I sat my fattening ass down to get caught up here, and it turns
out that today is the one year anniversary of this journal. I have averaged
about two entries per month - which is good enough. I have also grown
up some, and can discern this if I read through the entire year at once.
I also realize that, however few others around the world
read this (though I suspect there are at least a dozen and a half
or so out there) this will be a great legacy to
leave for my
SON/DAUGHTER - who is due around February 15. My wife loves too-cute,
snob names like 'Eli' and 'Ethan' and 'Elijah', or 'Noah', or 'Abigail', or 'Eva'.
I'll vomit out my
left lung before I allow any of those. I don't mind 'Eli' short for 'Elliot', though
Rhonda can't seem to get it into her head that familiar names are usually
abbreviations of more humdrum - and, yes - conservative names. Maybe
we'll do like my brother, and decide we like the dog's name so much (Jack)
that we'll hand it down to the boy and just start calling the dog 'Butch' - he was
too dumb to know any different anyway. I think they would've named the boy
Jack-short-for-John, except that they would've still called him Jack, and two Jacks in the house would be potentially
traumatizing for the little guy (Butch, that is). So - how does 'Kitty' sound?
The house we purchased on May 15 is big and definitely propels us
a few rungs higher up the middle class ladder. Its an 1865 early Victorian-style
home with a round turret corner, thin-cut parquet flooring, two fireplaces
lined with glazed tile and an iron 'cherub' lamp perched on the stair railing.
Its in Rockland, MA - a straight-up working class town, with a history in
shoe manufacturing, now with a Home Depot, Blue Cross offices, a couple
housing projects, and the kickass-est liquor megastore in Southeast
Massachusetts - right down the street. People drive down from New
Hampshire to shop there. They have every conceivable
imported Belgian and German ale, cheap. Heaven.
Our street,
Union, is the so-called historic street, with dozens of Federalist and
Victorians, but mostly in a state of bastardization, primarily because
the housing boom has not boomed hard enough to incentivize
landlords to reconvert all their
Painted Lady-cum-vinyl-sided boarding houses
into Boston-commuter, This Old House-type, yuppie-wet-dream houses
- much less to induce
the yuppies to buy on noisy, motorcycle-ridden Union Street. Our place
is a bright exception. It was bought up by the funeral home across
the street in 1987 to tear down for a parking lot, though the local
Housing Commission raised a stink, and a woman named Faith
stepped in with a $1 offer to move it off the lot. She owned the
multi-unit house directly across Union, which had a 1 acre-deep wood
behind it. She cleared a lot in the wood, poured a concrete foundation,
and moved the house whole-hog up the little hill, adding an updated
(by 1987 standards) kitchen and finishing the attached carriage house
as a one-bedrom in-law apartment. The only casualty of the move was
the copper spire on top of the turret. It sits in the basement, and when
I'm done with the arduous job of restoring and painting the exterior,
I'll ceremoniously recap it. Among the warm-ups for the painting
marathon was roto-tilling the "backyard" into shape, sawing off the weeds
of Maple saplings, and chipping up all the wood slag.
So how much? Everyone always wants to know. I'm not saying, because
the mental obsession middle class people have with real estate and home
owning, and their irresistable urge to ask 'how much?', and to offer
'this much!' even when they're not asked - we'll, I think its tacky.
You could call that a snobby notion, but I think its genuinely polite
not to risk offending someone who has less than you - or making
someone who has more feel embarrased. And any habit, even one
bordering on taboo, that helps people concentrate - in coversation
at least - on what's really essential in life - like the weather, and
children, and happiness, and not money - is good. One
of the fortunate traits I picked up from my father was to eschew yakking
about money and stuff, although in this respect I think he's let himself go
late in life - perhaps he thinks I'm mature enough now to be bored without
my consent. One bit regarding finances: the rental unit
enables us to live in this style, which we would otherwise be unable to afford.
That's all you get.
