchen downstairs and the old kitchen became the living room, complete with an inlaid white tile floor. My grandparents had raised nine kids in that house by the time my two sisters and I showed up on their doorstep, but there was plenty of room since only the two youngest daughters were still at home. And the price of gas wasn't a problem. My grandfather could drive, but didn't own a car. My grandmother never learned, and neither did one of my sisters. Everything we needed was within three blocks. If I came out of the house and turned left, there was a bakery, a music store, a 5-and-dime, a firehouse and a bank. If I came out of the house and turned right, there was a shoe store, a beer distributor, a clothing store, a meat market, a grocery store and a candy store. On both corners there were bars, and one of them had pretty good pizza. Across that street was a cemetery. We'd walk past the cemetery to go to the Irish church, because the Italian church was several blocks further and my grandparents were old. Across from the church was the Catholic school and across from that was the public school. I used to walk home for lunch with my grandmother. On the occasion when we did need more groceries than the neighborhood could provide, I walked two blocks with my grandfather to the little, wood-floor A&P and carried home the bags, all four of them, as he strode ahead smoking his pipe. And if you wanted adventure and exotica, there was plenty of that too. The little back alleys across the street from my house were full of DPs, displaced persons from World War II, strange people speaking strange languages and eating strange foods, from places like Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and even France. A block behind my house was a street where the Syrians and Jews lives in uneasy truce for three generations, sitting in front of their shops on wooden chairs stroking their beards, the names of their stores glyphs on the front windows. That was the street where the rabbi would give you and your buddy a dime if you'd walk behind him up a dark set of stairs and turn off the light in the synagogue. Talk about adventure. If you did have to drive, gas was under a dime a gallon. By the time I moved to Massachusetts it had climbed to 15 cents, so for a buck and a half I could fill-up my VW bus and go the 200 or so miles back to visit my hometown. In those days you stayed put until you died or they dragged you to the hospital or the nursing home. That's what happened to my grandparents. My dad sold the house. I visited the old neighborhood a few years back and rode around on my bicycle to get a child's-eye view of how it had changed. It was still ethnic, but of a different kind then when I grew up, but a lot of the old places were still there. I stopped and talked to a man who was working in the yard that used to be my grandfather's. He told me how beautiful it was in Lebanon, his home country, and how he longed to return. Did I, he asked, want to buy his house. Up here, I moved into the house I live in now the year the country turned 200. I'll tell you a little about that next time. See you next week.