My father never went by his given name of Andrew. Everyone called him Jack. As I stopped to think about it today, I must confess that I still don't know why. His middle name was Jacob, perhaps that had something to do with it. He bristled at people who called him Andy, those friendly type people who like to show their friendliness by familiarity and the use of nicknames. My father wasn't into friendliness much.

My father built the house we grew up in. After they first married my parents moved to Florida for a short while, and returned north having found it unsuitable for them. They rented an apartment for a time and my father was working for a construction company. There were going to build in a new area of the next town over. My father decided to buy one of the plots and in between working and building the other houses on the new street, he built his own house on his own land.

He built it, I say, but he never finished it. There is an old saying about the cobbler's children never having shoes. The carpenter's family has a house that is not completely built yet. He scaled down the blueprint he used so the entire house was slightly smaller than it was supposed to be. My mother never stopped chastising him for that. She had seen the house it was supposed to be modeled after and she was not happy with the miniature house that Jack built.

The second floor was to have two small bedrooms and one large one as well as a bathroom. It only ever had two small bedrooms. The bath and master bedroom were an unfinished area that we children always called "the attic" and it was filled with the usual junk one collects in such an area. Downstairs was the kitchen, bathroom, livingroom, diningroom and a small den. I remember long ago there was a time we actually used the dining room as a dining room but I can't for the life of me figure out where everyone slept then. We had a family of seven in a house with only two bedrooms. The den usually housed two children or my parents, my mother kept switching rooms. The dining room eventually became my mother's bedroom for good after he built her a large closet with sliding doors. I can remember being in almost every room at some time in my life until finally, after a few of the older siblings moved out I got my own room, the teeny tiny one that had the slanted ceilings and barely room for a bed.

When I was growing up, there was no electricity allowed on the second floor. This had to do with my sister, a lamp, a blanket and a magazine that was being surrreptitiously read late at night. Once the offending parties had moved out, and I was an inhabitant of the second floor, that had to change. I did get electricity, oh boy did I get electricity. I think if he had ever seen the number of things I had connected to the only two outlets in the room he would have pulled the plug permanently. The only inconvenience I suffered was when he would change the fuse from a 15w to a 30w to run his machines in the cellar as he worked and when he changed them back again. The record player would slowly wind down to an inhuman garble and then wind back up again to be recognizable as The Beatles. I never understood why the cellar and the second floor were on the same fuse, but that was the way things worked in the house that Jack built.

The one bathroom was not sufficient for seven people and was so tiny that it could not be exited by one person if another also occupied it. Originally there was a sink on spindly legs in there and the door opened wide enough for escape or entry. Later he built a lovely vanity around the sink that absolutely just fit. The door cleared it by 1/16 of an inch. A few careless people nearly lost fingers by having a hand on the wrong part of the door as it went by the corner of the vanity. Danger of dismemberment was just part of life in the house that Jack built.

We had a huge back yard. The kind you could play baseball in. Anything over the opposite neighbor's pine trees on the property line was a home run. Even all these years later, I can still see the depressions of home base and the pitcher's mound. This was one place where having a carpenter for a father came in handy. We never had a swing set, but we had sawhorses to set up with long planks for see-saws. We could build anything we needed.

My father reserved a portion of the yard for a garden. Planted potatoes (of course) but also corn, tomatoes (though he hated tomatoes) and assorted beans. I learned how to hoe and weed and cultivate. I also learned how to pick the potato bugs off the vines. It's a nasty business and you have to put them in a can of kerosene to kill them, or at least that is what he had me do. Potato bugs are really quite colorful little creatures but you can't have them returning, can you?

There are great advantages to having a carpenter live in your house and work from your basement. We always had wood and tools and although we never had much in the way of fancy or expensive toys, we made our own most of the time. My neighbor had the complete Barbie doll house, but I had a great cardboard box, a brother who worked for a tile company and who brought home tile and carpet color samples and wood to make furniture with. It was the most elegantly furnished cardboard box anyone ever had.

Just a week ago, they put the house that Jack built on the market for sale. An offer has been made and accepted. For the first time ever, some other family will live with its structural oddities. Other children will discover the bannister that is perfect for sliding down, will play baseball in the yard and climb the trees. Maybe some other father will dig in the yard and plant a garden of his own. I will go back one more time, to see it as it is and not as it may become once some other family modifies it to their tastes, to walk around the yard, to see where we wrote insults about each other on the foundation, to take away any last remaining items that are part of my life there and to say goodbye to the house that Jack built.