Feature
August, 24 2008
Ode To My Apartment
by The XY Files
The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus professed that the only constant in the universe is change. Everything is in a constant state of flux, so that the world as we know - heck, the entire universe as we know it - is completely different now than it was when you started reading this sentence.
So, in an existence where nothing stays the same, I am not surprised to find that I am filled with a wide range of emotions regarding Moving Day, which is rapidly approaching this coming week, like a giant asteroid preparing to shatter all the routines and patterns my family has grown into over the past two years. Upheaval will be the order of the day. How many days or weeks will it take to establish new habits? How long before things start to feel normal again?
The big day has almost arrived - Tuesday, August 26th, 10:00 AM, to be precise - and despite a proliferation of cardboard boxes and Rubbermaid totes, I can't help but feel that nothing is packed. Getting everything together was much easier when there was only one child. The number of toys has multiplied by two, which is to be expected when you have two children. But in addition to this, for some reason there appears to be a never-ending stream of tiny bits and pieces that are very difficult to pack. Where does one blue Polly Pocket go? Two marbles from the Hungry Hungry Hippos game? Mr. Ketchup from the Little Tikes Talking Grill (a wise-cracking barbecue that I am dying to introduce to my size 10 Doc Martens)?
The problem is that all of the items that are missing this minute have been packed away in boxes that are taped up and buried in stacks of other large boxes. Do you make a miscellaneous box? Then you have to spend an hour going through it and matching up all the pieces. Blaargh! Do you throw them all out? No! Because chances are the things you throw out will be the pieces your kids will be looking for once you unpack. Then all of a sudden it's after one o'clock in the morning, you have not packed anywhere near what you anticipated and you have another Diet Pepsi Max and Malibu and pop the Olympics on to watch water polo.
Strangely enough, the apartment has officially taken on the appearance of the apartment of a tenant about to get the heck out of Dodge. Boxes line the wall and reach high in the sky. Bookshelves have been cleared and moved from their homes along the living room wall. Clutter and detritus lies strewn across the floors of my bedroom. I find myself wishing for one big box that I can throw everything into so the movers can take it out in one shot. Who cares if the box weighs 300 lbs. and requires two rolls of packaging tape and four muscular men to carry it out? That's why my dad is paying them!
As the layers are peeled way, suddenly I fail to see why we liked this apartment in the first place. The floors are uneven; If you place a ball on one side of the living room floor, that ball will roll clear across the room. The molding around the baseboards and doorjambs was nailed into drywall that is roughly as thick as my fingernail, without any sort of bonding agent. The molding comes off the wall faster and easier than Paris Hilton's clothes in front of a video camera with night vision. Some electrical outlets are covered with plastic plates. Others you can't put a plate on because the sockets are set back into the wall about a full inch. The blinds are falling off the windows.
The walls, floors, windows and doors are all covered in my kids' early crayon and marker training exercises. There is a hole in the wall from the day my dog decided a new fun game to play would involve his teeth and the sheet rock in the bedroom. Dora decals are stuck on the windows, unyielding even to the mighty power of my awesome straight razor. One of the cabinet doors in the kitchen is a slight nudge away from swinging wildly. The grout in the bathroom is peeling. The landlord is leaving one patch of lawn unmown, conveniently hiding a dead woodchuck that has been sitting in the high grass for at least a month now (well beyond the "Ocean of Maggots" stage, the thing has to be full-blown skeletal remains by now).
Speaking of the landlord, he doesn't come to shovel the snow in the driveway, even though he told us "No problem, when it snows I will take care of that" with a sly smile. His promise of a motion sensor light in the pitch black backyard has also gone unfulfilled. The neighbors have a duck, a pit bull and a little rat dog that used to crap on our lawn - all three of them are unfriendly.
Yet at the same time, this apartment is different from any other that I have lived in for a reason that I had not really contemplated until this past week. My wife and I first lived in a crappy apartment on the upper level of a crotchety old lady's house. Then when we got pregnant with our daughter, we moved to a new garden apartment, which also sucked, but was a little better because... well, no, on the whole this was not much better. The laundry room was, like, a million miles away to the left, and the dumpsters were a million miles in the other direction. When it snowed, they plowed your car in and you had to dig out all by yourself. Then we lived with my mother-in-law, which was alright for a while, but soon we wanted to get a place of our own again. That ended up being this apartment.
In this apartment, both of my kids spent a lot of time growing up. My daughter did a lot of her firsts at my mother-in-law's house, with me as a stay-at-home dad. But here, my son did all of his firsts. First steps, first words, first filling the cat's water with litter. And my daughter was there to help him, egg him on and offer her full support as a sibling. This apartment may have been less than perfect, but this was where my family grew closer and stronger. Now, we are moving into a house, which is a bigger and better opportunity for us, but at the same time this is a massive change in our daily lives.
Our apartment served a purpose, and despite its (many) flaws, this place served that purpose quite well. Now it is time to move up to the next level and go from paying my little landlord a king's ransom every month to paying a king's ransom for my mortgage every month. But for that king's ransom I will have property. A lawn to mow on my own. A patio that is perfectly suited for a barbecue. A driveway that I can clear myself. A cute little attic that I will use to scare the kids to sleep, by telling them that is where the wild leprechaun lives. And most importantly, a fireplace, where I can safely burn everything I can get my hands on, heating the house and cutting down some of our utilities bills, thus using my pyromaniac tendencies for good.
Next week I will be off, decorating my house and lighting things on fire in the fireplace, even though it is summertime. I will also be going to a flea market at some point, a big one in the Pennsylvania countryside, which I really hope will provide some good fodder for a future article. Take care, Mommies, and let me know if you have any fond memories of places that you'd otherwise never think twice about!
