Editor's note:
This is the third in a series of occasional essays about buying and building a new home in Las Vegas.
I own, therefore I am.
(Which is what Descartes meant to say, but he couldn't make the mortgage payments.)
This I know is true because the cookies were delicious.
Sugar cookies. Four of them. BIG babies, too. One had my back yard etched in chocolate and lime frosting. Another, the front yard. A third, my name—in strawberry frosting, a real tummy-yummy!—mounted over an itsy-bitsy house.
And the fourth, the homebuilder's logo in yellow and chocolate. All carefully wrapped in cellophane in a cute little cookie planter.
A gift, just for purchasing a new home. Decades of apartment rentals never earned me as much as a roll of Lifesavers.
The cookies are code for that most American of ideals: equity is power.
I've got the power.
My brand new, never-been-slept-in, built-from-the-ground-up-especially-for-me home—my first—is less than a month from completion, capping seven months from contract to closing. I visit every Sunday, charting its progress from roped-off earth to American Dream painted a deep, rich brown, with six-paneled doors and brushed-nickel doorknobs and an oversized tub and cherry-wood cabinets and textured stairway handrails and the walk-in-closet window with graffiti of a big-eared chap named Mario—harmless construction-worker humor that will disappear when they do, I expect (right, guys?)—bringing the off-white walls alive with purpose.
Last week, I nearly tumbled into the modest backyard crater that will soon be my pool. If I could backstroke in mud, I would have belly-flopped in with utter abandon. It was the most joyous fall I ever almost took.
After living in an even dozen apartments in my life, squeezing into packed elevators with sweaty neighbors for a ride to my furnished cracker box, I'm finally trading up for that oddly American concept of communal separatism—entering and exiting via my own garage in complete privacy, just like every other neighbor I'll hardly ever see.
I'm stoked. Grateful. And a little saddened.
Lurking among the bulging boxes and thinning packing tape and change-of-address cards and calls to utilities and notices of intent to vacate and hiring of movers and emptying of storage and writing of checks and dwindling of funds and the nerve-fraying madness of it all is a truth with a bittersweet tang.
I've done better than my parents. Exactly as they would have wanted. And they aren't here to see it.
Born and raised in the sardine culture of high-rise apartment living in New York, I am the only son of a salesman/musician and a housewife/bookkeeper—I'd call her a "homemaker/financial associate," but she'd only scoff at such PC pablum. They were first-generation Americans, the children of Ellis Island immigrants, survivors of the Depression and World War II, a married couple of the '50s striving toward the utterly sincere, pre-irony-age American Dream of the United States of I Like Ike.
The home. The yard. The nest egg. The mark of the gentry, middle-class division.
They never got there.
He grew up a chip-on-the-shoulder scrapper in Newark, New Jersey, forced out of high school and into a job by a taunting, sadistic stepfather who eventually turned him out. A good, loving man whose inner angels barely kept his braying demons at bay, his greatest joy was simply to sing and play music.
He did—weekends and whenever else he could, for wedding and bar mitzvah money. But he never caught that wave, the one he could surf to financial security while igniting his soul. Instead, he peddled wine and candy and bug spray, selling Willy Loman's shoeshine and a smile in the deadest sections of a dying South Bronx for meager commissions. It beat him down.
A fiercely proud man, he knew that I knew he hadn't completed high school, but never discussed it with me until an unexpectedly confessional cup of coffee at a diner one morning. It was as if he knew something. Two weeks later, he was hit by a car. He did not survive the night.
He died in 1994, unable to retire at age 79, clerking in the basement of a bookstore, living in a New York apartment.
I buried him under a headstone that reads "Music in His Soul."
She grew up a Bronx beauty whose inner attractiveness surpassed the outer, a woman whose innate gentility helped reroute her husband away from the darkness that nearly swallowed him. Generous, thoughtful and solicitous to a fault—the yin who steadied his yang—she hung in through tough times and a sometimes contentious marriage with consummate dignity. And she zealously maintained and beautified our modest family apartment in New York with more care and pride than others could lavish on the grandest of palaces.
She died in 2001, pining for him in an apartment at Vegas Towers on East Flamingo.
I buried her next to him, under a headstone that reads "Beauty in Her Heart."
They spent a shared lifetime yearning for an American Dream they could never quite wake up to. He never made a living at what he loved. They never attended college. They never amassed more than $35,000 in the bank. They never owned a home.
But they vowed their son would do better. They did better than vow. They ensured it.
In 2004, I earn a living doing what I love. I have a college degree. I have more money under age 50 than they had approaching 80, much of it born of their sweat. I'm about to own a home.
I gaze at this house I will make a home and envision my dad, an avowed pool rat, practically living in my shimmering blue slice of backyard heaven, swimming and sneaking underneath me, then suddenly hoisting me on his shoulders, shooting me upward and giddily throwing me over, a replay of decades ago. I see my mom passionately puttering around my home, obsessively decorating each room one day, redecorating them the next.
On the threshold of a seismic life change—reflecting on what my mom and dad sacrificed, how much they gave me, the debt of love I can never repay—I realize two things:
I own, therefore I am.
I owe, therefore I remember.