"Home is where you hang your head" is the memorable phrase coined by James Thurber. I wish I could have spent more time hanging the old noggin in a shanty of my own. But now it's too late -- I've grown lax and prodigal in my old age -- my current apartment has the advantage of being both rent-subsidized and easy for my daughters to clean and fumigate once a year when I offer to take them and their kids out to Chick-fil-A.
Although I spent a goodly portion of my productive working life on an extended sawdust wanderjahr, I have always had a soft spot for hearth and home. Whenever I hear John Howard Payne's paean to domesticity, "Home Sweet Home," my lachrymose instincts kick in and I mewl like a sucking babe deprived of its mother's bazoombas.
I basically grew up in just one home. My parents did not believe in mobility of any kind -- upward or sideways or any other way you want to slice it. 900 -19th Avenue Southeast, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, was the only abode I ever knew. My parents moved us there in 1954 and my widowed mother did not leave the place until 1996.
Alas, my own perambulating star led me to drag my family from pillar to post for fifteen years -- and so we spent most of our lives together in rented digs.
But I did manage to briefly acquire mortgages on three different homes during our married outing.
Our first home was in Bottineau, North Dakota, in the midst of the rather disingenuously named Turtle Mountains -- rolling pine covered hills in the center of the state near the Canadian border. We were renting a ramshackle hovel that was in the chill shadow of grain elevators for most of the day, and that was slowly being consumed by black fungus. We had already closed off the main bedroom and were unhappily preparing to evacuate the living room when a lucky stroke put us in touch with a local FHA official who needed to unload a small house on a large lot just outside of town. It only had one bedroom, but a huge attic, so we snapped it up for a song -- which turned out to be "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" as I vainly tried to patch up the cistern in the basement. Each time it rained the cistern would fill a few inches and then let the water seep out onto the basement floor -- creating a disturbing damp and decayed odor akin to used gym socks unearthed from an ancient Egyptian tomb after millennia.
But it was a happy house, for the most part. The mortgage payment, if I remember aright, was a mere $125.00 a month -- and that included the mandatory home owners insurance and escrow for property taxes. And our first daughter Madeleine was born while we lived there.
I have no regrets, no apologies to make, for leaving that rustic idyll to go work as a clown at Circus World, in Haines City, Florida, just a few months later. It was an opportunity of a lifetime -- just not MY lifetime. For reasons that need not concern us here I was shortly ejected from the park and took my family on a sightseeing trip to several fascinating trailer parks across the United States.
We ended up back in North Dakota, living with Amy's parents, when I was offered the position of Ronald McDonald for the state of Kansas. The salary was generous and the hours required were few and far between. So Amy and I spent many hours looking for a home of our own on those windswept plains. After a few months in a Wichita apartment building that featured an outdoor swimming pool filled with man-eating algae and a colorful assortment of hungover teenagers rehearsing to be derelicts, we found a cozy three-bedroom place next to the railroad yard. With money from a sitcom script I sold to an actor friend in Chicago (who promptly frosted the manuscript with concrete and sunk it in Lake Michigan) we made a down payment and moved in on a mild spring day -- only to be cowering in the bathtub a few hours later when the entire town came under a tornado alert. The house, you see, lacked a basement. We spent many pleasant evenings huddled in the bathtub like sardines while the Kansas zephyrs howled around us like banshees.
When I lost THAT job a year later (an undocumented payaso took the job away from me, de verdad!) we rented out the house and went back to North Dakota so Amy could pursue a Masters in Special Education at Minot State University. Our tenants had an allergic reaction to all the copper plumbing in the house, ripping it out and prudently selling it for seed money to start a meth lab. By the time the police had frog-marched them off to the hoosegow our home was a gutted shell, not worth the peel of an onion. We let it go for back taxes.
I vowed to never again be lulled into a financial debacle by dreams of home ownership. But Dame Fortune, that cunning termagant, placed us back in my birthplace, Minneapolis, for a telemarketing job with Fingerhut (during a hiatus from the circus, due to an unfounded rumor that I had once described cotton candy as 'pink kapok' in a magazine article -- what I actually wrote was that cotton candy was a 'dentists' delight,' a huge difference: am I right?)
And wouldn't you know it, there was a home for sale directly across the street from my old stomping grounds, Van Cleve Park. We went to look at the house one Sunday after church -- merely to pass the time until our slow cooker tripe and trotters had cooled off. There was a stained glass window illuminating the staircase and regal oak wainscotting in the parlor -- but I remained adamant that we were better off in our current rented townhouse, even if our next door neighbors liked to turn their living room into a bowling alley after midnight.
The realtor, a direct descendent of Machiavelli, cornered me, and, with a devious smile worthy of Old Scratch himself, mentioned in an off-hand manner that the place could be had with absolutely no money down -- to a family with more than three children; the city council had started an initiative to bring more families into the inner city, and they were willing to fund all down payment expenses if the right phylum could be found. Panting like the hart after the waterbrooks, I signed on the dotted line, testifying that Amy and I were the proud and harried possessors of rugrats galore. We moved in two weeks later.
And discovered a tribe of squirrels in the attic, who apparently had squatter's rights dating back to the Spanish-American War. A month after we moved in the bathtub upstairs emitted a gentle sigh and gave up the sudsy ghost, sending a slurry of Mr. Bubble into the floor joists just above the dining room. The wooden garage was infested with so many carpenter ants that the only thing holding it up was a coat of paint.
I could go on, but why bother? That haunted house sucked up money as fast as I could make it. And so we decided to pull up stakes (before the carpenter ants got 'em) and move out to Utah, where a shining opportunity awaited me as a writer . . .
And THAT particular literary Waterloo will be fully explicated in future episodes of this folie a deux -- for now, suffice it to say that never again did we own our own home -- nor did I own my own home when I was cast adrift and went back, first to the circus, and then to Thailand. And then back to the circus . . .
No siree bob -- owning property is just not my cup of Pero. Today I'm a happy man, with no mortgage hanging over my head. Only cobwebs.
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