Conversations with my house, revised and continued

A year or so ago I was thinking once again about my house as a chapter in my life gradually approaching a close. Our relationship was changing: each year I move closer to retirement and selling the property and moving on. A poignancy had crept into our conversations. I have always loved the layout of the house, its coved ceilings, the views of the golf course through the windows, its airy and open position on a corner lot. This house taught me about the capacity of the right real estate to frame possibilities for a changing family--- a newly single mother, a teenage son, an aging grandmother, a dog. And at one point a visiting Doberman who did not do stairs. The arrangement of its rooms had enabled three people to invent a new life successfully.

When my partner Dennis was here that October he replaced the screen doors with glass for winter. The last tomatoes were picked and the plants pulled up. He hosed the gutters clean and our high school helper Grant raked leaves to the street for city cleanup. All the annual fall tasks, the rhythm of the last ten years. But I knew then that things were not the same between us, the house and I. After Dennis left, my relationship with the house did not return to its slightly bittersweet equilibrium. The mortgage crisis had disturbed our formerly philosophic dialogue. My side of the conversation grew querulous. How will this house sell in a depressed Flint market a few years from now? Reproaches about market value loss had replaced gratitude for shelter and security. The house stopped talking.

In other times in America, in other centuries and other countries, people lived in houses for generations. Tragedy often struck and families sold off goods and furnishings until finally the house would have to be sold to a new owner. In a final, sacrificial service and now a shell of former self, a house would generate cash to pay its owner’s debts. The colonial mansions of Jefferson, Washington, and Madison went through this process until restoration societies could salvage them. Memoirs and autobiography, novels and drama often convey the connections between human life and houses. Psychologically and metaphorically the house has been understood as an analogy for the self and human relations. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard described the fortitude of the house which anchors us in the swirl of the universe.

How can the value of a good house be measured?

The mortgage crisis has advanced since the fall of 2008 when these ruminations began. Those fortunate enough to still have their homes have gone bi-polar, lurching between dismay at drops in home values and hope for floors or plateaus so that at least we’d know we are at the bottom. The federal incentives have hit snags. The mortgage modification options have not been implemented well by the Great Lenders. Unemployment now causes mortgage defaults, pushing more properties on to the market.

Meantime I began to size up the condition of my conversation partner and to list the repairs: roof, garage door, basement walls, yard. The list was not what I would do, of course. Parallel to the column of tasks were the names of those who had always worked on the house before, back in the duplicitous days when our real interest lay in marketable improvements---“updates,” as realtors say. Maintenance was an irritation.

Ron the builder, Tim for heating and plumbing, Bill the glass man, Big Dan the tree man, Lewis the painter---a roll call of repairmen. Flipping through an old rolodex it appears that about a third of my Flint social life is connected to house maintenance. My house has been kept together by friends. They were respectful. My house provided them work and displayed their talents. Each noisy, dusty day of a project brought hoots of amazement or humor at finding out how things were constructed sixty years ago when the house was built. Or disdain at previous owners’ cheap and un-workmanlike fixes. I’d be called upon to make decisions about the quality of materials to purchase or the cost of extra hours of labor to do it right. Extended deliberations ensued.

One summer my mother, then about 85, set herself up on the front porch with a novel and the New York Times while eaves troughs were spread around the lawn, scrubbed and repainted. The dog slept under her chair, my son went off to friends, I went to work; everyone was happy. That was over ten years ago. The mortgage crisis makes it seem so far away.

After a winter of sulking and silence, my house unresponsive, I galvanized myself this past spring. I returned to the rolodex, got some estimates, and then a surprise. A new friend for the house turned up---Kyle, the part-time landscaper. He’s from the neighborhood association on Facebook. By late summer he’d laid out a new plan for the front entrance with hardscape design and shrubs. Long deliberations about which plants to choose, trips to the nurseries and the gravel yard. This time Dennis sat on the front porch; about 5 o’clock the beer came out. Everyone was happy.

The house is talking to me again, our conversations have resumed. The house has taught me something again, this time about flexibility and imagination in hard times. Oh, and our philosophic dialogue reminds me that I’ve found a man who likes house repair.

Read this essay and others at The East Village Magazine, http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/

Books and Life

A dozen boxes of my Mom’s books, stacked in the garage since her death two years ago. I remember them in floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that covered one wall in the living room of the house where I grew up, the colors of their spines, the illustrations on their dust jackets, the titles read sideways. As an only child I gazed at them in the vacant time I seemed to have. I am sorting them now. To keep are the sets: my Mom’s Anthony Trollope novels, the political novels and the ecclesiastical novels, in the Oxford World’s Classics edition. They are small, just 4 inches wide, 6 inches tall (not quite octodecimo in book sizes). Hardcover but lightweight, they fit in the hand, easy to read despite the small print. Their jackets not as bright as I remember them, but still multi-colored. Next is the complete Jane Austen novels in the London J.M. Dent edition with Brock illustrations---all were ordered from England. Then there are her old college books inscribed with her older brother’s name; he’d passed them down to her. Their mottled buckram spines and musty smell uninviting now but in the 1930s a world of learning to a young man and woman able to go to college when so much of the population was struggling to survive. Her father had only a grade-school education, but ran a hardware store in Portland, Oregon. Barrels of eight and ten-penny nails, cans of paint, tools and lawnmowers---the store produced enough to pay for private tuition for my Mom and her brother. And for these books.

My sorting project migrates to my own bookshelves, to old books I’ve been meaning to cull---Signet Classics marked 95 cents in the upper right corner; I can barely read the print any more, at least not for pleasure. Notes edge their pages, angled obliquely to the text which itself is underlined in the days before highlighters. I had been enthralled by these books in graduate school; they had been my life of study and intellectual exchange. What was I tracking as I read Anna Karenina? Some analysis demonstrating that it wasn’t really a love plot, it seems. Shabbier are the books bought in communist Poland with cheap paper and ink; weak glue in the spines. They fell apart like communism, only faster.

One year, after my income had improved, I decided to invest in some quality hardbound editions---In Search of Lost Time in 6 Modern Library volumes in the translation by C.K. Moncrieff-Terrence Kilmartin, revised by D.J. Enright. Twenty bucks or less a book. I read up to volume 5 the first year my Mom lived with me. Having the set stacked at my bedside got me through the day, anticipating the night when I could finally be alone with the next chapter. While perhaps not elegant, they were sufficiently handsome, a pleasure to hold. Then a year or so ago, I learned that there was a new translation of Swann’s Way by Lydia Davis, part of a project to re-translate the entire Remembrance of Things Past, with six other translators, each for a different volume---the twenty-first century “Penguin Proust.” Maybe the publishers worried that a single translator might die during the lengthy project, or maybe gearing up for 2013 and the centenary of the publication of Swann’s Way. I ordered the Davis translation and discovered a new world, fresh and direct. I’m hooked on another set.

The first week in December brings The New York Times Book Review with Holiday Books, “100 Notable Books of 2010” followed the next week by “The 10 Best Books of 2010,” and then The New Yorker’s “A Year’s Reading. Reviewers’ favorites from 2010.” Publishers are pushing for strong Christmas book sales, but for me it’s an extended winter project: mark the ones to review online, which ones to peruse at Borders, which ones to sample on Kindle.

There are drawbacks to the Kindle, of course. Why is it hard to remember what I’ve read on a screen? Somehow I can’t visualize the place on the page where I recall a certain passage. Not having page numbers displayed disconcerts. And it’s easier to quit reading a book on Kindle. It seems to work best for short fiction and essays. On a plane, its bright yellow zippered cover promises an hour or two in my own bookshelves. At my bedside it reminds me it’s not true that I’ve got nothing to read.

Sitting on the floor, I add my own books to my Mom’s. It’s our common project now, hers and mine, this cull from both our lives. I shift books from her boxes into bags, along with some of my own---re-read the inscriptions, smell the pages, and stack them into bags marked for the Flint Public library and UM-Flint Thompson library, choosing what I think would be good for each. They will dispose of them according to their own lights, of course. Hers here, mine there, a few to save for a while. I mark the calendar to haul the bags to the loading dock manned by the understanding volunteers from “Friends of the Library” on the first Saturday of the month. Why don’t I sell the better ones on Amazon or explore this website book exchange thing? When I’ve bought from an individual seller some books come in thrice used jiffy bags, former addressees blacked out, my name in crabbed handwriting; I visualize some strange book hoarder. Others come in fresh, new bags with a computer generated label. A pretty professional set up. Neither appeals.

Beginning in January, the Flint Public Library will close on Mondays, holding on until finances from a successful millage take effect. Branches of the Library will be open only 2 days a week. Even when the millage kicks in, the Library tax revenue will be almost 20% less than what it was in 2009.

Books from another person’s life and from a past stage in my own. Four bags ready to go. I get out my checkbook and join the library Friends, a small contribution to help out the library. But it’s more like Charon’s obol, the coin placed on the mouth of the dead so the ferryman would take them to Hades. An offering out of respect to these books, hope for their safe passage to another life. It makes the parting easier.

See also http://www.eastvillagemagazine.org/