My Life in Real Estate--Part 1

Sic semper tyrannis! The South is avenged!---John Wilkes Booth upon shooting Abraham Lincoln

We bought our first house in late 1985. It was a 1920’s Dutch colonial on the main drag of Westfield, NJ. At first glance the house had two strikes against it: it was on a busy road, and it was across the street from a municipal building--a big old red brick schoolhouse. The trees around the house, planted too close to the house as saplings 60 years earlier, were overgrown and brushing the roof of the house. From its front, the house looked neglected and dark, with moss growing on the roof where the trees blocked the sunlight. But...it was gracious, dignified and somehow familiar.

Doris, the realtor, had listened patiently to our list of must-have’s, wants and no-way’s. She recognized two babes in the woods when she saw them. And although we were clear that we didn’t want to be anywhere near municipal or commercial buildings, and certainly not on a heavily trafficked street, she suggested that we ‘just take a look’ at the house on East Broad Street. I walked in the front door, took one look at the 30 foot living room, the French doors and the fireplace, and I heard Chopin rippling in the background. “Peter! Do you hear music? I hear music!” Peter took one look at my enraptured face, and offered his own take on the situation, “Stop gushing!” I knew this house. I’d lived in this house somewhere, sometime, in some other life, and I had found my way home again.

So much for the romance. Now we moved on to the business of buying the house. The sellers, Larry and Marge Pipes, were corporate nomads, misplaced, displaced and disconsolate South Carolinian's. Larry worked for ITT and was being dragged around the continental US forcibly and by the nose. He had been relocated from South Carolina to NJ in May, and by October he had been reassigned to Colorado. No doubt Larry was being well compensated for his inconvenience, but his charming wife, Marge, was clearly not taking these life changes in stride.

The Rhett and Scarlett of East Broad Street, as we came to think of them,  had not completely unpacked their moving boxes when ITT packed Rhett off to Colorado. And Scarlett, aside from being in her first trimester of pregnancy, morning-sick, openly racist and anti-Semitic, was left alone in New Jersey to sell the house. Well, not completely alone. She had half a dozen nasty Lhasa Apso’s and a house full of fleas to keep her company. (When we moved into the house we learned that she had thoughtfully left the flea infestation for us.)

From the end of November until mid-March, the run-up to closing on the house was spent with Scarlett on the phone to Peter each weekday evening. Rhett came back east on the weekends, but in his absence she needed to vent her concerns about the progress and state of the sale, informing us repeatedly that she’d once had a civil service job with the state of South Carolina, and how awful the North was. Scarlett ranted about New Jersey real estate law, insisting that she shouldn’t be required to hire a lawyer to close on the sale. And if she was, her good ol’ uncle from South Carolina could advise her by phone. And why wasn’t she getting interest on the escrow account with our deposit? (Why? Because that isn’t part of a standard sale agreement in New Jersey, and since she refused to have an attorney read the sale agreement, she hadn’t asked for anything outside the standard. Doris, either wasn't taking Scarlett's calls, or wasn't explaining the terms of the contract to her satisfaction.) Scarlett was in a constant and consuming hissy fit.

At Scarlett’s request, the closing took place at a place convenient to her—rather than, as is customary in NJ, at our attorney’s office. Scarlett took her sweet time and arrived 45 minutes late for the closing. Then she warmed up the crowd by regaling us with tales of how cold Yankees were, how she really felt about Jews, and wrapped it up with a charming anecdote about the only friendly person she’d met in the entire nine months she’d been captive in the North—a NY State Trooper. Finally she returned to her favorite topic—the interest she was due on the deposit in the escrow account. Since the $25K had been sitting in a non-interest bearing account for 3 months, Scarlett wanted us to write her a check for the interest. Peter and I said flatly,  "No". There was a long pause while Doris, the realtor, contemplated the sale swirling down the drain. Then Doris pulled out her own checkbook and offered to write a check for the $200 Marge wanted from Peter’s and my Jewish hides. But Scarlett paused for a dramatic moment and finally announced, "Oh no, dawlin’, I don’t want your money," and let it drop.

Scarlett and Rhett left us a dirty plastic jar full of unidentified house keys, a flea-infested house and a roll of mailing labels to forward any wayward mail. No stamps, just mailing labels. No doubt, they went on to charm the pants off their new neighbors in Colorado.  And by now, Scarlett’s baby is well out of college. But whenever I think of Scarlett, I usually wish her lifelong morning sickness, just as I have for the past 26 years.

Bring on the Sugar Daddies

Rick Santorum has Foster Friess. And, as unappealing as Santorum is, he even has a back-up donor in the wings—a Dr. John Templeton—who has already forked over $250,000 to Santorum’s PAC.

What is this man thinking?

Newt Gingrich, as utterly improbable and inexplicable as it is, has a Jewish billionaire underwriting his campaign. Inexplicable doesn’t begin to describe Adelson’s choice. And I say that as a Jew. If Newt continued to repeat Saul Alinksy’s name to the raw-meat chewing mob, I don’t know what I would have done. How could Adelson fund such overt Jew-baiting? Of course, Sheldon Adelson, is smart enough to have his own back-up—a back-up candidate, this is. Adelson has already made overtures to Mitt Romney—when Newt finally does hoist himself on his petard, Adelson will be ready to jump on Mitt’s bandwagon. (Romney doesn’t really need a sugar daddy. He has enough of his own money to burn. But, a wise man never looks a gift horse in the mouth.)

I’m not sure I quite understand why Adelson would back Romney either—a member of the enigmatic Mormon religion. (Aren’t Mormons the faith that posthumously baptized Anne Frank and a host of other Holocaust victims in absentia? They didn’t want the Jews lost to history to be lost to Christ. Their actions are a little tone deaf in modern America’s world of multicultural sensitivity, but well intended, nonetheless.) Adelson must be thinking, what do I care what Romney thinks of the dead? Just as long as he takes care of the living—those living in Israel, that is. Because Romney sure isn’t interested in the poor souls living in the US.

Well, as usual, I’m losing my way. There’s so much ground to cover…. Obama’s campaign has signaled that it is ready to hold its metaphoric nose and open the deposit chute to its own PAC. So now we will be deafened by the ka-chink of money on both sides. Those campaign jets don't fly themselves, ya know.

Newt Gingrich and Captain Renault

I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
                 --Captain Renault on ordering Rick’s American Cafe shut down in Casablanca

Watching Newt express horror at having his own character assassinated reminds me of Captain Renault expressing shock at finding gambling going on in Rick’s establishment. Remember this is Newt--whose impassioned denouncements of Jim Wright, Tip O’Neill, President Bush (41) and anyone else whose name would resonate on C-Span were delivered in the well of the deserted House after hours. Never fail to exploit a good photo opp--even if you have to jerry rig it yourself. (Apparently Tip O’Neill also understood the power of imagery, and he ordered the C-Span cameras to pan around the chamber so viewers would understand that Newt was grandstanding to an empty House.)

Newt, the self proclaimed ‘transformational figure', has indeed, been one of the driving forces that poisoned and crippled the Congress. It was Newt who introduced a vocabulary list that the Republicans memorized and recited like obedient school children. From his mid-90‘s GOPAC memo, Language: A Key Mechanism of Control, here’s a small sample of the words Republicans were instructed to use against Democrats:

destructive... destroy... sick... pathetic... lie... liberal...sensationalists... hypocrisy... permissive attitudes... self-serving... greed... ideological... insecure... corrupt… excuses… shame... bizarre... cynicism... cheat... steal... abuse of power... patronage…

Since the GOPAC days, many of those words could be applied to Newt. He’s been compared to Greek tragic heroes, but I think that’s giving him too much credit. It’s quite possible to be the poster child for helium-filled hubris and have no redeeming qualities at all. Newt ain’t no Agamemnon. Phineas T. Bluster? Now, that's got potential.

But back to my original premise: the man who perfected the politics of character assassination blubbers like a baby when his own tactics are used on him. So perhaps Newt’s life is a cautionary tale after all: if you live by the sword you will die by the sword, and the petard on which you are hoisted may be your very own.

Behind every sitcom….

…there is another story waiting to be told. Fred and Ethel Mertz had lives before they met Lucy and Ricky Ricardo. Yes, they talked about being on the vaudeville circuit for 20+ years. But they were also committed members of the Communist Party in the 1930’s. Fred had been a very young doughboy during WWI, spending a few horrible months in the trenches of France. After the war, he followed the Russian Revolution with great interest. But it wasn’t until the Great Depression that his socialist ideals came into focus. He met Ethel at a Party meeting in a rundown flat in Chicago. And that, as they say, was that. They were both out of work and willing to try anything, and that’s how the vaudeville act came to be. Their travels took them to backwaters and through railroad yards where the hobo camps swelled throughout the Depression years, only confirming their politics. They snapped out of it after WWII, coming to realize that the worker’s paradise and Uncle Joe were not everything they were cracked up to be. At that point they were growing a too little old and a little too thick to continue hoofing it on stage. They hung up their tap shoes, bought the apartment house on East 68th Street and the rest is history.

Millie and Jerry Helper, the next door neighbors to Rob and Laura Petrie, didn’t come from nowhere. Millie’s over-eager, wide-eyed stare masked the over-achiever she really was. Millie Krumbermacher graduated from Sarah Lawrence with honors. Millie was earning a master’s degree in foreign policy and working for the UN when she met Jerry. He was finishing dental school, and as the era demanded, Millie quit her job and graduate school to marry and start a family. So much for that promising career in diplomacy. By the late 1960’s, Millie had followed her inclinations and she fell—at first, reluctantly, and then exuberantly—into the counter culture. She left Jerry and their son behind, dropped Millie in favor of Justice and reclaimed her maiden name. Justice Krumbermacher hitched her way ‘cross country to enroll in graduate school at UC Berkeley.  She eschewed the Weathermen—too violent for her taste—but became rabidly anti-government. She washed the hairspray out of her hair, let her hair grow down to her knees and wore it in braids to keep it out of her way while she picked grapes with Hugo Chavez and the migrant workers. Justice married a migrant worker and is now a retired social worker. To this day, she wonders how she ever tolerated discussing cupcakes and recipes with Laura Petrie. 

On the evening news Jerry watched Justice and a mob of women burn their bras. He remarried just as the Watergate was being burgled. He and his second wife raised little Freddie and had two more children together.

The Andy Griffith Show made Mayberry look like a serene and quiet little Eden. But Aunt Bee, that chirpy little dear, brought a great deal more to the table than we were led to believe. Yes, she cooked and cleaned for the widowed Andy, made Opie’s lunch and packed him off to school each day. But what did she do before she came to live with Opie and Andy? Even doting and dotty maiden aunts have private lives and histories. Aunt Bee’s life and history rolled out in Charlottesville, where she worked for a patent attorney. She may not have been the brightest bulb on the tree, but she was a hard worker, learning the in’s and out’s of her job thoroughly. And as a young woman, she had a porcelain skin and soulful blue eyes that brought men to their knees. She worked for the attorney for 30 years,

and was his mistress for the last 20 of those years. Like Nelson Rockefeller, the attorney died in his mistress’ arms with a smile on his face, in the lavishly furnished love nest in which he kept her. Bee came home to Mayberry with a small fortune in stock, cash and jewelry. Andy’s job as sheriff, as heartwarming as it was, wasn’t going to make it possible for Opie to attend an ivy-league college. Aunt Bee put that child through Yale undergrad and law school. And she did it with a smile on her face. As Bee trilled throughout Opie’s college years, “What else is the money for?”.

There’s a point here, somewhere. Beneath the carefully presented fiction, there’s more to the story than we’ve been told or shown. Just ask Newt Gingrich about his marriages and his affairs. He jumps ugly, and I don’t believe for a minute his reaction is a chivalric and protective impulse towards the women with whom he has slept and/or married and/or divorced. Ask Mitt about his money, and he alternates between the Aah shucks shuffle (“I really didn’t make that much.”) and rich Uncle Pennybags boastfulness  (“I’ll bet you $10,000!”).  Ron Paul bills himself as a libertarian. But behind him trails a history of newsletters laced with racism. So enjoy the debates for the bread and circus they are, and remember that entertainment--even when presenting itself as news--is pure fiction.

The Continuing Adventures of Nanook

The town's snow plows knocked our mailbox right off its post on Friday. The headless post is still standing proud, and Peter got to dig through the snow in the culvert to recover the mailbox. he laid it neatly on a mound of snow next to the headless post. Next step: I came up with the idea of using industrial-strength velcro to put the mailbox back on the post. The snow plows can kick that can down the road all they want, and we will just velcro it back on the post. Since it's a nice round 9 degrees Fahrenheit this morning, we will hold off installing the velcro until the temperature reaches mere freezing. If that fails, I am moving on to the ultimate repair tool: duct tape. In the meanwhile, the PO has left us a polite postcard informing us that all is not right with our mailbox and that they will hold our mail at the PO until the headless mail post is once again topped with a functioning mailbox.

Like every woman, I dread hat hair. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do... If this doesn't qualify me for sainthood, tell me what will. Bye the bye, Peter won't even allow a camera in the same room with him when he's got this hat on. Don't laugh, folks. Forget about those lovely little hand knits that were last year's holiday gifts. Next year everyone gets a mad bomber hat luxuriously lined with squirrel fur.






Along with Teddy in his new winter gear, we are quite the sight. And yes, you can see from the look on his face, Teddy is not thrilled to be wearing a coat.

The Unexamined Life

ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ ...

The unexamined life is not worth living.—Socrates

Fuck Socrates. What does he know? This fall I spent five weeks examining 40 years worth of my life’s detritus. And I can tell you with certainty, it wasn’t worth the examination.

The occasion for the exercise was the cleaning up and cleaning out of our NJ condo in preparation for its sale. I finally dug into the many boxes of high school memorabilia and uncovered honor roll certificates, notebooks from sophomore English and more. PSAT score, SAT scores, National Merit commendations, Iowa scores and more. I threw away 30+ years of birthday cards, handwritten notes from my parents, friends and more. Much more. Then I plunged into the books of college text books, spiral notebooks filled with class notes, doodles and love notes, research and term papers and final exam blue books. And that was just the tip of the iceberg. There were computerized print outs of final grades, freshman orientation materials, campus maps and more. Much more. I shredded journals, diaries and love letters and photos that still made me tear up, congratulating myself on how much lighter I felt. I shredded long-winded Hay job descriptions written in the mid-80’s, folders full of work memos and correspondence (including a mid-‘70’s letter to a pension-holder apologizing for miscalculating his benefit and offering “May I be struck by lightning if this quote isn’t correct.”). I am not good with nostalgia. It’s the next best thing to radioactive. It consumes me unhealthily, and so I try to stay as far away as I can get. This kind of disciplined avoidance creates a mountain of ancient history collecting silently but steadily in the attic or the basement or the back of your head. I threw away 99% of it. There are some love letters and pictures even I couldn’t let go.

From there we moved on to Peter’s office where nearly 30 years of income tax returns were spilling out of a tall file cabinet. Peter’s office—and the collection of cobwebs, candy wrappers, coffee cups, dust moats and ancient stuff that filled it—is off limits to everyone. That includes me and our housekeeper, Adria. So the dust fairies have reigned supreme for a long, long time. But now, Peter had to clean out his stuff. Actually, shovel is a better description than clean.

And so, finally, it was done. From the clean up we moved on to the newest way to sell one’s house--staging. No, staging doesn’t capture the essence of it. Staaaaaging is nearer to the fact. And the story of staaaaaging and selling the condo will appear in the next blog.

Peter and The Belle of Amherst

I like a look of agony,
Because I know it’s true;
Men do not sham convulsion
Nor simulate a throe. — Emily Dickinson

It’s not often that Peter comes face to face with the splendor of 19th century American genius. But this July I dragged him to a local production of The Belle of Amherst, staged at Centennial Hall on Harpswell Neck. I’ll start by saying that Marion Jeffery gave a remarkable and moving performance as the annoying Emily Dickinson. Emily must have been a finalist in the crazy maiden aunt category—twitchy, nervous and jerky, self conscious of her talent, yet without the imagination or nerve of the Brontë sisters who managed to get themselves published. (Of course, the demand for bodice ripper novels outstripped the call for obscure poetry—even then. The Bronte’s were producing the 19th century equivalents of The Delta of Venus. Who knew what to make of Emily’s precious squibs?) Anyway, one-woman shows always require the star to hold prolonged one-sided conversations with invisible people and to go through exaggerated pantomimes of waving out imaginary windows, drying imaginary dishes and worse. The Belle of Amherst is no exception.

The last time Peter came face to face with a formidable American Master was in 1979 when I dragged him to a showing of The Europeans at the Paris theatre on West 58th Street. This was a gorgeous Merchant-Ivory production of the Henry James novel, replete with lavish period costumes and luscious photography of New England filmed through a golden autumn haze. Lee Remick was exquisitely turned out: richly ruched, ribboned and corseted in ivory silk and lace. If it weren’t for the absence of indoor plumbing, modern dentistry and antibiotics, her wardrobe would have been enough to make me wish I were living in the period. But gorgeous dresses aside, one must have a taste for Henry James—which amounts to savoring the sound and quality of one’s own saliva being rolled around in one’s very own mouth. There are lots of long, meaningful gazes, laden with heavy meaningful emotions. The world is filled with slight gestures of the wrist and twitches at the corners of one’s mouth that conjure up entire lives of meaningful consciousness. Indescribably beautiful shafts of sunlight and the very dust motes floating in them are moments meant for eternity… I couldn’t live with that much endless subtlety. But it is a lovely place to pause and appreciate the endlessly examined life—if only for a short time. A very short time. After that, I want to stop rolling the saliva around in my mouth, swallow it and get on with the rest of my life. Peter’s tolerance for this kind of preciousness is considerably lower than mine. He spent the first half of the movie alternately smoking, squirming and sleeping. I woke him, thinking he wouldn’t want to miss another minute of Lee Remick’s costume changes. To my utter shock, he expressed deep annoyance and stomped out of the theater. I think he walked around the corner to the Oak Room to drown out the horror of what he had just endured. Too much, too slow, too subtle for his robust appreciation of life, art and adventure novels. If there is anything Henry James lacks, it is explosions and violence.

Since The Europeans, I’ve kept Peter away from 19th century American geniuses until The Belle of Amherst beckoned. I’ll hazard that the temperature was still in the mid-80’s in time for the 7:30 PM curtain, and Centennial Hall’s AC is functional, but fragile. To the credit of its AC, the Hall was actually comfortable throughout the performance. Emily had to e-nun-ci-ate until her cheeks ached to be heard over the whoosh of the AC, but she did an admirable job of it.

This was my first exposure to the production, as well as Peter’s, so I didn’t know what to expect. I was hoping for more biography and less poetry, but it is what it is. And Peter, to his credit, was polite and attentive. He had no choice but to be so. If he so much as cocked his eyebrow in impatience in this tiny, one-room theater, Emily could have seen him, come down from the stage and slapped him for being rude. He had ample time to count the number of people in the audience (40) and to note that there were all of three men in attendance. The rest were women in varying stages of menopausal decay and worse. (This reminded me of my last high school reunion, when I demanded to know who are these old people? Oh that’s right, they are us.)

At intermission, Emily went backstage to rest her aching cheeks, and we stepped outside into the mosquito-filled evening air, where the gnats proceeded to swarm Peter. Usually they go for me, and so I’ve foresworn Nine Ricci and Chanel when in the country. But on this evening, Peter was their preferred meal. He stood there, swatting at the gnats and mosquitoes and sweating in the heat. Couple that with the discomfort of tiny, folding chairs set up for the occasion of The Belle’s performance, and he was just about done in. I took pity on his many complaints and returned to watch the second act alone. The air conditioning was still feebly chugging away and Emily was still heroically enunciating over its drone.

Peter went home to walk the dog and then returned to pick me up at the show’s conclusion. When he asked what he had missed, I gave him the same answer I did when his aching knees kept him from sitting through the second act of Copenhagen: If you’ve seen the first act, you’ve seen the second.