A House of One’s Own: Summer Dreamin’ Deferred
“You never finish eating the meat of an elephant.”
-African proverb, found here.
When Thomas Jefferson plagiarized in ink and parchment the words and ideas of John Locke to create the document that would claim a string of colonies on the North Atlantic seaboard as sovereign, he did nothing so different as do my junior high students who skim back and forth from Thesaurus to drafts of school essays looking to supplant the meager offerings of their lexicons with more grandiose parsing. But these kids, again like Jefferson, are the bright ones who grasp intuitively that medium is message, or, at least, that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. (Due props to Mary Poppins.)
Of course, Jefferson could not have been aided by a writing reference not yet in existence, nor did he need one. Yet when the last of the triumvirate “life, liberty, and property” was replaced with “happiness,” it was more paraphrase than emendation. A more grand synonym, happiness transcended property though did not exclude it. If you didn’t have property, as the majority of citizens did not, you did not vote. If you did not own, you did not count. Even as poorer classes and minorities gained suffrage, it was property owners whose lobby had the ear of the legislature. Hence we have forever embedded in the American Dream, forever linked to the ideal of freedom and happiness, the ownership of space.
I suppose I was naïve. I thought I had achieved happiness when I found the love of my life and got to live with her and be around her everyday; I think she, too, thought herself to be fully happy. Yet after talking to many people we have found that we were only as happy as we could be at that time. According to all these other people, we could significantly increase our happiness by giving money to a jeweler to symbolize our love, money to a judge to document it, money to a preacher to bless it, and money to a property owner to celebrate it. So when we found this out, we kind of looked at each other and said, Well, we’re pretty darn happy, but it couldn’t hurt to be more happy. Right?
So we took the plunge. (Into the deeper waters of happiness, that is.) She got a diamond from South Africa in the spring. I picked out a platinum band in L.A. this summer. We booked a spot on a 38-acre estate in Portland for the venue. We have a pastor, who is also a personal friend, to do the ceremony. Our DJ sounds like Casey Casem and is letting us pick all our own songs. Our cake is four-tiered, each tier a different flavor. My future father-in-law, a graphics arts expert, is doing the invitations with a West African insignia to boot. We bought Nigerian wedding beads to include in the ceremony. An environmental school in southern Washington is growing fresh flowers exclusively for our occasion. She chose her dress and veil, which she says are non-traditional yet classy. I chose my tux, which I’ll say is long tie, not bow. We had engagement photos made in a garden of sunflowers and corn. One photo was printed with “Save the Date” information and was sealed on the back with small magnets so you can place it on your refrigerator and be reminded not only of us and our happiness for the next ten months but also of the date on which we will achieve even more happiness.
So we were pretty busy this summer. It was a lot of work, but worth it because I still got to be with the love of my life and live with her and be with her everyday. Plus, I got to see her smile a lot more and look at me in ways she hadn’t looked at me before. It just didn’t seem like life could get any better. Then, after talking and visiting with so many people, they revealed to us that we had yet to reach the pinnacle of happiness. We were only as happy as we could be at this time, they said. We could significantly increase our happiness, they told us, if we would pay a couple thousand dollars to an agent who would then help us become a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt to a housing market in which that amount would get you a single family home the size of a small economy apartment.
When we heard this, we were a little skeptical. We had planned to wait to buy a house until we could save some for a down payment, until the market was not so crazy. Besides, I’ll be trying to make a living as a freelance writer next year, with possibly only a part-time job as supplement. We need a house that’s, maybe, only a hundred thousand. But everyone we talked to was adamant. Ha!, they said, You can’t get an anthill on an eighth-acre for $100,000. Not up here, they said. This ain’t Texas, where you’re from, where there’s 1,000 miles of flatland in all directions and anywhere you look you can see over the horizon into eternity! We got mountains, rivers, ocean, and an environmentally friendly metropolis all within a 40-mile radius. This is the West Coast!, they said. We got moderates, and even liberals! The Northwest is the new California! The market’s a Buster Poindexter song - Hot, Hot, Hot! Trust us, they said, If you buy now, the market’ll keep going up, up, up, and when you come back next year and see the equity you’ve earned you’ll be happy, happy, happy!
After considering a number of such arguments, we looked at each other and said, Well, we’re pretty darn happy right now, but I guess it’s worth a try. I guess it couldn’t hurt to be even more happy than the more happy that we’ve become. Right?
So again with the plunge.
*****
Our best moments in life are, necessarily, brief interstices between longer, more trying times. And just because I’m at the latter bookend of this time loop doesn’t mean I’m not happy. I am. I still get to be with the love of my life and live with her and be with her everyday. Even though we must now despoil ourselves of American consumer culture once again, change our watches and mentalities back to Nigerian time, go back to teaching the uber-wealthy, entitlement-afflicted children of diplomats and oilmen, pray we remain healthy for the next ten months so as to avoid the looney quacks who come here to practice medicine, even though we’re again knee deep in Lagos life, we feel good. We’re somewhat glad to be back in Nigeria, intent on enjoying this last year, seeing a bit more of Africa, and taking in as much as we can.
And why the hell not? We’re coming off a storybook summer. Budapest, Hungary. Krakow, Poland. Warsaw, Poland. The Zacopane Mountains in Poland. The Berlin Wall, Germany. Downtown Frankfurt, Germany. Huntington Beach, California. Los Angeles, California. Pacific Beach outside of San Diego. Portland, Oregon. Winchester Bay on the Oregon Coast. Kalama, Washington. Woodland, Washington. Vancouver, Washington. Houston, Texas. Dallas, Texas. Ennis, Texas. Conroe, Texas. Now back in Lagos. And it’s only one more year. We can coast on this past summer until Christmas when we go to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, then coast on Christmas until spring break when we go to Kenya, then coast on spring break until summer when we go to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, and then coast on that trip right into wedded bliss.
Of course, bliss has its price. And for a bit more than 1100 square feet of it in Vancouver, Washington, that price is a bit more than $200,000. Three bedrooms, two baths, a double-car garage, a surveillance camera above the garage door, a surveillance TV monitor mounted in the garage corner, faulty siding, a dog run, vaulted ceilings in the living room, a bay window in the living room, sliding patio doors in the master bedroom, purple walls in the master bedroom, a small rock pond with green water and koi fish, atrocious blue carpet, a patch of green in front, and a little larger patch of green in back - all of these included in our package of joy.
It was built in 1994. Initially, we were looking in downtown Vancouver for something quaint from the 1940s. These houses were priced a smidge lower between $160,000 and $180,000. Lots of them needed work, but apparently lots of people didn’t mind. On more than one occasion we’d go into our agent’s office first thing in the morning, and we’d see one or two that had just come on the market a few hours before. He’d call on it right away, and it would already be sold. People were buying houses sight unseen.
Our agent, who (unlike several loan brokers we dealt with) was surprisingly kind, non-threatening, and patient, made a copy of an article printed just a week or so before we started looking for houses. It reported that the market in Vancouver had gone up 25 percent in the last year and seven percent in the last month. Yikes, we thought, we’d better get in now, not just for investment purposes but because we may not be able to afford this area if we wait until next summer.
When we finally arrived at the door of the house that would be ours, we were nearly turned away. A young woman came to the door with her two young daughters. “We’re here to see the house,” our agent said. “Um, well,” said the young woman, “It’s not for sale.”
They had taken it off the market two months prior after having it on for only two weeks, but somehow it was left by mistake in the database. The owner, the young woman’s boyfriend, was beginning to have credit problems and balked at the thought of trying to get into a new place. As we began to leave, the woman said, “Oh, well, you can come in and see it. You came all this way.” Afterwards our agent asked if they were still interested and she talked to her boyfriend and we were on our way.
Great, we thought, where do we sign? Well, so far, it’s been in about 74 places, and I believe at least a couple of those signatures were forfeitures of our first-born child should we miss a payment.
Someone once told me that the two most stressful things you’ll do in your life are buy and sell a house. The real estate market is a zoo, they said. No, it’s a circus. At least in a zoo you don’t have to jump through a hoop for every little scrap of meat.
We are on our third loan broker, and, hopefully, he’s the charm. Though he kept telling us it was “very likely” and he was “very confident” that we’d close before leaving for Lagos on the 18th, there I sat yesterday in my classroom in Lagos printing out the 209-page loan document he sent me. And tomorrow I get to take time off from school to drive down to the Consulate to get these things notarized for $50 per signature and then pay another pretty penny to send them back to the title company in Washington from Lagos by DHL.
Luckily, the couple we bought it from are going to rent it back from us for a few months until they find a new place closer to where the boyfriend was transferred for work. Getting permission to rent it was a whole other headache in itself. We had to write a very deferential and servile letter to the (duh-duh-DUN-DUN) Board of Directors of the Home Owners Association. Our neighborhood is one of those with lots of restrictions in place that exist purportedly to keep people from parking a trailer in their front yards for months on end and from turning their lawns into cornfields and from painting their houses in pastel or neon.
If things go well tomorrow at the Consulate, I may get to send the final docs out by the end of the day. And maybe not this week but next I’ll officially and for the first time be a member of one of the most privileged of classes - property owners of the United States of America. This is exciting to me because I really don’t think they counted my vote last November.
We could not have done it without the family and friends who gave us invaluable advice and support along the way. I remember telling my future brother-in-law, Heather’s younger brother Danny, who is already on his second house, about all the grief we had to go through in getting the house. He just kept shaking his head, giving me these knowing looks and slight smiles as I talked and held his ten-month-old son, Mateo. Danny didn’t say much, just asked me if I was happy with the house and all. I told him I was. Yet he seemed to be holding something back. He seemed also to be saying, by the way he looked at Mateo and I, that he was just going to let me have my moment, my sense of accomplishment, but that he knew something I didn’t. You’re happy now, he seemed to say, and you should enjoy it, but there’s even more happiness to be had. There was something in his eyes that said, You’re only as happy as you can be at this time. You could significantly increase your happiness, he seemed to say, in ways you have yet to imagine.
By God, I wondered, what is he trying to tell me? How many more levels of happiness can there be? When I stopped talking and looked down at Mateo, Danny answered my questions with one of his own.
“So, how many kids do you want?” he said.
-African proverb, found here.
When Thomas Jefferson plagiarized in ink and parchment the words and ideas of John Locke to create the document that would claim a string of colonies on the North Atlantic seaboard as sovereign, he did nothing so different as do my junior high students who skim back and forth from Thesaurus to drafts of school essays looking to supplant the meager offerings of their lexicons with more grandiose parsing. But these kids, again like Jefferson, are the bright ones who grasp intuitively that medium is message, or, at least, that a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. (Due props to Mary Poppins.)
Of course, Jefferson could not have been aided by a writing reference not yet in existence, nor did he need one. Yet when the last of the triumvirate “life, liberty, and property” was replaced with “happiness,” it was more paraphrase than emendation. A more grand synonym, happiness transcended property though did not exclude it. If you didn’t have property, as the majority of citizens did not, you did not vote. If you did not own, you did not count. Even as poorer classes and minorities gained suffrage, it was property owners whose lobby had the ear of the legislature. Hence we have forever embedded in the American Dream, forever linked to the ideal of freedom and happiness, the ownership of space.
I suppose I was naïve. I thought I had achieved happiness when I found the love of my life and got to live with her and be around her everyday; I think she, too, thought herself to be fully happy. Yet after talking to many people we have found that we were only as happy as we could be at that time. According to all these other people, we could significantly increase our happiness by giving money to a jeweler to symbolize our love, money to a judge to document it, money to a preacher to bless it, and money to a property owner to celebrate it. So when we found this out, we kind of looked at each other and said, Well, we’re pretty darn happy, but it couldn’t hurt to be more happy. Right?
So we took the plunge. (Into the deeper waters of happiness, that is.) She got a diamond from South Africa in the spring. I picked out a platinum band in L.A. this summer. We booked a spot on a 38-acre estate in Portland for the venue. We have a pastor, who is also a personal friend, to do the ceremony. Our DJ sounds like Casey Casem and is letting us pick all our own songs. Our cake is four-tiered, each tier a different flavor. My future father-in-law, a graphics arts expert, is doing the invitations with a West African insignia to boot. We bought Nigerian wedding beads to include in the ceremony. An environmental school in southern Washington is growing fresh flowers exclusively for our occasion. She chose her dress and veil, which she says are non-traditional yet classy. I chose my tux, which I’ll say is long tie, not bow. We had engagement photos made in a garden of sunflowers and corn. One photo was printed with “Save the Date” information and was sealed on the back with small magnets so you can place it on your refrigerator and be reminded not only of us and our happiness for the next ten months but also of the date on which we will achieve even more happiness.
So we were pretty busy this summer. It was a lot of work, but worth it because I still got to be with the love of my life and live with her and be with her everyday. Plus, I got to see her smile a lot more and look at me in ways she hadn’t looked at me before. It just didn’t seem like life could get any better. Then, after talking and visiting with so many people, they revealed to us that we had yet to reach the pinnacle of happiness. We were only as happy as we could be at this time, they said. We could significantly increase our happiness, they told us, if we would pay a couple thousand dollars to an agent who would then help us become a couple hundred thousand dollars in debt to a housing market in which that amount would get you a single family home the size of a small economy apartment.
When we heard this, we were a little skeptical. We had planned to wait to buy a house until we could save some for a down payment, until the market was not so crazy. Besides, I’ll be trying to make a living as a freelance writer next year, with possibly only a part-time job as supplement. We need a house that’s, maybe, only a hundred thousand. But everyone we talked to was adamant. Ha!, they said, You can’t get an anthill on an eighth-acre for $100,000. Not up here, they said. This ain’t Texas, where you’re from, where there’s 1,000 miles of flatland in all directions and anywhere you look you can see over the horizon into eternity! We got mountains, rivers, ocean, and an environmentally friendly metropolis all within a 40-mile radius. This is the West Coast!, they said. We got moderates, and even liberals! The Northwest is the new California! The market’s a Buster Poindexter song - Hot, Hot, Hot! Trust us, they said, If you buy now, the market’ll keep going up, up, up, and when you come back next year and see the equity you’ve earned you’ll be happy, happy, happy!
After considering a number of such arguments, we looked at each other and said, Well, we’re pretty darn happy right now, but I guess it’s worth a try. I guess it couldn’t hurt to be even more happy than the more happy that we’ve become. Right?
So again with the plunge.
*****
Our best moments in life are, necessarily, brief interstices between longer, more trying times. And just because I’m at the latter bookend of this time loop doesn’t mean I’m not happy. I am. I still get to be with the love of my life and live with her and be with her everyday. Even though we must now despoil ourselves of American consumer culture once again, change our watches and mentalities back to Nigerian time, go back to teaching the uber-wealthy, entitlement-afflicted children of diplomats and oilmen, pray we remain healthy for the next ten months so as to avoid the looney quacks who come here to practice medicine, even though we’re again knee deep in Lagos life, we feel good. We’re somewhat glad to be back in Nigeria, intent on enjoying this last year, seeing a bit more of Africa, and taking in as much as we can.
And why the hell not? We’re coming off a storybook summer. Budapest, Hungary. Krakow, Poland. Warsaw, Poland. The Zacopane Mountains in Poland. The Berlin Wall, Germany. Downtown Frankfurt, Germany. Huntington Beach, California. Los Angeles, California. Pacific Beach outside of San Diego. Portland, Oregon. Winchester Bay on the Oregon Coast. Kalama, Washington. Woodland, Washington. Vancouver, Washington. Houston, Texas. Dallas, Texas. Ennis, Texas. Conroe, Texas. Now back in Lagos. And it’s only one more year. We can coast on this past summer until Christmas when we go to Spain, Portugal, and Morocco, then coast on Christmas until spring break when we go to Kenya, then coast on spring break until summer when we go to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand, and then coast on that trip right into wedded bliss.
Of course, bliss has its price. And for a bit more than 1100 square feet of it in Vancouver, Washington, that price is a bit more than $200,000. Three bedrooms, two baths, a double-car garage, a surveillance camera above the garage door, a surveillance TV monitor mounted in the garage corner, faulty siding, a dog run, vaulted ceilings in the living room, a bay window in the living room, sliding patio doors in the master bedroom, purple walls in the master bedroom, a small rock pond with green water and koi fish, atrocious blue carpet, a patch of green in front, and a little larger patch of green in back - all of these included in our package of joy.
It was built in 1994. Initially, we were looking in downtown Vancouver for something quaint from the 1940s. These houses were priced a smidge lower between $160,000 and $180,000. Lots of them needed work, but apparently lots of people didn’t mind. On more than one occasion we’d go into our agent’s office first thing in the morning, and we’d see one or two that had just come on the market a few hours before. He’d call on it right away, and it would already be sold. People were buying houses sight unseen.
Our agent, who (unlike several loan brokers we dealt with) was surprisingly kind, non-threatening, and patient, made a copy of an article printed just a week or so before we started looking for houses. It reported that the market in Vancouver had gone up 25 percent in the last year and seven percent in the last month. Yikes, we thought, we’d better get in now, not just for investment purposes but because we may not be able to afford this area if we wait until next summer.
When we finally arrived at the door of the house that would be ours, we were nearly turned away. A young woman came to the door with her two young daughters. “We’re here to see the house,” our agent said. “Um, well,” said the young woman, “It’s not for sale.”
They had taken it off the market two months prior after having it on for only two weeks, but somehow it was left by mistake in the database. The owner, the young woman’s boyfriend, was beginning to have credit problems and balked at the thought of trying to get into a new place. As we began to leave, the woman said, “Oh, well, you can come in and see it. You came all this way.” Afterwards our agent asked if they were still interested and she talked to her boyfriend and we were on our way.
Great, we thought, where do we sign? Well, so far, it’s been in about 74 places, and I believe at least a couple of those signatures were forfeitures of our first-born child should we miss a payment.
Someone once told me that the two most stressful things you’ll do in your life are buy and sell a house. The real estate market is a zoo, they said. No, it’s a circus. At least in a zoo you don’t have to jump through a hoop for every little scrap of meat.
We are on our third loan broker, and, hopefully, he’s the charm. Though he kept telling us it was “very likely” and he was “very confident” that we’d close before leaving for Lagos on the 18th, there I sat yesterday in my classroom in Lagos printing out the 209-page loan document he sent me. And tomorrow I get to take time off from school to drive down to the Consulate to get these things notarized for $50 per signature and then pay another pretty penny to send them back to the title company in Washington from Lagos by DHL.
Luckily, the couple we bought it from are going to rent it back from us for a few months until they find a new place closer to where the boyfriend was transferred for work. Getting permission to rent it was a whole other headache in itself. We had to write a very deferential and servile letter to the (duh-duh-DUN-DUN) Board of Directors of the Home Owners Association. Our neighborhood is one of those with lots of restrictions in place that exist purportedly to keep people from parking a trailer in their front yards for months on end and from turning their lawns into cornfields and from painting their houses in pastel or neon.
If things go well tomorrow at the Consulate, I may get to send the final docs out by the end of the day. And maybe not this week but next I’ll officially and for the first time be a member of one of the most privileged of classes - property owners of the United States of America. This is exciting to me because I really don’t think they counted my vote last November.
We could not have done it without the family and friends who gave us invaluable advice and support along the way. I remember telling my future brother-in-law, Heather’s younger brother Danny, who is already on his second house, about all the grief we had to go through in getting the house. He just kept shaking his head, giving me these knowing looks and slight smiles as I talked and held his ten-month-old son, Mateo. Danny didn’t say much, just asked me if I was happy with the house and all. I told him I was. Yet he seemed to be holding something back. He seemed also to be saying, by the way he looked at Mateo and I, that he was just going to let me have my moment, my sense of accomplishment, but that he knew something I didn’t. You’re happy now, he seemed to say, and you should enjoy it, but there’s even more happiness to be had. There was something in his eyes that said, You’re only as happy as you can be at this time. You could significantly increase your happiness, he seemed to say, in ways you have yet to imagine.
By God, I wondered, what is he trying to tell me? How many more levels of happiness can there be? When I stopped talking and looked down at Mateo, Danny answered my questions with one of his own.
“So, how many kids do you want?” he said.