Today in (My) History

An ordinary Monday for most, today is momentous for me in a couple of ways.

First, as of 2:30pm, I have sold the house we bought in 1983. As I wrote here almost exactly two years ago, I spent my middle and high school era here before renting and then buying the house from my folks over the past five years.

Not that anybody either remembers that I wrote two years ago "I'm gonna stay a while" or would hold me to it, but as they say about mice and men...

I recently decided to shack up with my lady friend (wwoman just doesn't look right), and we bought a place. As such, the old domicile had to go. Rates were rising, so it was touch and go, but it worked out.

And so I bid adieu to a home I've known for just shy of 40 years. Happiness, relief, wistfulness. 

On another note, 21 years and some hours ago, I came home from a night of heavy beer-swilling at the Cowboy Cafe, nodded off for an hour or so, and was awakened by my wife's contraction-induced alarm.  Several hours later, my first child entered the world in our nation's capital. 

Today that child could go into the Cowboy Cafe and legally order a beer.

Makes a man feel old, but all is well. Happy 21st to my Zoë. 

A House, a Home

In 1983, we moved out of the house and neighborhood I described a few posts ago and into the Ghent Square section of Norfolk. My mom, stepdad, little sister, and stepbro Ian, whom my Pi Lam fratres know.  It was a new house; they'd razed the old run down blocks and built all new construction for a handful of blocks. I was too young to understand gentrification and its many impacts. I just liked that my room was up on the third floor.

It's debatable whether it's a good idea to put teenage boys in their own little world up on a different floor. At least the smell stayed up there. 

I left that house in August of 1988 to live in Williamsburg with Dave, Rob, Hightower, and 26 other dudes I'd never met. One of the most fun years of my life. Beer Olympics, the Graffiti Wall, semi-regular copulation, random idiots, and Random Idiots.

I spent college summers in Goshen, VA, Cape Cod (2), and Williamsburg (2). I was pretty sure I was never living back in the Norfolk house again.

Graduation was a bit of a moving target for me. May '92 begat December '92 which begat May '93.  In the spring of 1993, I needed "just" one 3-credit A in order to get my degree. I orchestrated an independent study wherein I wrote a 50-page paper on the Chesapeake Bay and it problems as seen by two opposing entities, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers.  It was a worthy document; for once, a whole-assed effort.

Given the nature of my out-of-class schooling that final semester, I moved back in with my mom. She was fresh into her second divorce and yet to meet the real love of her life a year later. Life there was... challenging.  

I was also working for my dad in Virginia Beach. He'd recently parted ways with his commercial real estate business partner of 20 years due to the recession.  As such, he was pretty unhappy, more so because I had not graduated. He enlisted me as his Office Manager (pronounced "secretary") for five bucks an hour. Life there was... challenging.  

That stint as a Norfolk resident was six of the longest months of my life, but I made it through the spring and out of college. I bolted for Cape Cod and never looked back.  Six months later, I embarked on Whitney: The Washington Years when I rented a house with Rob and Spoid Spurrier.

A lot of shit happened after that. As the Monty Python lads might say, "Skip a bit, brother."

Back to Norfolk in 2005, good days and bad, tumult and upheaval, and in 2017 I moved back into my old house. My mom and stepdad are Florida residents now, and they were poised to sell the Ghent house then, but instead I moved in and rented from them for the final few years of my two daughters' high school careers. After that, I figured I would move out and go find my own place in the world.

Eh. This past Friday, I bought the house from them.

Single-income mortgages are slightly intimidating to me, but the rates are laughably low (I locked in at 2.875%) and I'm gonna stay a while. So I'm a homeowner for the first time since 2010, and for the first time by myself. 

I love my old house. That old 3rd floor bedroom is now a guest room / office / Les Coole Studios.  I will slowly make the place my own, which I guess means more Wilco posters and fewer prints of flowers.  Although I did put up a Wilco concert poster print with flowers. 

As Jimmy Buffett sang before he became a parrot-cature... 

And there aren't many reasons I would leave
Yes, I have found me some peace
Yes, I have found me a home.