To Our House on Coolidge St. and the Neighbors We Had There

In our first 3 years of being married, we lived in 5 different rentals in 3 states. Finally, we decide, it’s time to buy. 

 

Quickly, we realize options are limited. Madison is a fairly pricey market, relatively speaking for a mid-size midwestern town, and we are still paying off students loans, a car. We have a teeny tiny down payment but stellar credit scores, so we decide it’s an investment.

We find one that’s less than $100k and less than 1,000 square feet in a neighborhood  by the Oscar Meyer plant. It was built up in the 40’s and 50’s for employees. Cookie-cutter cape cod houses on small urban lots.  Two bedrooms, one bath and, as my friend Rita calls it, a one-butt kitchen with quite literally no counter space. 

Our neighbors to the right had the same layout and one day, he brought us in to show us what he’s done with the space. He just ripped out the bathroom and redid the whole thing, including a brand new jacuzzi. He was so proud of it; he’d done it for his wife, the wood paneling on the outside, the extra deep tub. But it looked, shall I say, ridiculous. Overbearing. Confused even.

As we leave, Keith stays and talks to him out in the front yard while I go back inside to make dinner. As they talk, he says, a propos of nothing, “Man, I just love to watch television.”

On the other side was our neighbor, Frank, who worked at a meat-packing plant. He had a wife and two daughters living in the same size house. On occasion he would bring us a big bag of raw ground meat that he got at work. It was bloody and had unfamiliar bits in it. He would tell us to ignore the light grey hue. “It’s just from the air,” he would say.

His oldest daughter was difficult, but she knew it. One day, I’m walking outside with the baby and we chat. She says she has to change schools because she doesn’t “make good choices.”

I want to tell her there are no good choices. I don’t. It would upset her parents and I know what they mean. She hangs out with the wrong kids. She doesn’t do her homework. She got drunk once and she’s not yet 13. So I don’t want to give her the impression she can choose without consequence.

But good and bad are so relative and really, don’t you have to see your whole life play out first before you can know what’s a good choice and what’s a bad one? And, in hindsight, doesn’t it often seem the bad choices, the ones that left you pained and raw, the ones that made you feel lonely, the ones that strained all of your resources and left you at someone else’s mercy, weren’t those the ones where you felt who you really are?