| 21 May 2005 Closure I had at least one thing in common with Saddam this morning. We both got up in our underwear. But we changed the calculus in our relations. He once owned a hundred palaces and now he has only one concrete box. As of this morning, I am ahead. I have two. It had rained since before dawn, wind from the northeast, chill soaking rain. I worked from home, since I had to be at the real estate closing, and I felt I could generate meaningless memoranda as easily from my folding chair as from my office downtown. I pounded out a piece on Navy procurement, and Army initiatives for Trans-Saharan Africa in which we might find a market opportunity. I analyzed the state of the intelligence re-organization, and made a stab at explaining the research and development capabilities of the joint command down in Norfolk , and the NATO connection that might be exploited for new Trans-Atlantic business. I typed as the cool dank air flooded the place. I heard a small dog bark urgently, a day sound with which I was not familiar. Then I mashed the button on my missives, sending them out to the e-mail queues around the world. Then I shut down the link to the Company server and drove to McLean for the Closing ceremony on my real estate deal. The wipers shrugged the rain away and water from great standing pools on the roads splashed the windows. When I was done obligating myself to another half million in debt, I returned and made a grilled cheese sandwich. The rain let up, eventually, but the clouds hung low until the darkness came. The open windows let in the sound of the new couple on the second floor fighting. It was early in the evening for that, I thought. In my experience the bile comes on most strongly before bedtime. This couple is young, though, and there are two of them in an efficiency like mine. Perhaps the rain had brought on a bout of cabin fever, or perhaps some financial crisis was impending. It is hard when you are young and have little cushion from reality. I imagine the little place is all they can afford. Prices are through the roof, so to speak, and a few hundred square feet of privacy is what the traffic will bear. Big Pink is a tolerant place. Tolerant of the little frightened angry dog that barked through the morning, Master or Mistress off at work. Tolerant of all the combinations of people who rent and own here, people on the way up, people who carry oxygen in handbag-sized dispensers and are on the way out. Tolerant, to a degree, of unhappiness and shouting. We are not guaranteed happiness at Big Pink. But we are assured of thick walls, which normally stifle the rumble of basso profundo and dueling falsetto. The concrete is thick, but this is Spring and the windows are single-pane and mine are open. So I decided to vicariously join the murmur of the anger upstairs. I walked out on the patio to see if the words could be more distinct. I looked up there, and presently the vertical blinds shuddered and I saw eyes looking down to see that I had joined their dance of anger. The noise abated for a while, and I had to imagine the hissed message between the antagonists, but presently emotion overcame them and they were at it again. The shouting did not continue through the night, so perhaps they went out, or perhaps they made love. In any case, there was silence, and I presume some closure. I wondered if they owned or rented, and how long they would live here. I imagine Saddam wonders about that, too, in his concrete box at the Baghdad airport. I was happy that my picture in my underwear was not splashed across the tabloids. I could have been captured by a determined paparazzi on my patio, in the small hours, and the disturbing image could undermine my position with my children or co-workers. I did not know which worry to take down from the menu of morning concerns as I rose. Since my local radio station dropped the music and purchased more content from the BBC World Service, I have been concerned about an entirely new agenda. There are the pictures of the ruthless despot in his BVD's, of course. Even the President had to comment on the matter, saying that he didn't think that it could make the insurgency worse, which is probably true. It sounded to me like an information operations campaign gone awry, a dirty trick hatched in the fevered brain of some Major somewhere, a low-cost means of humiliating the old regime. Then selling the idea up the chain of command. Perhaps the concept was that the image of the Dictator in Drawers would demoralize the former Baathist apparatchiks in the resistance. Perhaps it would slow down the suicide bombers. I sipped some coffee. It is not the secular Baathists who are blowing themselves up, I thought. It was the foreign Arabs, the young ones, who were dying the martyr's deaths. Perhaps the picture was aimed at the bomb-makers and the ones who plant the infernal improvised bombs by the roadside and fully intend to live to the next day. Or maybe the pictures were just the product of some banal stupidity, something that seemed funny at the time. Like posing with a prisoner on a leash. Someone in the White House apparently had further thoughts on the matter, and a few hours after the President spoke, a Deputy Press Secretary emerged to suggest that the release of the pictures constituted a violation of the regulations and possibly the Geneva Conventions. I shrugged and listened to the real emotion from across the water. Manchester United is a successful football franchise. I know this from the early news, broadcast when the Americans are not awake yet. The British are, though, and the topic of the sale of the soccer club has raged through the weeks. Apparently a Yank, described as "billionaire financier Malcolm Glazer" has bought the successful franchise, leveraging it past the 75% ownership required to treat the club as his private sandbox. He apparently owned the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who do not play soccer, and there are dark murmurs that it is a plot to offload debt and ruin the club, which will play arch rival Arsenal in the FA Cup this weekend. I don't know what the FA Cup is, exactly, but I am worried anyway since the BBC has presented all these new concerns. I decided that the eighty signatures I had executed that morning were what had me tossing in the night, not the argument upstairs, or the pictures or the disturbing soccer news. I purchased a two-bedroom condo with two baths that morning, but I did not have closure, despite all the documents. Each time I have bought a home, I could walk from the closing ceremony to open the front door, and then close it behind me. That was what was missing. Closure . The former owner was still in the place for a couple weeks, an act of calculated rent-free grace that had sweetened my offer on the place and made me the winner. The closing attorney had signed off on the last of her documents, and then proudly announced that she was officially homeless. It took me another thirty signatures before I was the legal owner of the place on the fourth floor. I think there is a balloon in the first mortgage after 120 payments, which I think I can make. I recall looking at the number on the page as I initialed it and marveling. I will be 64 then, if I live, and I wonder what I will be thinking when it happens. Will I go out on the balcony in my underwear to look pensively down at the pool? Or perhaps shout inside the thick walls, thinking I am alone? Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra |