I was born and raised in San Francisco, in a home purchased new by my grandmother in the twenties. It was a neighborhood affair, what with my friends' parents being schoolmates of my father and the whole bit. I knew everyone on that block and it was a safe fun place to grow up. Street wiffle ball, skateboards and bike ramps - the general rule was go play outside till the streetlights come on. When one grows up in such an environment, it is hard to imagine calling any other place in the world home. Even after being shipped off to Santa Barbara for five years of college and two bonus years of screwing around being a gypsy artist cliché, I still called 43rd avenue home. So when my last year of screwing around found me the proud father of a newborn son, he myself and his mother packed it up and moved back to the old neighborhood to seek our fortune. Another son followed shortly thereafter, and we were now precisely .3 children away from being nuclear.
Now your milage may vary, but something about becoming part of a nuclear unit triggered in us a desire to create our own homestead, but housing prices in the city fairly clearly dictated that any homesteading would require some pioneering first. We searched from San Diego, to Costa Rica, to Oregon looking for a place where we could afford to set up shop, but the great real-estate bubble was getting its first aeration, and nowhere presented itself as doable. Some close friends of ours had moved to outside Crozet the year before, and after visiting them we decidedly liked the area. We had been paying $2700 a month for a 2 bedroom house in the avenues, with a lawn you could mow with pinking shears, so when they called saying that the 1865 3 bedroom farmhouse on 5 acres adjacent to their property was up for rent - and up for rent for $600, we threw caution to the wind and greased up the covered wagon.
It was New Year's eve 1999, and our nuclear unit plus three cats and a couple of friends loaded up a box truck and the mini van, drove down to the pacific ocean, watched the sunset and said goodbye to the city by the bay. We arrived in mid January after an epic voyage. Immediately upon arriving to our very very cold house, and very slowly realizing that in order for it to get warm, we would have to feed this large black metal stove pieces of wood we did not have on hand, the "oh my, what have we done" vibe started to dawn on our very chilly urban un-countrified heads. After finding a wood man, whom I was positively convinced was speaking some sort of foreign language, this feeling grew, although at least we were warming. After traveling to the local IGA supermarket for provisions only to find that the person running the register already knew my name, family status, current address and place of origin - this having been in town for less that 36 hours - my illusions of calling Crozet my new home were fading fast. After a week of traveling around reading mailboxes and deciding that everyone was named either Shifflett, Morris or Pugh, the final nail came when I saw something completely alien to my urban self - I saw a woman pay for groceries with a check. While this may be punishable by verbal flogging in the hustley bustley city, apparently this was perfectly acceptable here in my new home.
I gradually came to peace, and even deep appreciation, of my new planet over the next year and a half, but I didn't come here tonight to tell you abut that. I came here to talk about Christmas. I mean, thats really the litmus test isn't it? Where do you go for the holidays? Don't you go home for the holidays? I don't know, maybe its trite, but it seems a good a compass as any i think. I mean… anyway. Yes. Christmas.
So after about a year and a half came the nuclear explosion, when my wife decided that she was in love with a young woman that looked rather not unlike John Belushi. I know the heart wants what it wants, but here we had just left the gay capitol of the entire universe, a place where there are no doubt support groups for the pets of owners emerging from the closet, and now we were in rural Virginia, a place that hadn't quite completely worked out race relations, if the preponderance of colored lawn jockeys was any indication. The heart may want what it wants, but I definitely wished that that particular heart had had just a scoatch better timing. But what can you do?
We separated, and I decided to move to c-ville, closer to my employer, but a manageable distance for the hostage exchange-looking pick up and drop off of the offspring that would now occur weekly. After becoming rather dejected at the rather poor selections available I quite accidentally stumbled upon Rancho Notso Grande, my current residence in Belmont. The sign said "For Sale", not "For Rent", but I called the number anyway. After talking with the real estate lady and finding out the joint was only $90k, then running some numbers in my head, I arranged for a viewing. And after the viewing, it became abundantly clear why the asking price was so low.
A woman named Margaret Goodson had lived there alone for nearly 50 years. One day, she had fallen and broken her hip in the kitchen. She was taken to the hospital where it was determined that she was both an alcoholic and senile. She went from the hospital to a home, and pretty much the house was left as is for the next 2 years, just as she had left it that day. I now know that in real estate deals, it is often noted that "appliances convey", meaning you get the fridge or washer or whatever. Well with this deal, everything conveyed. And, with the exception of clothes, family photos and jewelry i do mean *everything*. Plates, silverware, bedding, furniture, ceramic jesuses, two *gallons* of Canadian Mist Whiskey - all the flotsam and jetsam of an old woman's demented final years. And lest you miss the entirety of this vast conveyance, this house, being a duplex, even came with an aging alcoholic tenant upstairs. And just in case that was not quite enough, it even came with a kindly old feral dog that lived under an azalea bush in the yard. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and seeing that I had no furniture, plates or other daily accouterments, I did the deal. In the rain. Covered in flour. But that is another tale.
That was October, the holidays were right around the corner, and the holidays are, of course, what I really came here to tell you about. It didn't dawn on me until about December 23. I had bought the grossly over the top amount of presents that any competitive newly separated dad would hurl himself into chasms of debt to acquire, but other than that, my house was decidedly lacking in holiday cheer. I was cooking, or rather heating, whatever frozen thing any incompetent in the kitchen newly separated dad would normally prepare for the fruits of his loin when a crazy notion hit me. So me and the boys headed down to the only recently semi explored basement and sure enough, there they were. Like the three wiremen, there on a shelf sat three glorious boxes marked "Christmas", bearing untold gifts. We lugged them up to the house and began to unbox. One of the boxes contained an artificial tree, which we assembled with a fever of ironic glee. The next two contained all manner of bizarre 1950's decorations - little santa heads that fit over the door knobs, lights, fake wreathes, ornaments with Goodson Family portraits imprinted on them - everything and then some. It was just like the very common tradition of unboxing the family memories for the holidays and festooning the house with the accumulated holiday treasures that make a house a home. Except for the fact that in this case, it was someone else's family, that christmas was still one of the weirdest, yet most enjoyable christmases on record for the three cross boys. And while it took several years to erase imprint of the previous owner and fully place my stamp on Rancho Notso Grande, and though it may be hard for you to understand, in the Fellini movie that is my life, that is the moment when my house began to transform into my home.
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