John and Ida Maki built my house at 16 Curtis St. in Rockport in 1933. I and my wife are its present owners. We have added to their house and have tried to remain true to its original design.
Like John and Ida, however, Bonnie and I have created our own unique house on that property we and our tax assessor recognize as our own. Since 1983 we have fed and schooled our children from this house whose breakfast table grow bright many mornings from the sun’s rising over Pigeon Cove Harbor. That same view that encouraged the quarryman John from his bed to obtain the sustenance for his day’s work did the same for my wife and I in my local work in construction and my wife’s as a nurse.
I took sustenance, as well, from the four square corners of the granite foundation that John made for our house from the chiseled and honed stones from the quarry up the street. His presence I felt, as if by osmosis, from the solid and sturdy house he and Ida built about my family. His and Ida’s ghosts, if you will, were a steadying and comforting influence for my wife and I in our attempts to raise our children in this house. This house, originally built by John and Ida, became a home for them as it has become for my wife and me.
I never met John. Alive, that is.
I did meet him, however.
His massive and gnarled hands were folded on his chest that was clothed uncharacteristically (I am told) on a starched white shirt. His eyes were closed. Across his face was an imperturbable look of serenity.
I knelt in front of him and thanked him and the Good Lord for the home he help bestow upon me and my family. I did my sign of the cross, stood up, and turn to be greeted by his son extending his hand in greeting this stranger who had come to his father’s wake.
I introduced myself. He reciprocated. And we went on to regale stories of John and Ida and the house and neighborhood they helped create and that world of which they were and are a part. I did not know the man at the time but our house, that neighborhood, were our common stories by which we became kin.
His son told me a story of our kitchen, that place of the rising sun, had become a place of many a gatherings. Be they for meals, card games, or just chatter, it was a place of bonding and community. A place of love and sharing where commonality rather than exclusiveness, friendship rather than snobbery, and reconciliation over confrontation prevailed.
Paradise it wasn’t. No place is or was. In 1933 the long breadlines and dire circumstances of the Depression screamed too loudly for such a Panglossian perspective. In 2023 the clamoring of mass killings and saber rattling of bellicose nations portend Armageddon rather than heaven.
The home on Curtis Street is not immune from these evils.
And this brings me to a point his son told me overlooking his father’s coffin.
“John and Ida” had their differences. But they persevered. The morning always came the next day after these differences. And somehow that morning sun would seem to melt them away, like that slab of butter on a hot heaping of flapjacks on their breakfast plates. Despite their differences, despite their claiming to be right and the other wrong, that sun would continue to rise from the east and settle in the west.
After one particularly trying face off, they made a pact not to let their differences hem them in. Like the sun rising anew over the eastern horizon, they would simmer their differences by a week-ending picnic watching the sun set over the ocean from the ledges and rocks by Point De Chene Avenue off the Atlantic Path at Andrews Point.
And so, a tradition was born in their household. John and Ida remained together for over 60 years. The house and the home they built in the form of their children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren live on today.
The “organic” community cultivated by these two immigrants of Finnish descent is being threatened today by a less lively, “inorganic” interest that seems more nourished by greed and money interest than communal ones.
I refer to the continuing diminishment of our open space horizons as exemplified by the public’s diminishing access to legally established rights of access to these open spaces.
One such location that is an example is a recent lawsuit by a homeowner at 18 Long Branch Ave. in the Andrews Point area of Rockport seeking to ban all public access to this location.
Our family has many times followed the sagely example of the builder of our house, John and Ida Mackey. We have had relaxing, invigorating picnics on these rocky shores. I ask, no, implore you to keep this refuge open for the public so that this bit of heaven, this panacea from the cares of the world, can still remain within our rights to enjoy.