The Concept of Home

Last week, I had a meltdown. While this isn’t entirely unusual for me, this one was a little on the odd side. Here’s the skinny:

We’re selling my maternal grandparents’ house in Los Gatos. After my grandfather moved into an assisted living facility a few years ago, the house was rented out as an extra source of income for him. When he passed away last August my mother elected to keep renting it out. That continued until she got sick and tired of getting bills for electricians to change light bulbs and plumbers to unclog toilets. (Seriously, it’s like these people do a Chicken Little routine for every little thing. How many tenants does it take to change a light bulb? One. Instead of trying to change the bulb themselves they call the property managers and say “The light isn’t working,” and the property managers, instead of going over — literally next door — to take a look, call out an electrician. IT’S A FUCKING LIGHT BULB, PEOPLE. EXERCISE SOME COMMON SENSE.)

Anyway, a multitude of unnecessary plumbing and electrical invoices later, my mother decided that she’d had it. The tenants have had their notice and the house is in the throes of being prepared to go on the market. I was consulted, and gave my blessing to the sale because I’m not in a place in my life to be able to drop everything and move rightnowthisinstant and nobody wants to keep renting it out until I am, so the house was going and that was that.

And then I got sentimental.

It wasn’t immediate. It was a couple of months after the original decision was made. I blame my therapist. (She won’t mind.) I honestly don’t really remember how we got onto the subject of the Los Gatos house anyway, but we did, and I ended up down the emotional rabbit-hole of memory.

I spent a lot of time in that house when I was little. My grandmother used to have me one or two days a week when my mother was still teaching part-time in San Jose. At the risk of repeating a story, I was in that house during the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. My grandmother fell on me. I remember it very clearly.

My grandfather hung one of those yellow and blue plastic Fisher-Price swings from a beam on the covered patio for me. They had a water feature in the corner of the yard for years until I came along, but they got rid of it because my grandmother (bless her soul) was neurotic and convinced I was going to fall into it and die. Before the construction of a deck at the front of the house, there was a pittosporum shrub of epic proportions along the driveway, with a shorter row of star jasmine in front of it, and to this day I get nostalgic whenever I smell either of those flowers. My mother’s old bedroom had been turned into a guest room after she moved out, and it became a repository for photos of me. I was the only grandchild, and with that came an inherent level of blind adoration on my grandparents' part, but at a certain point my mother and I began to refer to that room as The Shrine. I counted once. There were over three hundred photos of me in that room.

In any case, I was suddenly faced with the reality of that house ceasing to be a place I could realistically visit, and I lost my shit. Suddenly I was desperate to cling to the memories — wallow in them, even — and I started to think up ways to hold onto the house for the sake of sentiment. I’d sell my condo! I’d find another job down there somewhere! I’d make it work!

Long story short I got hysterical, called my mother, and asked “How badly would it fuck up everyone’s lives if I said ‘Don’t sell Los Gatos, I’m dropping everything and moving in’?”

Well, okay, what I said was, "::insert hysterical sobbing and mumbling here::"

She said, "What are you saying? You know I can't understand you when you're hysterical!"

And then I said, "How badly would it fuck up everyone’s lives if I said ‘Don’t sell Los Gatos, I’m dropping everything and moving in’?”

And then she said, “You know it doesn’t look like the house you remember anymore. Besides, home is where your people are; it’s not a physical place.”

I said, “But, but, but!”

She said, “Okay, how about the fact that both bathrooms need to be gutted and redone, all the pipes are the originals from 1956 and need replacing, and so does the main water line out to the street, and that’s going to be a very expensive set of projects?”

I said, “... … …”

She said, “Well?”

I said, “Fuck that shit, I’m not made of money. Sell that son of a bitch!”

And suddenly, miraculously, I felt fine again.