Our house is a lot like a body, say, mine.  The older parts have either collapsed or are in the process of doing so, and the newer parts are not new at all. Both are fossilized into a state of mid-century modern wannabe, eons past modern, but not quite reaching adorable retro.

When we first bought it, the house had the aesthetic of a 1960s mobile home: vinyl folding doors and floors in the bathroom; counters in the kitchen which must have been updated sometime before the 21st century from, probably, Formica, to vinyl-over-pressed-wood chips, swelling from drips we could hear but not find. A tell-tale heart of the hearth. 

But it is ours, and COVID-fueled inflation has flipped our equity from 20 to 200 percent in four years. Which means nothing in the real world but is a fun thing to look at now and again, like reviewing my SAT scores from 1974. (620 verbal and 690 mathematics). (1)  And yeah, I know: there’s tons of movies about the horrors of homeownership, but if movies have taught me anything it is that I just have to believe or, occasionally, clap for Tinkerbell, or click my ruby slippers, to make my dreams come true. 

Even with all the responsibilities, owning a home still beats living on the kindness of strangers while engorging their bank accounts. 

My husband and I had had to make 12 involuntary moves as adults, seven of them with trailing kids, until we bought our place here to move to when we retired. We knew there was no way we could afford to remain in the city, paying what our ultimate landlady cheerfully and regularly announced was her whole mortgage. 

Our landlady had promised to never raise our rent or sell, and then raised our rent and sold the house to her plumber. The plumber had won a rather large lottery jackpot, which he split 70/30 with his son. (2) With his portion of the prize, the son held the liquor license of a nightclub called Touch on the other side of Staten Island, where the authorities felt Touch was a bit more comprehensive and pricey than the gentleness of the name might imply.  (3)

Unlike in several of our previous sold-out-from-under-us homes, the plumber was willing to let us keep living there. He even replaced the bathtub, which kept falling off its feet. But when COVID and working from home hit, we absconded to our retirement house early. 

I understand the plumber has moved into our old house and has installed a chandelier. It is, after all, Staten Island. 

Now we’re only paying our own mortgage, and our property taxes go to providing local education, maintenance and the important services of our community board, like proclaiming that they will follow the Constitution, as they interpret it.  Somebody’s got to do it!

Living here, I sometimes just stand at the window, soaking in the beauty we never expected to be able to afford. Just now I stepped into the living room, its fake wood paneling identical to that my parents installed in our garage-turned-rec room in the ‘70s. I closed my eyes, clicked my heels, clapped and believed the wool paneling was real wood. I believed REALLY hard. 

Huh. Didn’t work. Perhaps the movies have been lying to me all along. 

(1) ACT: 30; GREs: 720 verbal, 540 mathematical. Dad wanted me to retake the math part.

(2) https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/05/nyregion/a-136-million-powerball-ticket-stashed-in-a-staten-island-plumbers-basement.html) 

(3) www.nydailynews.com/2017/08/21/city-moves-to-shut-down-staten-island-strip-club-after-violence-prostitution-bust/ and www.silive.com/news/2017/08/strip_club_is_magnet_for_polic.html