Homeownership, part 3: Settling In

It's been over six weeks now since I bought my house, and because I've started automatically referring to it as "my house" instead of "the house" I'd say that means I've settled in. As always, each day is a learning process; for example, a few weeks ago I learned that my sump pump wasn't designed to handle the amount of rainfall a tropical storm brings. The hilarious part is that instead of short-circuiting and dying, it short-circuited and refused to turn off unless the plug was pulled. However, since the sinkhole was refilling to the top with rainwater within 20 minutes, I decided not to pull the plug. (Good call, there.) I then listened to the pump working nonstop for over 3 days until a replacement could be found and installed - when I called my parents to tell them the news sometime on day 2, they simply laughed at me and said "Welcome to homeownership!" Truthfully, I'm not complaining about any of this - with the devastation the remnant of Irene caused to my state - yes, "my state," - I feel very lucky to have escaped with 3 days of noise pollution and spending $100 for a new sump pump. With so many having lost crops, businesses, livelihoods, and homes to the floodwaters, and Bluebell Town didn't even lose electricity, I'm more grateful than I can express. It will be a long recovery for our state, though the outpouring of support by local and federal government has been swift and wonderful.

Oddly enough, while all this has been happening, I've been reading Alexis de Tocqueville's gargantuan book, Democracy in America. It was the last of those 16 books I committed to reading this summer, the books which have been on my to-read list for many years. It was illuminating to read his words, such as these, while watching their truth in action all around me:

"When an American calls for the cooperation of those like him, it is rare indeed that they refuse it to him, and I often observed that they spontaneously afforded it with great zeal. Should some unforseen accident come upon a public road, they come running from all around - whoever the victim may be; should some great unforseen misfortune strike a family, the purses of a thousand strangers open up without trouble; modest but very numerous gifts come to its assistance in its misery. ... Americans, who are always cold in their manner and often coarse, almost never show themselves insensitive, and if they do not hasten to offer services, they do not refuse to provide them. ... At the same time that equality of conditions makes men feel their independence, it shows them their weakness; they are free but exposed to a thousand accidents, and experience is not slow to teach them that although they do not have a habitual need of assistance from others, some moment almost always arrives when they cannot do without it."

Tocqueville has much to say which is often quoted and often true about the limits of American democracy, its preoccupations with money and with mediocrity, but throughout his book are also very true and very rarely quoted aspects of what he finds admirable about American government, society, and culture. Though it's been a slog getting through it all, and he really could have used a team of editors helping him say what he wanted to say in fewer pages, it's one of those occurrences a literature major like me lives for: a moment when an author and a volume say in expressible, cogent language, something true in 1840 which remains true over 170 years later, not only in facts, but in experience; not only in a book of historical commentary but also when you look out the window.

I've slightly strayed from my original topic. This happens a lot.

I've bought towel racks for the kitchen and bath towels for the bathroom; a new showerhead and a new bed, this latter to be delivered tomorrow with a new sofa and loveseat. I own a lawnmower for the first time - heck, I own a lawn for the first time. Land as property: it's a fascinating thought. And you'll laugh, as you should, but I've been in bed at night thinking about land as property and its implications philosophical and practical. Don't worry, it's not a habitual thing I do, but it's nice to be thinking new thoughts brought on by owning a home. I've taken saws and clippers and trimmers to the yard: those two red pricker bushes are chopped down, their branches broken into pieces and delivered triumphantly to the town dump. Other branches and shrubs and weeds will follow, until the snow starts to fly. I've discovered that although I don't share it, I begin to understand the subculture of American men who spend long Saturday mornings in hardware stores and Home Depot, weighing merits of gas vs. electric edge trimmers and types of sprinkler systems (stationary, oscilating, pulsating, rotary, traveling). They wear faded baseball caps and jeans, often with a paint smear or two in places. They have questions about grass seed. These aren't life or death questions, and they know this, but they are anxious about the answers.

Because no matter where you live, people judge you on what the outside of your home looks like. Though we have no streelamps and few sidewalks and my neighborhood is not the suburbs, as I've mentioned before, there's still foot traffic going by when you're outside on a fine autumn weekend afternoon chopping pricker bushes down. Literally three people from the neighborhood at large stopped to thank me; apparently the previous owner was not thought of as, in one neighbor's words, "someone who understood how to take care of a yard." One of my nearest neighbors came over to introduce himself and talk about the drainage ditch the town installed which divides our properties; I found him a courteous and lively older gentleman and gladly spent a half-hour in conversation with him. (It would serve me right, of course, if after my post on my neighbors in the old apartment I found neighbors here who were actually enjoyable to live near.) I've trimmed back the branches which overhang the slim sidewalk I do have on one side of the house; two women who run together daily through our neighborhood slowed their pace and shouted a thank-you to me. The house already has its number on the outside, but the mailbox is bare and I keep forgetting to pick up those stickable numerals, but one day I'll remember. My parents sent up a box full of extra pads for the bottom of chairs and furniture they didn't use when they added the wood floor to their house. I still can't find bookcases I like enough with to buy, and my books and DVDs are all in neat stacks on the third room's floor. Various friends have been by to see the place and one laughed and said I should mess them up into one huge pile and swim through them like Uncle Scrooge. And I'm tempted to.

More than anything else so far, it's been borne in on me that the desire for a private space, a personal and owned space, is real, and deep-seated. It doesn't need to be big; my house is barely 1,300 square feet and I feel like a king. It doesn't need much ornamentation; I like the sparseness of most all of my rooms and plan to keep them sparse. I have been floored by the number and variety of home furnishings catalogs I get in the mail, a large majority addressed to the previous owner and very few to "current resident." I tend to get 3-5 of them a week, and the downside of owning a home is becoming clearer to me. Inside, with these catalogs from far-flung outfitters, and outside with the size and variety of things you can do to your land and house courtesy of the big box stores, it's the subtle seductions of envy, and possessiveness, and gluttony. The various "hoarders" shows on cable TV are startling and sad; only in the past month have I come to understand that they show another truth of American culture which Tocqueville well understood:

"It is not a question to build vast palaces, of vanquishing and outwitting nature, of depleting the universe in order better to satiate the passions of a man; it is about adding a few roods to one's fields, planting an orchard, enlarging a residence, making life easier and more comfortable at each instant, preventing inconvenience, and satisfying the smallest needs without effort and almost without cost. These objects are small, but the soul clings to them: it considers them every day and from very close; in the end they hide the rest of the world from it, and they sometimes come to intervene between the world and heaven."

And I should say, while I've realized that desire exists to have a private and owned space, it's also not a mandatory need. I've known people who've lived their lives as renters or who have lived with family members without owning where they live, and been quite happy and content. I can't honestly say I know whether I would be happy in that situation; maybe yes, maybe no. Either way the felt need isn't essential, but having it fulfilled is very nice. Much of what we call freedom in America is the ability to make numerous choices, from numerous options, which determine not only a fair share of the larger goals we pursue and our achievements over a lifetime but also quite a lot, if not more, of our daily habits and preferences, without coercion by, or fear of punishment from, our government specifically and our society generally. It can be easily seen how homeownership is not a prerequisite, or a natural end, of the American idea of freedom, though it can be a means through which this type of freedom is partially acquired. Certainly many have done and do so, as I hope to do as well.

I'm looking forward in a rather unreasonable way to my new furniture being delivered tomorrow. This could be the beginning of the end.

I'm tempted to say, as a buffer between me and consumerism, "at least I'm reading Tocqueville," but truthfully, much of what he has to say is common sense and further conclusions drawn from such sense, and though many of our best books involve authors who speak common sense, that's never stopped people from ignoring such things, which I may well do. There's more than a few people in this world who, in high school and college, I looked at and said "surely I'll never be like them." Now I look at those people, and former friends who have become very like those people, and say "oh dear, Lord please help me not become like them." My own agency in the matter is far more suspect these days.

To end this post on a more upbeat note, I also wanted to give an update on what my agency has accomplished over the summer re: my list of summer projects. Though buying my house hadn't been a sure thing when I formed the list this summer, I knew it was a strong possibility and would curtail some of what I wanted to do, though I mean that in the best sense. For example, those 16 books did get read, but I'm still finishing the last and here we are 2/3rds through September. I did recreate a druid in World of Warcraft in order to relearn that character class and revisit some areas I played through on my first WoW character five years ago, but Reascarl (Reece for short) is at level 30, lower than I'd expected. I'll keep her around and probably level her slowly. My other gaming goal, to play Portal 2, didn't even get started. My poetry goals ended up more mediocre than I'd hoped; I wrote first drafts of 8 new poems but haven't done any revising on them, though I did work through revising a larger poem which had stymied me for quite a while. I did push my way through listening to the full 6-disc "Jazz" compilation recently released by Smithsonian Folkways, but I must report jazz remains background music to me, something to listen to while something else is going on. Though many of the musicians made interesting music, it was also fleeting music; I couldn't get into the compositions much, complex though they were, and their melodies didn't linger the way they must for music to sink into me.

Lastly, as I expected, I didn't get to all 97 of the movies I'd wanted to revisit for various reasons. I watched 35 of them, a little more than one third. The rest I may or may not get to as desire dictates; as a project in itself I feel no compulsion to actually finish it. In a less-than-shocking newsflash, just like last summer when I rewatched my best-of list, most of the opinions I'd garnered 5, 10, or 15 years ago when I saw the movies the first time came right back to me. There were exceptions both ways: Klute became hopelessly cheesy in the interim; Blade Runner less impressive; Singles more comprehensible and funny after more relationship experience on my part; A Hard Day's Night more vivacious; A River Runs Through It more sublime. I'd forgotten how good Chinatown's script is, and how mesmerizing Jack Nicholson once was as an actor. I was sad to see The Manchurian Candidate lose resonance for me apart from a few specific scenes. Badlands, All About Eve, Heat, Lost in Translation, The Last Picture Show, and Wonder Boys all remained quality films and highly enjoyable. After the superhero movie renaissance we went through, Unbreakable felt awkward and poorly paced, though the story was still memorable. I only fell in love once, but what a way to go: Whit Stillman's The Last Days of Disco, passingly interesting to me the first time around, acquired the force of truth a decade later. As luck would have it, his first movie since, called Damsels in Distress, has been completed and was just screened during the Toronto International Film Festival. Unfortunately, while it has a distributor, there's no plans yet to release it in the U.S., and most of the reviews it got at TIFF amounted to the reviewers clearly wanting to coax good reviews out of themselves and cheering him for giving it the old college try. And then one reviewer ended by saying "As delayed, superfluous-in-hindsight sequels go, it's his Kingdom of the Crystal Skull." This fills me with the chic angst I enjoy watching in Whit Stillman films but don't like so much when it's real life.

And if that's what I'm calling an upbeat way to end, I think it's time for bed.