Going Downtown

Just got back from a round of Monday morning errands with my mom. We went grocery shopping.

Then we got back in the car and drove a mile down the road to Walgreen’s.

Then we got back in the car and drove two miles to the fruit market.

Then we got back in the car and drove three miles to the bank.

Then we got back in the car and drove to Panera for lunch.

“Gee, wouldn’t it be nice,” I mused, “if they would cluster all these important kinds of commercial places in one square mile so that you could park in a central location and walk to everything you needed?"

My mother laughed. “It’s called a Downtown,” she said sarcastically. “It’s how things used to be, and it sure made life a lot easier."

Ah, how things used to be. It’s a phrase I find myself trotting out more and more often these days.

“Look at the way that girl is dressed,” I’ll say. “It used to be that a girl would never be allowed out of the house looking like that."

Or, “I used to pay less than a dollar for this tuna fish and now the same can costs $1.98!"

And “It used to be that I could drink coffee or tea anytime and I wanted and it wouldn’t bother me a bit."

Humph.

Seriously, though, some things were better in the "old days." Take the concept of a downtown. We’re always hearing about conserving energy, but look at all the traveling we have to do just taking care of basics. Does it matter if there’s a bank, gas station, drugstore, and restaurant on every corner when the corners are so far apart you have to drive to them to get there?

I don’t remember much about the days when my parents lived within walking distance of “downtown.” But I suspect that’s why my mother never learned to drive. Between her two legs and the public transportation system, she didn’t need to drive in order to get everything done.

I do recall the first indoor mall that opened about two miles from where we live now. Along with the “big box stores” - which meant Sears and Montgomery Wards - there was a Sav-On Grocery, a Cunningham’s drug store, a Kresge’s (we called it the “dime store,” the 1960’s version of a “dollar store") a barber shop, a shoe repair shop, a couple of restaurants, and a the movie theater.

It used to be (there I go again) that you could park your car in the huge parking lot and live your entire life within the climate controlled confines of Livonia Mall.

They tore the whole thing down about five years ago (except for the Sears, which is still standing), and now the spot contains a Walmart, a Kohl’s, and a collection of four or five min-strip malls with four or five stores in each one. No drugstore. No grocery store. No bank. No gas station. And nothing within walking distance of anything else.

It’s nuts.

Progress is great and all - and I do love some of the 21st century conveniences (cell phones! ATM machines! drive throughs!)

But I do believe there were some things that were better back in the good old days.

Like downtowns.

So I’m excited about living in close proximity to a “downtown.” Northville, our new city, has retained the small town feel while keeping things updated and upscale. I’ll have to get in the car to drive there, but I’m hoping to develop the habit of doing as much of my daily business in one location as possible.

Simple Wisdom

In the mornings when I head out for my walk with Magic and Molly, we often stop to chat with my next door neighbor. He’s usually out in front of his house, watering some plants, waiting for his daughter in law to drop one-year old Jackson off for Papa to babysit while she’s at work. This morning he was waiting for a repairman to come and service his automatic garage door, which seemed to have come off its rails.

“I was out here until 1:00 in the morning trying to fix it,” he told me. “I finally had to give up. Aggravates me when I can’t fix a thing myself. It was just too darn hot and I couldn’t stand on that ladder any more.” He sighed. “My daughter needs me to fix her car, too,” he lamented. “Needs a new motor, ’n I don’t think I can lay underneath a car long enough to put that in. My back just won’t take that kind of thing any more."

He was silent for a moment, and then looked at me. “It’s not that I don’t want to do it,” he said, “but when you get older there’s a big difference between wantin’ to do something, and being able to do something."

“You’re right about that,” I said, thinking about how tired my own back was from sitting at the piano bench for four hours the night before in the (non) air-conditioned church where I’m rehearsing for Joseph (and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat). I love the music in this show, and it’s easy to play ~ I wanted to play for this production. After all, I had a great time when  I played for the show once before in this very same church.

But that was 15 years ago.

I was 40 years old.

And no matter what I’d like to believe about 60 being the new 40 - well, let’s just say my back and slightly arthritic fingers aren’t going along with that program.

It’s not that I can’t do it.

But there’s no doubt that it’s harder than it was the first time around, back in 1996. When I think about rehearsing from 6-10 p.m. for the next five nights and then doing three performances of the show next weekend, I take a deep breath (and a big swallow of Chardonnay).

I suppose we all want to believe we’re capable of doing the kinds of things we’ve always done, no matter what our age. And when I think about my seventy year old friend who is producing this show, I feel ridiculous for having any qualms about my own fortitude.

But I think there is some wisdom in my neighbor’s simple comment. We need to temper our desires with a dose of reality and common sense.

That’s actually pretty good advice no matter what your age.

Meanwhile, I’ll just keep the lyrics from one of my favorite “Joseph” songs running through my head..

“We all dream a lot, some are lucky, some are not. But if you dream it, want it, feel it, it is real. You are what you feel."

For the next week, I’ll dream that I’m 40 again.

Wish me luck.

Go Deep or Go Home

One writes out of only one thing - one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. ~ James Baldwin

Because I read a lot of memoirs, I can vouch for the truth of this statement. In the hands of a skillful writer like Baldwin, the personal experience the author conveys has to be squeezed dry for every ounce of meaning, otherwise it’s nothing but litany of events, good or bad. The memoirist or personal essayist simply must mine those experiences for the way they’ve impacted his life and his being, otherwise they are meaningless to the reader.

Does it matter if your father favored you over all your siblings, bought you everything you wanted while the others went without, praised your every accomplishment while criticizing them mercilessly? It only matters if that experience changed you or molded you into the person you are today. And how about your siblings? To what extent did your father’s favoritism change them or your relationship to them?

Describing all the ways your father treated you better than the rest of the children in the family doesn’t matter if you can’t give the reader a reason to care. And they will only care if they can relate your experience - and what you’ve learned from it - to their own life. To do that, you have  reflect  honestly and thoughtfully on these experiences. You have to go deep into your emotional memory, not just your incidental memory.

Memoir writing has gotten something of  a bad rap recently. Most likely that’s because memoirs often focus on negative circumstances in the writers life. Abuse, addiction, lost love, physical or mental impairments  - these undoubtedly have a profound effect on a human life, and thus become the subject of many books. New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that “The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one."

I’m a fan of memoir, and I believe in it’s power, but I agree with Kakutani on this point: It’s worthless to expose your life experiences on the page without first examining them in your heart to determine how they might be meaningful to others. Of course that’s the hardest part, isn’t it? Examining all those experiences in the light of day, doing the soul searching it takes to make sense of them?

But nobody said this writing thing would be easy.

Go deep.

Or go home.

Adding Insult to Injury

In addition to all the paperwork to do for  the new house, now I’m embroiled in another cluster#*$% of paperwork associated with our rental property in Florida. Apparently the county re-drew land maps, and in this new rendering it appears that our entire gated community is located in a flood plain. Mind you, it really isn’t located in a flood plain, it just looks that way on the map. (Thanks bunches cartographers.)

Ergo, our nefarious mortgage lender (Bank of America) has decided we need to purchase extra flood insurance. Unless, of course, we can prove satisfactorily that the home is not going to be inundated with water the next time there’s a tropical storm in Southern Florida.

I bet you already know the rest of this story.

More paperwork.

First I have to obtain an Elevation Certificate (FEMA form 81-31). Then I have to include that certificate along with my application to FEMA for a LOMA (letter that states my house is not in danger of being flooded). Of course, along with the LOMA application and the Elevation Certificate I also must send along the following:

Copy of the effective FIRM panel on which the structure and/or property location has been accurately plotted; OR a Copy of the Subdivision Plat Map with recordation date and stamp of the Recorders Office; OR a Copy of the Property Deed with recordation date and stamp of the Recorders Office, accompanied by a tax assessor’s map or other certified map showing the surveyed location of the property relative to the local streets and watercourses. The map should include at least one street intersection that is shown on the FIRM panel.

I didn’t expect you to read all that drivel. Besides, if you’re anything like me you started laughing  crying hysterically after the first sentence. (FIRM panel? what’s that? sounds like something you’d find in my mother’s old Playtex girdle.)

Is it any wonder that people go postal?

I’ve about come to the conclusion that modern life is much too complicated for the likes of poor simpletons like me. I’m tempted to throw my hands in the air and say the hell with it, I’ll pay the extra $300 a year for flood insurance.

But no.

Sometimes I think that’s the whole point of these kinds of campaigns. The huge corporations and financial institutions (and yes, THE GOVERNMENT) figure if they make it hard enough we’ll just pay the extra money out of sheer frustration. It’s like when gas prices suddenly skyrocket. When it’s been $4.89/gallon, we’re actually happy to see it “down” to $4.00 (never mind that it was $3.50 two months ago. Thereby, they incrementally raise the prices ever higher, and we’re duped into thinking it isn't so bad.

I may be down in the paperwork wars, but I’m not out.

Watch out, FEMA. Here I come.

Cash Deposit

<scrunch> <scrabble> <toss> <flip> Oh!

Hello!

Excuse my long absence from these pages, but I have been literally buried in mounds of paperwork and have just now managed to tunnel out for a bit of a breather.

The most recent events on The Road to Brookwood Court have us embroiled in the process of Applying for A Mortgage.

Portentious and important stuff, yes?

I had no idea.

Now it isn’t as if we’ve never had a mortgage before. In the last 10 years, we actually had two - one on each of the home we have in Florida. And while I certainly remember there being paperwork involved, it paled in comparison to the reams and reams of papers needed to apply for a mortgage today.

And it isn’t only tax statements and bank statements - those you would expect. It’s proofs of insurance and copies of deposit slips and copies of all the checks you’ve cashed in the last two months and copies of the credit card accounts you’ve paid off and letters from the bank and letters from the tenant in the rental house and and and and....

Every day it’s another email with requests for more information.

And why? It’s not because we’re asking for an overly large sum of money. Nor is it because our credit rating is bad.

It’s because THE GOVERNMENT requires it. THE GOVERNMENT needs to see every check I’ve deposited in the bank in the past two months, even the 10.00 rebate check from the oil change at the Ford Dealer.

But it’s the cash deposit that almost did us in. A while ago I deposited some cash into my checking account. You remember cash don’t you? It’s the green paper that you can use to buy thing with? Comes in different denominations and usually has the face of a President on it?

Well, I happened to have some cash and- not realizing the danger -  deposited it into my checking account.

“Oh well this is just a real problem,” my nervous mortgage consultant told me. “We might have to produce an affidavit explaining where this cash came from, otherwise THE GOVERNMENT thinks you’re laundering money."

Holy Freaking Cow.

After I spent about 10 minutes railing against THE GOVERNMENT and how they needed to stay out of my f#&*(%^ business, my husband looked at me over the top of the reading glasses he was using to read the fine print on even more papers.

“Careful,” he said. “You’re beginning to sound like a Republican."

Sigh. Now that’s a real reason to fear the cash deposit.

Never mind, we will not let these ridiculous rules and regulations deter us from our final goal. We will continue to collect all the minutiae required in all the acceptable formats.

However, if I don’t surface until after the closing, you’ll know I’ve been consumed by the monster that is THE GOVERNMENT.

But I won’t go down without a fight.