By Anita Garner
I met Itsie years ago in Mill Valley when he pulled his big blue van into the driveway next door. He was doing roof repairs for neighbor, Jerry. Itsie introduced himself. Real name Italo he said but everybody calls me Itsie. He was perpetual motion, up and down that ladder all day. At a bit over five feet tall, in his 80s, he exerted an impressive amount of energy for anyone at any age.
Jerry told him I was writing a book about Southern Gospel music and by the way, had I ever heard of the Gaithers? Sure. Anyone with ties to Southern Gospel knows the Gaithers. He loved their TV shows, watched them every week on one of the three channels he received via his antenna. He pointed in the direction of Mt. Tam, a defining feature of the town, and said he lived in a canyon with bad television reception. He wasn’t about to pay for cable TV so he got himself a DVD player. As soon as he learned to use it, he was going to buy some Gaither DVDs. Meanwhile he listened to music on a CD player someone gave him.
I invited him in for coffee. He was disappointed when I brewed a fresh pot. Didn’t I have any instant? It was cheaper. I should try it, save some money. He talked about the work he did on properties around town. “I’m just a fixit guy. Now my wife, May, she had all the brains.” From that first cup of coffee, no conversation ended without mentions of May, who’d passed away years ago. I gave him a CD of my parents’ gospel music.
I had just returned to the Bay Area, leaving Los Angeles soon after 9/11, homesick for Northern California. I found the sublet next door to Jerry while searching for something more permanent. All I needed was a small place with a room to write in and a redwood tree to look at. Mill Valley is not a rental town but Itsie said he might know of something.
He liked to work on things, he told me, but May enjoyed buying properties, fixing them up and then not selling them. He still owned all the houses they’d bought decades ago and he still did the repairs. When he had a vacancy in one of his rentals, there was no advertising. You’d have to know someone who knew him and then he’d make a decision about you based on who knows what? In our case, it might have been the gospel music. One of his cottages was about to be vacant and I could go take a look. It was love at first sight. It had enough quirks to suit any writer.
Itsie was a scavenger. He drove around town picking up things. He retrieved discards left behind by previous tenants. Most of his treasures had already been employed somewhere else at least once. A row of cupboards, doors of all sizes, windows with some real beauties among them, and enough lighting fixtures to power a showroom. He wasn’t a hoarder he assured me, he had plenty of room to store things and he could name everything in his inventory.
When repairs were needed at my cottage, the material he brought didn’t necessarily resemble the original, so there might be no logical visual transition, say from metal to wood or vice versa. One day he observed a downspout pouring rainwater in a direction that he considered wasteful. He attached a flexible extension hose all the way from the downspout by the front door, across the driveway and into a flower bed out front by the mailbox post. To give gravity an assist, he built supports from scraps of some other material to prop up his contraption. Nothing matched anything else. I returned home to this surprise and by the time I went inside I’d adjusted, as this cottage must have over the years, to Itsie’s particular additions.
He lived one road away, a quick walk over the creek, in Corte Madera Canyon. On my first visit to have a cup of instant coffee in his kitchen, I stood at the bottom of what appeared to be at least four flights of wooden steps zigging and zagging up his hill.
Elegant lights on wooden posts decorated the path all the way up to his stunning home. The lights, he assured me, were bought cheap from someone in The City.
A tour of his four-level home involved even more stairs. Everything stacked up, layer upon layer, culminating in a sort of redwood castle on a hill.
One level below his living space was a professional workshop with a huge storage area neatly arranged. The level below the shop was an entire floor designed by the original owner as an apartment for live-in help. Itsie used it for his furniture rebuilding projects, The top level was a full-floor attic. Walking around up there we visited his family heritage, from Italy to California’s wine country, and his personal mementos from WWII, displayed as carefully as if a museum tour would be coming through any minute.
Back to this story’s starting place – the Christmas tree in the photo at the top of the page. I took this fuzzy picture to prove to my family in L.A. that I had decorated for my first season in the cottage. The tree was in the entryway, a space with absolutely no function but plenty of charm. Itsie found a bunch of old windows somewhere and formed a complete anteroom incorporating them. I hung the canvas curtains and we bought the long string of lights on one of our thrift shop trips. He wouldn’t dream of letting me pay retail, not even for Christmas lights.
He didn’t care much about Christmas, he said. Since May died, there weren’t any holidays he celebrated. On my next trip to his house, I carried a little Christmas tree already decorated. I encouraged him to put it on his kitchen table where he started each day listening to music, surrounded by redwood trees. At first he frowned, ready to reject the whole idea. He asked where I got it. Thrift shop, I said. Then he plugged it in.
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I’ll probably be writing about Itsie as long as I’m around. Here’s another story and there are others in these archives.