Home Ownership
They say that pride of ownership means everything and I sometimes understand that and at other times ponder its wisdom. It has always appealed to me to think that this life is all about dust to dust and that in the long run, none of us own anything other than the love we give and the love we take with us. Everything else is flotsam and jetsam. I know that some families like to pass down homesteads, whether they are primary residences or favored vacation homes. These feelings seem to me to be rooted in an effort to cling to memories more so than real estate. Because I do not favor or particularly respect inherited wealth ( I believe we are all no more than the sum of our accomplishments, and the more independently generated the better). I am sure this is somewhat due to the fact that I was unlikely to and never did inherit anything from my father or my mother. To be fair, I could have had a small share of my mother’s modest estate, but I preferred to see that go to my sisters. As for my father, he died in debt and my farewell gift to him was his cremation and burial and the going-away bash his seventh wife wanted at La Costa Country Club. So both of my parents effectively passed in a state of ownership that realistically followed the pattern of dying broke that is gaining a following among my generational cohort.
I have owned seventeen homes at one time or another over the past forty-five years. I lived in each and every one of those except for the house I co-own with my oldest son. Of those, including the one I live in now, four were or are suburban single family homes. Three were urban primary home condominiums. The rest or fully ten were secondary or vacation homes. My children spent many a good time in each of those vacation homes. They were seashore, mountain, country and ski houses. I spared no expense to make sure that the times spent together at these houses were good times. At this point I only own one vacation home and it is in Ithaca, New York. I have childhood memories of fireflies and summer ice cream at Purity Ice Cream. But even Ithaca is not a homestead to be passed down. I purposefully bought it in a complex ownership transaction with the University that cedes it back to the long-term interests of the long-term institution of higher education that has existed on the East Hill of Lake Cayuga since 1865. A University needs to be long-term in its perspective in a way that a person cannot afford to be.
I have had a few good times out here in Southern California with my children, but this home has been more about good times with siblings and friends. I certainly hope that will balance and change over time. But it does not stand as a goal for me to garner a love for this place and for the cacti and views that please me every day. It is somewhat odd that I have found so much grace and peace in a place that is a mere seventeen miles from the Mission San Luis Rey where my father’s ashes rest. Odd because my father had so little bearing on my life and my character. My mother’s ashes lie in the home where she lived the longest in Las Vegas for thirty-five years. I took some of her ashes and tossed them into Fall Creek, just down the hill from my home in Forrest Home. That Creek flows into Beebe Lake on the Cornell Campus and then goes down the Fall Creek Gorge into Cayuga Lake from where it mingles with the waters of that glacial lake where, six miles north on its Eastern Shore sits the burg of Myers, whence she came. My step-father, Irving, a classmate of my mother’s from 1937 and her husband for her last quarter-century had his ashes taken back to Hawaii where he had spent forty years of his post-collegiate youth, riding the Waimea Valley on the big island of Hawaii. I have told my Kim to spread my ashes in part where my mother’s were cast in Fall Creek and in part in New York Harbor, where I spent my forty-five years of majority. It’s all symbolic anyway, so I’m not so sure I care all that much.
But what I do care about is the ability to enjoy the views for as long as possible of the distant snow-capped mountains and the hills between here and the Pacific Ocean. It shouldn’t matter that I own this property, but there is that nasty habit of pride of ownership. I spend money above and beyond what is absolutely needed on the upkeep of both Casa Moonstruck (my name for this house) and Homeward Bound (my Ithaca home). I bought this house from a longtime farmer (mushrooms were his game) who did what I suppose farmers tend to do. He put only the amount into maintaining this house that was absolutely necessary. There is paint on metal railings, but there was no primer. The stucco in front is clean as a whistle, but it the back it is marred by soot in places. I have had Handy Brad working full-time on fixing everything there is to fix on this house for the past ten weeks. I figure he has another few weeks and then we are done for a while. As for Homeward Bound, my cousins Pete keeps up with all the maintenance with equal diligence. Do I do it because of the future bequest? No, it is because I take pride in my homes and enjoy looking at them in attractive condition. I have a weak spot for household tidiness.
Some who know me, like my brother-in-law Jeff, know me as a busy and perhaps occasionally self-important executive that has no time for household chores and prefers to hire out the jobs that need doing. I enjoy telling him these days about the various household tools I purchase online and the tasks I undertake that smack of household manual labor. Tonight Kim and I spent time washing out the filthy trash buckets that got emptied today and needed to be brought back up the hill. We did this while watering the succulents we have had planted across the road. Neither of us are really gardeners, but we are both gardening. I spent time on my way back up the driveway weeding the cracks and ridding the property of unwanted flora. Weeds are so untidy.
My first home, bought for $64,000 in 1977 when I was six months out of school and two months married, was a typical starter home with three bedrooms and 1.5 baths. It was set on a quarter acre lot a ten minute walk to the LIRR train station in Rockville Centre, Long Island. I used every ounce of my physical strength and time outside of work renovating that little Normandy Tudor. There was woodwork stripping, wallpapering, painting and completely renovating the kitchen. Most of the physical work I did myself. I also did all the gardening including cutting the postage-stamp lawn and maintaining the wall-to-wall in ground backyard pool. Those pavers tended to get weeds in between, so that is where I picked up my weeding obsession.
I have tried to teach my kids that home ownership in their era is not the wealth-accumulation strategy it was in my day. I’ve tried to explain that home ownership versus renting is like buying or leasing a car. The secret all lies in the residual value risk since everything else can get reduced to after-tax expense flows. So far that has fallen on deaf ears as two of my three children own their home and the third is a bit too young to have done so yet. There seems to be no getting away from that old pride of ownership bugaboo.