Scottish hunting lodge? No, an orphanage for peculiar children
I miss small children — loud ones, shy ones, peculiar and precocious ones.
The other day, I walked through a rambling place that was for sale in La Cañada, a splendid dump of old oak and ancient fieldstone, crumbling mortar falling out of its spine. The price tag was $2.3 million, which is cheap these days, even for something that is barely standing.
Anyway, I see in this rambling old place the potential for an orphanage, as per a John Irving novel. Perched on nearly an acre with a small forest in the back, it looked like the Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite (recently renamed), had it been left alone and ignored for 50 years.
There is a grandiose fieldstone fireplace in a large, beamed living room. In the back of the place, bedrooms, studies and plenty of nooks for reading on rainy days.
My goal would be to decorate it with peculiar children, a design aesthetic I think I’ve nailed (ask my neighbors).
Here’s the history of the place: An oil baron built it to resemble a Scottish hunting lodge, didn’t like the results, tore it down and rebuilt it in 1935. If there’s anything I admire about the ridiculously rich, it’s how they always get what they want in an ornery and uncooperative world.
It’s the light I like the most, streaming through the surrounding oak trees, then wavy old glass, splashing around a home without a hint of plastic or veneer. The floors thud when you walk on them, and the doors are solid and heavy, with real hardware.
The 4,500-square-foot house now sits empty, an orphan itself, abandoned and a little spooked by its lot in life.
Because of the size of the property, developers are eyeing it, dollar signs oozing from their ears and noses.
Visionaries like me, though, see its future as a full-service orphanage. As headmaster, I would be stern, but clueless, as stern people often are. Instilling values would be paramount. As you know, I am at war with pop culture, shunning Amazon, store-bought grated cheese and any music made after 1983. On such principles, we would build the world’s finest orphanage.
Mozart would play on the sound system in the morning, and Kenny Rankin in the afternoon, when I would cook up enormous vats of soup and sides of frozen tater tots, the finest and most-comforting of all the institutional foods.
I would encourage the kids to “stretch the laundry” between washings, a life skill they can use forever. So that they might never be hungry, I would teach them how to short the market and cheat at poker. At good Italian joints, I would urge them to always “leave the gun and take the cannoli.”
At dinner, I would share with the boys and girls the stories of my own difficult childhood: how when I was 8 we were forced to flee the family coffee farm back in Illinois, where insurgent rebels threw rocks at my grandparents.
That’s perhaps a more dramatic rendering of what actually happened to me in my childhood, which was absolutely nothing. Outside my house, birds would fall from trees, dead from boredom. Inside, adults would pour their last Scotch of the day and wait for the weather report to come on. When that was over, they went to bed.
This was probably more tragic than my “rebels seized the family coffee farm” story. But I don’t want to upset the children.
So, an orphanage it will be. I am like Picasso with a putty knife, and Rembrandt with a pipe wrench. I figure it should only take me 10 to 20 years to bring the old house up to code, then we’d move on to the kitchen.
At that point, I’d have the place in good enough shape where I could flip it and finally afford the Manhattan Beach condo I’ve always craved, with a sensational housekeeper who falls a little more in love with me each week, till it gets bothersome and I have to let her go.
But that’s later.
Job No. 1 at the orphanage: Install a soccer field out back, where on perfect autumn afternoons the kids can run around in jerseys the color of jelly beans while their coaches — crimson as Santa Claus — scream as if an offside call really matters.
It won’t be just an orphanage, but a soccer academy (or maybe a comedy club).
Because when I say I miss small children, what I really miss is soccer Saturdays — loud and peculiar and full of funny challenges. After every game, there was lost laundry and empty bottles to be collected and forgotten kids who didn’t know their toes from their tater tots.
To this day, “Coach” is the best thing anyone has ever called me. Even then, I guess I was running an orphanage.
Twitter: @erskinetimes
UPDATES:
5:41 p.m.: This article was updated with edits throughout.
This article was originally published on Oct. 5 at 7 a.m.
