The house on East 12th Avenue was just two blocks from the Governor's mansion. Since we lived there, rented or not, it was ours in my 3 year old mind. We lived there for several years, long enough for me to go to Pre-school, Kindergarten, and first grade at Dora Moore elementary school. The Arts & Crafts home was a staging place for fantastic beauty and wealth, yet our family, unbeknownst to our child-minds, was rather impoverished.
Our parents had left behind a bucolic farm in the Ozarks, driven out by drought, and their four older children, ranging from 12 to young adulthood, had scattered for material support to relatives--or to the Army, and the specter of the Korean war, in the case of the eldest. There were just three of us children, a brother and two sisters, as we started life in the house with benches built into the front porch and the first floor staircase landing.
It was a place of welcoming, inviting you to sit and visit. The staircase alone would give you pause as you entered, oak banisters gleaming with the lemon oil polish my mother applied lovingly as she hummed in her quiet soprano vibrato. The glass from the dramatically placed windows streamed in light as if from heaven into a chapel. A simple Art Deco lamp hung from the ceiling of the foyer, not to detract from the understatement of the room.
Our feet fell on wooden floors, also polished with care. In the living room, a couch and a single chair framed the floor model Philco radio-phonograph that was tuned to KOA radio during the day and served Strauss and Sonatra at night. A Dutch door opened from the living room onto an encased porch, with green milk-painted floors and bead board, and screened windows that were kept open in the summer for ventilation.
A long, narrow dining room paralleled the living room and adjoined the kitchen where a butler's pantry led upstairs and down to the basement. From the kitchen door you could step out onto a fully screened back porch, also painted milky green from floor to ceiling.
At the upstairs landing was the bathroom and the door leading from the butler's pantry, a library with woodwork complementing the glorious staircase, and two additional bedrooms. In another time, the library would have been a refuge for study and quiet for our father, but in post-war America the competition for jobs was stiff. Our parents took turns selling vacuum cleaners and Tupperware to support us. And the library became the renter's room. Fortunately for us, for most of our years on East 12th Avenue, Azar was our guest.
From this stage, our lives intertwined with the Denver Public Library, the exquisite city parks, and the sounds of Strauss at night played on 78 rpm records. Azar and my father talked and listened to the music while Mary Beth finished her school work and my brother,David,and I slept. On one of those evenings, Azar taught my sister, Mary how to do the box waltz, so she in turn taught me the simple steps.
How beautiful our lives were!
Mother explained to us that among his own people, Azar was considered a Prince. He had been sent to learn how to better the lives of the people of India, she told us.
When later we saw Shirley Temple in "The Little Princess" on TV we were delighted to see that she, too had an Indian Prince living nearby.
I was very young when Daddy told me, "You know, Azar is a Mohammedan." * I nodded. He went on, "Mohamed was their prophet, and they worship the God of Abraham, but they call him 'Allah'." Again I nodded. It seemed simple to me. I was being instructed that for the rest of my life I would respect all who worshiped Allah the same as I would respect Christians and those of the Jewish faith. Our God was one and the same.
Azar was a student at Denver University, where I am told he studied post-graduate Engineering. He was tall and dark, with a beautifully toothy smile. I only remember his voice and his presence in our home, especially at mealtime, as though a member of the family. He was courteous and gentle, but as all students, more engaged with studies than anything else. Appropriate that his room was the library.
Azar was called home to marry and sent a wedding invitation to my delighted parents. Unfortunately, Lucknow, India was far, far away. Although they did not go to the wedding they corresponded for years with him. Azar stew always brought mention of his time with us.
I remember Mother putting up the Room for Rent sign that brought another polite student, whose name and fame did not carry with our family. Soon we were renting another house not far away, and a big brother who went to high school, worked ad a car wash, and drove a '57 Chevy was living with us. Time was pushing us, ever forward, enriching us as we went.
* Since I wrote this memory, I have learned that Muslims do not like the term the English formerly used to describe them because it implied they worshiped their Prophet, Mohammed. Daddy thought he (in 1953) was being quite urbane using this term, respecting that they believed their Prophet and worshiped quite the same God as we do. Certainly his instructions for respect toward others were nothing but sincere. But Daddy was born in 1909.
I include the conversation in it's context now with this footnote because it irks me the same way when others presume we who belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saint either presume we worship our own founding Prophet, Joseph Smith, or that we don't believe the Bible and are not Christian because we believe also the writings in the Book of Mormon, Another Testament of Jesus Christ. Apologies to my Muslim friends for my previous ignorance.
That was simply delicious! Keep writing!!
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