Homeward Bound
My hone out here in San Diego got its name from my favorite movie. I used to have mixed feelings about naming my homes because it seemed pretentious and very egotistical. But then I came to make my peace with the issue on the theory that these homes were all about family to me and the ability to gather with them and lend them to them and even host my close friends. So when I bought this home eight years ago I was coming off a difficult time in my life and I had a sense of relief. I had sold the Utah ski house when the shit hit the fan at Bear Stearns for me.
There was a six month period when it felt touch and go about whether the Feds were going to come after me for something. Unlike when you know you’ve done something wrong and just hope they can’t pin it to you, this was a case of the global pain being so great that you worried that they would fabricate something (not do much from whole cloth as from a sort of two plus two equals five way). I had already seen them perp walk two of my highest integrity guys into the Eastern District courthouse in Brooklyn. It was not a stretch to imagine them throwing me under the same bus. They don’t have to prove you guilty to ruin your life. An indictment will do the job just as well. It’s unfair, but it’s the way of the world. So, I got out ahead of it and sold my ski house to get liquid and in so doing, got one of the last good sales off in Park City before the crash of ‘08.
By 2011, the problems had passed, but the Southern California real estate market was still soft and there were great deals to be had. I spent half of what I had sold for in ‘08 and one third of the price of the big place I had previously owned in Park City. The price was equal to a nice one-bedroom apartment in NYC. When I bought this house it was with an eye towards retiring out here. It only took one star-lit night out here with the family to come up with the name. It would be called Casa Moonstruck, in honor of the Cher/Nicholas Cage/Danny Aiello/Olympia Dukakis/ Vincent Gardenia classic about an Brooklyn Heights Italian family, Moonstruck. The last line in the movie is a toast, “A la famiglia!” It spoke to me, as did the starry, starry night with its full Cosmo’s moon over the Pacific. It is now the official name of our house and I even named my Tesla X, Moonshadow, in its honor.
But now go back to 1996. It was June and I was attending my twenty year business school reunion at Cornell. On my way to dropping someone off at the airport, I was driving out Warren Road thinking, as one does, about how nice it would be to own a home in Ithaca. I had that disease where you think that Nëw York Dollars can buy anything like cheap houses in places like Ithaca. As I drove past the Cornell Robert Trent Jones Golf Course (the great man was a Cornell graduate and learned his landscape architecture there), I saw a ramshackle old farmhouse across from the eighteenth tee. There was a For Sale sign out front with a broker name and number. I joked to my passenger that I bet a house like that could be bought for a mere $300,000. On a whim I called the number on the sign and got right to the listing broker. I asked the price and she said it was a bit more complicated since it was a leasehold from the University and not really a sale. The good news though was that they only wanted $99,000 for the leasehold.
To make a long story short, I bought the 99-year leasehold from the University, having viewed the property with a local contractor organized for me by the broker.. I did a fancy tax Two-step by simultaneously gifting it to the Business School after taking a 25-year life use. It seemed like a good idea for lots of reasons at the time and 25 years seemed like a lifetime. Hell, I would be an ancient 67-year-old by then. That life use comes due next year.
I spent a multiple of what the leasehold cost to upgrade the house to one of the most beautiful properties around the campus. That seven-month renovation was a story unto itself. The deadline for it was set in order to give my mother and step-father (both members of the Cornell Class of ‘37) a party for their class’ 60th Reunion. We met the challenge and in many ways it set the tone for my home in Ithaca because that became the quintessential family homestead. At one point in the monumental renovation process, I decided to name the house Homeward Bound. It seemed the perfect name. Homecoming is, of course a collegiate mainstay. Ithaca, in the Homeric tradition, is that idyllic place we all hold in our hearts as the ideal we search for to find our peace in our lives. And even in a golfing sense, overlooking the eighteenth tee meant that one was hitting home from that spot. There was even a favorite “Lassie Go Home” movie that was a favorite of my children called Homeward Bound. So, the house became known as Homeward Bound and it always fit it to a tee (pun intended).
Even though my life use agreement ends next year, I suspect that the Business School will be happy to let me continue to keep use of the property. The taxes, utilities and maintenance (including the gardening) add up to an amount hard to cover with a full-time rental. The school uses the house when they like without any of the muss or fuss, so I bet they will choose to look the other way as long as I want them to.
Today I spent three hours and eight minutes on the phone with my best friends at Verizon trying to sort out the phone service at Homeward Bound. Telecommunications life for all of us has moved on. Few of us need landlines any more. We need them less at vacation homes like Homeward Bound. Few of the Millennials or younger generations bother with cable, HBO subscriptions or satellite dish TV services. With Netflix, Hulu and any kind of streaming services you can name, there is less and less need for DirectTV or Cablevision. Few people who stay at Homeward Bound even watch TV there, but if they do they wish I had Apple TV or Roku. So I decided to kill the satellite and kill the local phone and keep the Verizon DSL internet service, which is as much broadband as is available at 313 Warren Road. I have been paying $250/mo. to Verizon forever so I had no qualms about trimming the service to $100/mo. DSL internet only. Sounds easy, plays hard. My latest COVID foiling story is that Verizon does not allow their techs into homes due to the pandemic. So, guess who has to keep paying $250/mo. to keep Homeward Bound online? Yet another reason to wish for a speedy recovery from Coronavirus.