At home with the dogs
Every Sunday morning, we go to this illegal dog-park that springs up at a local baseball field around the corner: i.e., a dozen or twenty neighbors show up and we let our dogs off-leash to play (and totally freak out the entire walk there, too, in our dog's particularly-excitable case), while we sip coffee and squint. And talk about real estate and home improvement.
Oh, wait—That last part only applies to everyone else at the dog park. And I mean, everyone. It’s as if they arrive, and, by setting foot on the ballpark’s green grass, some strange mind-control takes over and they are moved to talk only about The New Deck, The New Addition and property values. And suddenly, I’m twelve.
When we first started going to Illicit Dog Park, I kind of suspected I might be twelve anyway, since everyone else who shows up are house-buyers, many of them newlywed-ish and in their thirties. See, our neighborhood is one of those Euphemized with the phrase: "In Transition." Meaning it used to be a lot of black people, here, and now the black people all live on one side of the main drag, and the computer-programmers live on the other side, fixing up the houses of what used to be the neighbors.
And then there’s Hunter and me. We rent. We live in the apartment complex behind the main little row of shops on the main drag. Hunter’s a coffeeshop clerk going back to undergrad, and I’m starting out as a writer for a small publication that can’t afford to pay me to work there full time, and so I sometimes work at a shop that sells knick-knacks. And I’m kinda too scared to look at my bank statements too hard, to find out if I’m actually getting by.
Hunter doesn’t really like to go to dog-park at all anymore, because he swears he’s gotten the fish-eye from other people there who’ve asked him where we live. I’ll still go. I adore watching our dog frolic with the other dogs more than anything else, although the conversation still does bore the living hell out of me.
And sometimes offends me, just a little: among a certain number of people who come, there’s an awful lot of pleasure derived from stories about how they called 9-1-1 when, say, there was this drunk guy sitting on their lawn in the middle of the night. One man likes to point out that he has a gun when having these discussions. There’s a lot of, "I went to the door with my gun and I called out to this guy—" All right, Indiana Jones! Or freaking Hernando de Soto, Georgia pioneer.
Apart from all this, there is a part of me that feels again, ever-so-slightly pathetic; to be closer to thirty than to twenty with zero money saved, trying desperately to piece together a future/career/geographic location, who can barely afford the apartment she lives in with her small live-in circus of boyfriend, dog and cat: a 2-bedroom from the ‘50s, with an ancient gas heater in the front wall, no screens in the windows, and mold growing on the walls of every room. I can’t even afford a dehumidifier.
Sometimes I don’t like those people very much, but what I envy is their confidence about who and where they are. You know: "I am Phil, Young Physician! And this is My New Neighborhood! That is My Golden Retriever--and My Wife is pregnant with My Baby, whom I shall raise here and who shall attend the elementary school down the street! And we shall live here quite happily for many years to come." These are the folks who run the neighborhood leaflet that talks about successful kindergarten plays and upcoming wine-crawls.
There's a relaxed-ness that comes with this sort of confidence. An ease of gait that comes from feeling like you've earned the right to spend the afternoon reading and drinking lemonade in your backyard hammock. From knowing that you have the right to relax and shouldn't be working on figuring out how you're going to start saving enough to start thinking about oh, maybe, moving out of your crummy apartment, for starters. And then, just maayybe, developing a real career.
I feel miles from this, and saddened by it a lot of the time.
I want a real house that is mine. I want to have stability and I want to keep in touch with more friends; hell, I want to make more friends where I live. It’s true that somehow I still can’t imagine myself exactly hanging out on a Friday night with our dog park neighbors. There would be eyebrows raised at our Marcos dolls from Mexico, at any rate. But sometimes I think anything would be better than this current feeling of flux.
Every Sunday morning, we go to this illegal dog-park that springs up at a local baseball field around the corner: i.e., a dozen or twenty neighbors show up and we let our dogs off-leash to play (and totally freak out the entire walk there, too, in our dog's particularly-excitable case), while we sip coffee and squint. And talk about real estate and home improvement.
Oh, wait—That last part only applies to everyone else at the dog park. And I mean, everyone. It’s as if they arrive, and, by setting foot on the ballpark’s green grass, some strange mind-control takes over and they are moved to talk only about The New Deck, The New Addition and property values. And suddenly, I’m twelve.
When we first started going to Illicit Dog Park, I kind of suspected I might be twelve anyway, since everyone else who shows up are house-buyers, many of them newlywed-ish and in their thirties. See, our neighborhood is one of those Euphemized with the phrase: "In Transition." Meaning it used to be a lot of black people, here, and now the black people all live on one side of the main drag, and the computer-programmers live on the other side, fixing up the houses of what used to be the neighbors.
And then there’s Hunter and me. We rent. We live in the apartment complex behind the main little row of shops on the main drag. Hunter’s a coffeeshop clerk going back to undergrad, and I’m starting out as a writer for a small publication that can’t afford to pay me to work there full time, and so I sometimes work at a shop that sells knick-knacks. And I’m kinda too scared to look at my bank statements too hard, to find out if I’m actually getting by.
Hunter doesn’t really like to go to dog-park at all anymore, because he swears he’s gotten the fish-eye from other people there who’ve asked him where we live. I’ll still go. I adore watching our dog frolic with the other dogs more than anything else, although the conversation still does bore the living hell out of me.
And sometimes offends me, just a little: among a certain number of people who come, there’s an awful lot of pleasure derived from stories about how they called 9-1-1 when, say, there was this drunk guy sitting on their lawn in the middle of the night. One man likes to point out that he has a gun when having these discussions. There’s a lot of, "I went to the door with my gun and I called out to this guy—" All right, Indiana Jones! Or freaking Hernando de Soto, Georgia pioneer.
Apart from all this, there is a part of me that feels again, ever-so-slightly pathetic; to be closer to thirty than to twenty with zero money saved, trying desperately to piece together a future/career/geographic location, who can barely afford the apartment she lives in with her small live-in circus of boyfriend, dog and cat: a 2-bedroom from the ‘50s, with an ancient gas heater in the front wall, no screens in the windows, and mold growing on the walls of every room. I can’t even afford a dehumidifier.
Sometimes I don’t like those people very much, but what I envy is their confidence about who and where they are. You know: "I am Phil, Young Physician! And this is My New Neighborhood! That is My Golden Retriever--and My Wife is pregnant with My Baby, whom I shall raise here and who shall attend the elementary school down the street! And we shall live here quite happily for many years to come." These are the folks who run the neighborhood leaflet that talks about successful kindergarten plays and upcoming wine-crawls.
There's a relaxed-ness that comes with this sort of confidence. An ease of gait that comes from feeling like you've earned the right to spend the afternoon reading and drinking lemonade in your backyard hammock. From knowing that you have the right to relax and shouldn't be working on figuring out how you're going to start saving enough to start thinking about oh, maybe, moving out of your crummy apartment, for starters. And then, just maayybe, developing a real career.
I feel miles from this, and saddened by it a lot of the time.
I want a real house that is mine. I want to have stability and I want to keep in touch with more friends; hell, I want to make more friends where I live. It’s true that somehow I still can’t imagine myself exactly hanging out on a Friday night with our dog park neighbors. There would be eyebrows raised at our Marcos dolls from Mexico, at any rate. But sometimes I think anything would be better than this current feeling of flux.
Labels: home life
posted by Alice at 4:08 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home