05 March 2010
The Office
(The breakfast bar in Big Pink’s unit 107)
Three early meetings this week and I am tired of it. It is happening again this morning, back to the old routine of leaping from bed sometime before five. I enjoyed the months when the Government was so disorganized and I could check the office mail from home before the ten-minute commute and rolling into the garage after nine.
I mean, it was work at home, so I wasn’t loafing. But this week was a pain. Being out in Fairfax for a 0830 meeting, or worse, over at Bolling Air Force Base in the District for a 0800 and fighting my way through the traffic is just not where I want to be.
I logged on to check the debris from the morning. I had talked briefly to Berlin just before my bed-time, impossibly late there, still early out West, and counted myself lucky to be stuck in the middle though my heart was on both ends.
I was pleasantly surprised to find the tax refund had posted to the account. Considering the budget deficit, I had been grateful to Richmond for their alacrity in giving my money back to me. I spent it immediately. The larger check from the Feds was hung up for some reason. Maybe it was the snow that forced the time on me to do the taxes in the first place.
I give away so much money in mortgage interest and something called “Maintenance” that it is inevitable that some money will come back in the Spring. Maybe I can get this right some time in the future, but for now it is just something to deal with.
I looked at the unexpectedly large number in my checking account and blinked. Then I opened up another window in the banking program paid off the second note on my little condo down below with three left-clicks of the mouse.
I was still numb with rising, so I didn't feel any triumph. It was only a few minutes later that I recalled why I had taken out the $20 grand loan to upgrade the place in the first place. It was very basic when I bought it, largely on fear of the bubble. I was living on the fifth floor- the Party Floor- at Big Pink, a rental, and afraid that my landlord would succumb to the blandishments of the market and take a quick profit on a sale and I would be out on the street.
That had happened the year before, when I was ejected from the little place I had first rented in this vast building for the convenience of the owner. I still smarted from that, the gnawing uncertainty of not knowing where I was going to live.
I was making progress on paying off the boy's education at the time, but cash flow was tight. Remember those days? When things looked like they were zooming out of sight and would only leave us behind?
The place was tiny, but the location was good. It was just adjacent to the pool deck, in between the International Concrete Worker's places, Joe and Tony, and both had lavished attention on their places. I thought I could do the same.
And tiny was relative. The place I rented had the same square footage, but the owner had put a wall down the middle of the single living room and termed it grandly a "junior one-bedroom."
It was about as big as the queen-sized mattress I put inside the little room.
I thought that I would never be able to live in a place to call my own again. Oh, the memories swirl! I bought a Murphy bed that folded up into a bookcase, installed the whole thing myself. Had the plantation shutters installed on the big windows so that I did not share all of my life with those passing by.
But the little kitchen was purely 1964. No dishwaser. Basic icebox. nice gas range, but every dish that was used had to be washed in the single sink, and you know the peril of allowing even a single dish to remain unwashed in the shallow sink- soon they multiply.
So I had the Guatemalan craftsmen gut the place. Rip up the ancient wall to wall rug; refinish the parquet floors; replace the appliances, install tall new cupboards, marble counters, dishwasher, built-in microwave; new paint and new walls with a big aperture in the wall with two retro diner-style stools to make a breakfast nook bar cum dining area.
The intent was to make the place an annex. It was too small to really live in, as a very good friend pointed out, and the crap that came back to me after the marriage ended made something small into something almost claustrophobic when the days grew short and the chill darkness filled up the pool deck outside.
The Three Letter company that sent me a regular paycheck encouraged us to "work from home," which is a euphemism I still do not fully understand, and it was entirely too disorienting to live with my personal affairs mixed amid the papers of commerce.
I often said that home-workers, on a day when the blizzard came, were snowed in at the office. I thought having an actual office separate from the living place would provide the separation to keep things in their real perspective.
The work turned out pretty well, but of course by the time I was done with the reconstruction I had fled to another, larger place with two bedrooms and baths that I called Tunnel Eight, after the place where General Yamashita hid all the gold of China.
Imaginary gold, in point of fact, and capable of being dissolved over night in the frenzy of greed that swept over us all in that lamented decade of the zeros.
I should have known then what we now know painfully; it was as plain as the noses on our beaming faces. The going rates for rent in Big Pink were less than what the mortgages cost to own one. A lot less. The only advantage was the tax write-off, and that was a solitary pleasure that only came once a year, not twelve times.
Oh well. I will try to sell the place, open-house this weekend. The farm and Tunnel Eight are probably more than I need at one time, and having a third place is positively irresponsible.
But I will miss it. I really should sell the larger one, but it is only now- barely- not underwater.
That will be the next project. I guess this crap only ends with the first of the only two certainties in life, of which the latter- taxes- are by far the more pleasant alternative.
Copyright 2010 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Subscribe to the RSS feed!