We’ve lived in the same house now for 35 years and yet I’m still unacquainted with whoever lives on the opposite side of our backyard fence. When we first moved in, I did, but then they moved away. Since then, ownership of the house behind ours has changed three times.
Myself, I expect to stay put until the coroner comes to carry me out. Why? Because I’m a child of the postwar America, when nobody in the small town I grew up in ever moved. The house my father bought in 1946 was ours for half a century. We called it the Big House, as opposed to the Little House, where we three sons shared a triple-deck bunk bed in the same room where our parents slept. At the Big House, my brothers and I shared a common mattress, no longer stacked like cordwood but laid out side-by-side like enchiladas. After our baby sister was born, Dad built a third bedroom in the basement, as is the custom in Utah, where, when Mom starts knitting, Dad starts digging.
I was in my teens before I managed to wrangle a bedroom of my own, but I suppose I shouldn’t complain. My poor father never had a room of his own when he was growing up—just a trundle bed in the living room. Small wonder that he never felt sorry for me.
“You have it so much better than we did,” said my mother, who had come of age during the Great Depression. I never said the same to my son, because I realize that coming of age has become quite challenging nowadays. For one thing, housing has become ridiculously expensive, whereas in the town where I grew up, every adult male could afford to buy a roof over his head, no matter how meager his earnings. I’m thinking of Alvin Gaudio, regional Boy Scout executive, who had not only a house but also an office in the basement of City Hall. Barney DeVietti, proprietor of Barney’s Photo Shop, owned a house. Our mailman owned a house, as did our high school custodian. The school bus driver who lived next door had a house—ditto the long haul truck driver and the dry cleaning delivery man. And get this: none of those guys had working wives!
So while it’s true that my only source of boyhood income was panning for loose change in playground sand boxes, I still had a place to go home to each night. And even after I moved to the big city and embarked on a “career” as a freelance writer, I could still manage the monthly rent on a humble basement apartment on Apricot Avenue.
Today, thanks largely to the fact I’m married to a hard-working woman without lofty literary ambitions, I live in a storybook house on a leafy street in a nice neighborhood, and even though I’ve been sheltering in place for ten long months, it gives me great pleasure to know that Donald J. Trump and company will be on the hunt for new digs very shortly.