OLD HOUSES I love old houses for their smells, their must and dust and mildew and for what they've been to people I will never know. The character of caulked-up cracks means more to me than plastered walls and pretty paper, walls that play the neighbors' music when the radio I love has gone to sleep. The faces of the old are like old houses every line's a highway from the past. And so I love old houses and the faces that sit rocking on their sagging porches. -- Rod Marvin McKuen, b. 1933 Oakland, CA, author of "Finding My Father," (1976), world-famous poet and songwriter.