Movie Star Penn

This morning we got up early to dig Jen’s car out of the snow so that she could follow misguided company policy and be one of only seventeen people in the Baltimore area who had to go to work today. Catonsville was pretty quiet, because the snow was sitting on the roads refusing to melt and the plows were just pushing it around. Once I got the driveway cleared, we got Jen out and on the road to work, and I looked over at our next-door neighbor’s house.

Now, when Jen and I started looking at houses in the this town, she warned me about the neighborhood—not that it’s bad, or filled with toxic waste, but that it’s as old-school as old-school gets. There’s a church every thirty feet. We moved in next to a house with a crucifix on the front lawn, flanked by a plastic sign featuring the Ten Commandments; we knew things would be interesting with our neighbors when they found out we were engaged and not married, and bless their hearts, they have been warm and cordial with us—until I gave them our Christmas card. We’ve not seen them much since then; it could be because the average temperature here in Maryland has been hovering around the 20-degree mark, or because they are inside praying for our mortal heathen souls.

So I cleared the sidewalk out in front of their house with my non-believer shovel.

Wow. From Rob, I found this link to Margaret Cho’s site. It seems some right-wing site quoted part of her website and suddenly she was inundated with half-literate emails from racist homophobes. Isn’t America lovely?

The idea of owning a newly-constructed house has never really appealed to me, for many reasons. The lack of soul in any recently built dwelling has been enough to put me off, really—there’s a line I draw between ‘Modern’, (loosely defined as ‘simply designed for elegant living’, and translating into ‘you don’t have enough money to live this cool’) and ‘Cheaply Built’. Cheaply Built apes the easy parts of Modern, in that there are little or no finishing touches—not because the builder was consciously making a design decision, but because the carpenter was doing time for drug possession that week. (My experience has shown the three groups of people who are always holding are carpenters, painters and waiters.) Cheaply Built means that there are no trees within thirty feet of the house. It’s a lot like government contracting—the people who built your house were the lowest bidders. Walk into any new condo or McMansion and you will see great swaths of bare wall offset with little tiny strips of molded wood shavings which are called ‘finishing’. The floors will be wood laminate or linoleum in some hateful pattern, and the siding will be vinyl in a pastel color. And you will be lucky to have ten feet between your neighbor’s bedroom window and your own.

All that having been said, owning an older home presents its own set of problems. That charming slate roof, which should last 100 years, is now 85 and dropping shingles like dandruff. The mature trees surrounding our house, which add so much character, were in dire need of a pruning five years ago. The wiring throughout the house, which was installed in fits and starts with each passing decade by electricians of questionable license, now resembles a handful of cooked spaghetti. There’s no way to explain why the piping for the heating system is routed under the front porch, or why the linen closet was once painted metallic silver. And the idea of more than one full bathroom is madness, unless the prior owners decided to add an extension.

All this doesn’t faze me, though, because I grew up in a variety of different houses over the years. My parents owned everything from a 60’s tract home to a prewar Cape Cod where they built a master bedroom out of the attic. I’m used to mysterious cold drafts, unheated rooms, balky furnaces the size of luxury sedans, flooded sump pumps, ancient wiring, carcinogenic insulation, hot pink bathroom tile, and barely functional appliances. I’ve had a 50-year-old used tampon fall out of the ceiling on my head while demoing a basement. (Don’t ask.)

We’ve had a family joke for years that says that the Dugan Way is to buy a house, spend a number of years fixing it up, and the minute it’s finished, sell it and start over again. We spent years helping my Dad shingle roofs, hang drywall, sweat pipes, run wiring, fix cars, and landscape yards. If you had asked me at age 13 if I enjoyed any of that, I would have denied it, because given the choice I’d rather have been riding my bike than digging a hole in the backyard for a pool, but I see the value in it now. I grew up in awe of my Dad, because the guy could do anything. Having seen him cut holes in the roof, or mix concrete, or build an entire bathroom from scratch, I grew up learning how to do stuff, and more importantly, without fear of doing it myself. I don’t think I could have been given a better gift than that.

I’m also thankful that I found a woman who will put up with having all her laundry out on a subzero porch, or inches of plaster dust on all flat surfaces, or living six months without a proper bedroom. She has the vision thing, which means she can see past the cracking plaster, moldering carpet, dying shrubbery, and leaky basement into the future, when we have happy children playing in a clean, painted, updated house.

I have to admit, though, that the kitchen floor has been freezing the last couple of weeks, and I’m kind of tired of that.