I was able to find my way home yesterday. How strange and sad. I walked into the home I bought after I made “Rosemary’s Baby.” It was a beautiful place in the flats of Beverly Hills and it had room for a tennis court. My wife, Ellen, loved to play tennis. And she was damned good. We built a tennis court and we all carved our initials in the wet cement. I forgot to see if they still exist.
I stopped by Saturday afternoon and peaked around. It felt familiar but odd. Smaller, different, and definitely no cigar smoke lingering. The new owners had cleaned that out. They had cleaned me out. After all I left that home 34 years ago on a gurney. I never returned.
I stood in the room where I died. The soda fountain was still there, in the den off the kitchen–but I felt nothing. No sense of my family, no once upon ago memories, no regrets, not even any dreams. It just was.
I connected to the house but not the home. The home was my family and it was clear that they had long gone.
What are roots anyway? Is it a community you once lived in? A home you shared with the family you loved?
As I write this, I come to understand that roots are memories. And you, my friends, keep me alive.
Thank you all for the warm embrace, your willingness to suspend you disbelief, your kind words and even kinder thoughts.
I am one lucky ghoul.
WC
Thank you ,Castle Family.This has allow me the opportunity, too share with my 11 year old grandsonTres, the greatness of William Castle.It has brought back memorys of childhood.I was 9years old, when my father and I went to see,House On Haunted Hill.It was 1959. Good times.
Like Thomas Woolf says you can’t go home again. What a lovely bittersweet story of a place you once loved so much. Our old homes always seem so much smaller somehow. Ironically I didn’t live that far away.. Even though I knew you back then I didn’t know you were so close.
Touching read