There was a street lamp on the corner of Tunisia Road where we lived on post after we first moved to California, just a few steps away from our little home. Our house was the kind of house everyone in the military gets when they're lucky –– comfortable but also forgettable enough that you didn't even realize you were supposed to forget it.
But at that age, everything still seemed magical and sacred. My room wasn't just an ordinary room in an ordinary house. It was the hallowed sanctum where I spent hours organizing my toys and brushing my dolls' hair. It was my first little office and creative studio, the place where I first fell in love with drawing with my pencils and typing up stories on the old, secondhand typewriter my parents had given me for the purpose.
I was used to military life, so I technically knew the house and my place in it were temporary. But somehow that didn't matter. When you're only seven or eight, even a summer feels like an eternity, so a change that was still probably years in the future felt like something to worry about in some other lifetime.
In the meantime, I had living to do, stories to write, and that street lamp to dream underneath.
It was just an ordinary street lamp on an ordinary suburban street corner. But what I remember most is the way it stood tall and strange, like a metal flower that waited all day to bloom at dusk. That's when the soft, orange glow of evening flickered to life, and it always felt like something sacred had been summoned.
My mother would let my brother and me stay out until dark as long as we didn't go further than the street lamp. We would take our favorite toys (probably She-Ra or My Little Pony for me and He-Man or Go-Bots for him) and sit underneath the lamp on the cool concrete underneath, waiting for the sun to sink beneath the horizon so the light would come on.
And when it finally flickered to life with a click and a buzz (bloomed!), it felt like a magical portal suddenly opened up. We felt warm and protected under that tangerine light, no matter how cold it actually happened to be outside. The orange glow was like the glow of a dream you can't quite remember. It cast long shadows across the sidewalk and made our ordinary plastic toys seem mythic, like tiny warriors from a mysterious time long ago.
For that small window of time each evening, we weren't just kids on a military block. We were explorers. We were ritual keepers and dreamers.
I don't remember the full address of that house anymore. But I do remember the shape of the living room and the way the Christmas tree lit up the corner in December while A Christmas Carol played on the TV. I remember the texture of the carpet and the long, iridescent tails of my father's betta fish in their meticulously maintained tank.
I recall being frustrated with the way the front door sometimes stuck when it rained. I remember my mother’s voice calling us in when it got too dark, and I remember trying to bargain for “just five more minutes” under the light.
I miss that place. Not because it was perfect, because it wasn’t. It was ordinary and fleeting after all. I miss it because something in me opened there. Something that still remembers how to wait with bated breath for the world to light up so a portal can open.
........
I went back to Tunisia Road once, years later. If memory serves, I was in the car with my father. We were on our way somewhere else, just passing through, and he asked if I'd like to cruise by the old house and see it again. Of course, I said yes.
And in a way, part of me wished I'd never done that, because I barely recognized the place. The huge acacia trees my brother and I used to play under in our hammock were gone, cut down to nothing but stumps years ago. The house was a ghost of itself, and so was the street corner where my brother and I used to sit and play at dusk.
Now it's been a couple of decades since even that trip back. Fort Ord shut down as a military base decades ago. That house on Tunisia Road and the street light on the corner may not even exist anymore. But I still remember the sound of that light coming on — the way it hummed, then sparked, then held. The way my brother and I watched it together in reverent silence, like it was a tangerine star made just for us.
I've seen the tangerine star a couple of times since, in dreams and once when I painted it into a piece of artwork years ago. I didn’t fully realize it then, but I think I was trying to get back there, to that particular stretch of time and feeling. To a place where I felt at home without even thinking about it. Where the night wasn’t scary yet. Where a single street lamp could feel like a friend.
Sometimes I wonder what it means to miss a place that may not even exist anymore. A place no one else remembers. A place that wasn’t even meant to last. But other times, I realize the magic is the briefness. The flicker. The five minutes before someone calls us inside to dinner.
Some places fade. Some lights go out. But some of them, the right ones, leave their glow behind.
*Another lantern lit for Feast of the Wandering Pen. A month of wandering words, one new moon to the next.
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