Writing Life

Today Julie and I visited three of our “almost houses.” Six years ago, when we first made up our minds to move from Placerville to Sacramento, we began spending nearly every weekend in Sacramento, touring houses in the presence of a Realtor. We must have toured more than three dozen houses, but only five of them really tempted us. One of those five temptresses is our current home. The other four sirens are all located in our region of Sacramento, and three of them are within easy walking distance of our home. About once every year we make a visual inspection of our four almost houses, walking (or driving) by each of them in order to see how well they are being cared for. Today was visiting day.

This morning, we set out on a nice leisurely walk, traveling from our home in the extreme north end of the Land Park area over to the nearby Curtis Park area. In between the two neighborhoods is a slender no-man’s land that doesn’t belong to either the Land Park area or the Curtis Park area. Smack dab in the middle of that no-man’s land sits one of our almost houses. We call this the railroad house, because it sits right next to the railroad tracks. The least expensive of the five temptresses, it was priced $70,000 below the house we ended up buying. Many a time during these past two years, as we have flirted with foreclosure and other economic disasters, Julie and I have thought wistfully about how much better off we’d be financially if we had purchased the railroad house. Though inexpensive, it was not without amenities. In fact, it was the only one of the five temptresses that had a swimming pool. It also had a detached all-purpose building in the backyard that could have been an entertainment area, a guest bedroom, or, most likely, my writing room. The home’s only real drawback was its proximity to the railroad tracks. It wasn’t the big freight trains that rumble through town three or four times a day that concerned us. Both Julie and I love the sound of big rumbling freight trains. What bothered us were the light-rail trains that run past the house every twenty minutes or so between the hours of six a.m. and eleven p.m. Before, during, and after the passing of each light-rail train, a big mechanical crossbar is lowered to stop traffic in front of the railroad house. While this crossbar is in a horizontal position, it is accompanied by the incessant dinging of a warning bell that, presumably, alerts the blind and/or the hard-of-hearing that a train is passing and that it wouldn’t be a good idea to try to cross the tracks. We were afraid that this dinging, which fills three minutes out of every twenty, or roughly fifteen percent of the typical person’s waking hours and a good percentage of the non-waking ones as well, would prove too darn annoying, as well as a hindrance to sleep. And so, perhaps foolishly, we opted not to purchase the railroad house, even though it was an incredible bargain. When we walked by it today, we thought it looked a little sad, not quite as lively or well-cared for as it would now look if Julie and I were living there. Julie is an avid gardener. Wherever we have lived, we have attracted attention with our front yards. In Placerville, drivers often slowed down as they passed our house to shout out their approval of Julie’s landscape design. Here in Land Park, our front yard has generated a lot of positive comments from both neighbors and strangers alike. If we owned the railroad house, its front yard would no doubt be a landscaping showpiece right now. As it is, the yard is a little droopy, but not terrible. As far as we could tell, standing on the outside looking in, “droopy but not terrible” would appear to be a good description of the rest of the house as well. We breathed a sigh of relief. We’d hate to see the railroad house fall into disrepair. It appears that it is being loved, albeit in a rather careless way.

The next house we checked up on was the one we call the Curtis house because it was the only one of the five temptresses that was located in the Curtis Park area. This house too looked a little droopy but not neglected. Six years ago the Curtis house was listed for sale at $20,000 more than the house we eventually purchased. That fact alone keeps us from feeling too wistful about letting it slip from our grasp. It is located a block from beautiful Curtis Park, in the quietest neighborhood of all the houses we considered buying. It has a big full basement and a two-car garage, two things our current house lacks. Storage is a bit of a nightmare for us, and whenever we are hacking our way into our tiny one-car garage in search of a bicycle we haven’t ridden for months or a hedge trimmer we haven’t seen since the previous spring, we can’t help thinking about how much more convenient life would be if we had purchased the Curtis house. The Curtis house also had two bathrooms. When we bought our current house, we didn’t think living with one bathroom would be much of a problem. After all, our Placerville house had only one bathroom in it. But now that our combined ages total 110 years, Julie and I have begun to appreciate what a convenience it would be to live in a two-bathroom home. As one grows older, bladders and bowels become less cooperative. There are times when we practically have to fight each other to see who gets to use the bathroom first. If we had purchased the Curtis house, we wouldn’t have that problem.

Almost house number three we have dubbed the “Castro house,” because it is located on Castro Street. At the time we first toured it, it was located right next door to an auto repair shop. This meant that, during business hours, we would hear a lot of sanding, and drilling, and ratcheting and other automotive sounds coming from the property next door. This worried us a great deal. The price of the Castro house was identical to the price of the Curtis house, $20,000 higher than the home we bought. For those reasons we passed it up, even though it was probably the coolest and most prestigious of the five temptresses. It had three bedrooms (like our current home), plus a separate family room, two bathrooms, and a detached garage, part of which had been converted into a gym. It also boasted an odd additional feature. There was a long walk-in closet in the master bedroom. At the end of this closet, like a cul de sac, there was a wide space that could have served as my writing room. It was a bit small, but it was secluded and quiet. At least it would have been quiet whenever the auto repair shop next door wasn’t in full voice. Rejecting the Castro house might well have been a tactical error, as it turns out. A few months after our house-hunt ended, the auto shop next door to the Castro house was torn down. It has since been replaced by a tasteful-looking art deco office building. The building is small – two stories and only two or three tenants. The parking lot has room for only about eight or nine cars. I’m not sure what the businesses are that occupy the new office building, but they appear to be rather quiet operations, such as CPA firms or lawyers offices. The neighborhood in which the Castro house resides has probably held its value better than any of the other neighborhoods in which we considered buying a home. Thus, when we found ourselves unable to make our mortgage payments due to a dramatic drop in our household income, we probably still could have sold off the Castro house at a small profit, something we were unable to do in this house. No Realtor we contacted would even take a listing on our current house because the loan-to-value ration had grown too wide. These days, the Castro house’s exterior appearance has been updated a bit in a way that neither Julie nor I really approve of. It now looks a little too bland and contemporary for our tastes. But at least we cannot complain that it has been neglected. Whoever owns it clearly appreciates it and takes good care of it.

The fourth of our almost houses is not within easy driving distance of our home. It is located on F Street, within a mile of one of our favorite Sacramento hangouts, the antiques mall at 57th and H Streets. Since we would have to drive our car over to inspect our F Street almost house, we decided to stop off at the antiques mall first. We spent about two hours wandering the mall. One of our favorite shops there is called Sekula’s Fine Art and Antiques. One of the co-owners of Sekula’s is a man named Rick, who is an expert on a lot of esoteric subjects, one of which is globes. Globes are a passion of mine. Rick is the only other globe collector I know of in Sacramento. Rick, however, is much wealthier than I am (an easy thing to be). When we discuss our globe collections, he talks about a globe that he bid $16,000 on at Christie’s. I talk about a globe I bought at a local flea market for $25. But Rick is not a snob. He loves antique scientific instruments and educational tools of all kinds. He claims that his home office looks like Professor Dumbledore’s office in the Harry Potter movies. And so I had a nice chat about globes with Rick today. I told him that the biggest globe seller (and buyer) in the U.S. was probably Murray Hudson, who maintains an inventory of about 1800 globes at his shop/warehouse in Tennessee. Because Murray Hudson buys and sells so many globes, he is pretty much the engine that drives the prices of the domestic globe market. If he wasn’t in the market, globe prices would probably drop in America. Still, even with Murray Hudson buying up so many vintage American globes, the sheer number of globes manufactured in the U.S. in the twentieth-century will assure collectors of such globes a vast supply from which to choose for decades to come. There is no way that Murray Hudson, or anyone else for that matter, could possibly buy up all the vintage globes that are gathering dust in America’s attics, garages, and basements. That means that it is still relatively easy for me to find bargain globes at flea markets, garage sales, and elsewhere. For Rick, who collects primarily pre-twentieth-century European globes, life is not so easy. He says that there is an anonymous globe collector in Milan who avidly snaps up most of the high-end globes that come up for auction at Christie’s, Sotheby’s, and elsewhere. The abovementioned $16,000 bid that Rick made on a globe recently was not, alas, the winning bid. Rick was outbid by the deep-pocketed stranger from Milan who is currently driving up the price of pre-twentieth century European globes to record levels. Rick doesn’t know who this anonymous stranger is. A friend who works at an auction house has informed Rick that the stranger has an apparently unlimited bank account and that he lives in Milan. That is all Rick knows about this mystery globe collector. Somewhere in Milan, there must be a fabulous villa decorated floor to ceiling with ancient globes. The very thought of it is the stuff of every globe-lover’s dreams. Sadly, thanks to this Mystery Man of Milan, it seems likely I’ll never be able to afford a pre-twentieth century European globe. He is single handedly driving prices for such objects into the stratosphere.

After visiting Rick’s shop, we moved on to other parts of the mall. By the end of our trip, we had purchased just a single item, a 1941 National Geographic map of the Atlantic Ocean and the continents it abuts. The price was one dollar. Julie and I both love maps. And Julie is especially fond of maps of the Atlantic Ocean. She is an ocean-liner aficionado, and all of her favorite liners were Atlantic crossers. I constantly refer to her as an Atlantic snob, because she has so little interest in liners that plied the Pacific or Indian oceans. We were so eager to examine our new map in detail that we couldn’t even wait until we brought it home. Instead, we sat down on a bench outside the antiques mall and unfolded the map and laid it out on our knees. It was full of fascinating information. For instance it notes the site of several fascinating shipwrecks that we had never heard of before. It pinpoints the site in the South Atlantic where a Cape Town-bound Egyptian steamer called the Zamzam was shelled by a German raider and sunk on April 17, 1941. It notes the site where the American steamer Robin Moor was torpedoed by a German submarine on May 21, 1941. It also points out the last known position of an American Naval ship called the U.S.S. Cyclops, which left Barbados on March 4, 1918, and was never heard from again. More than 300 people were aboard the Cyclops. It still stands as the largest non-combat loss of life on a U.S. Navy ship in the performance of its duties. To this day, no one has any idea what happened to the Cyclops. The map also points out the island on which Alexander Selkirk, the real-life sailor who served as the model for the fictional Robinson Crusoe, was marooned (it’s called Mas a Tierra and it’s located in the Pacific; a small part of the Pacific Ocean that abuts the coast of South America appears on the National Geographic’s map of the Atlantic). Elsewhere in the Pacific, the map points out that the Galapagos Islands got their name from the Spanish word for “tortoise.” It also identifies the site where, in December of 1939, a German ocean liner called the Columbus was scuttled by its own crew to prevent it being seized by the British Navy. What’s more, it points out the spot where the Titanic sank, and it does so with impressive accuracy when you consider the fact that the wreckage wasn’t actually found until 1985. The map had so much information on it, that Julie and I sat together reading it for nearly an hour.

People who love maps are familiar with a term called “the Mercator Projection.” It refers to a method of portraying the entire globe on a flat map. It employs a mathematical formula that causes objects located near the north and south poles to appear much larger than they are in reality. The biggest beneficiary of the so-called Mercator effect is Greenland. On a true Mercator Projection map, Greenland appears to be nearly as large as Africa, even though, in reality, Africa is fifteen times the size of Greenland. Julie and I have a 1943 National Geographic World Map hanging on the wall of our dining room (above an array of nine vintage American globes). This map isn’t a true Mercator Projection because both the meridians and parallels (lines of longitude and latitude) are curved slightly (on a Mercator Projection map, the meridians all are straight lines running north and south, while the parallels are straight lines running east and west). Nonetheless, this map distorts the earth’s features enough that Greenland looks slightly larger than the continental United States when, in fact, the continental U.S. is more than tree times the size of Greenland (a globe is the only map that can accurately represent the relative sizes of the earth’s major land masses). I was thinking about the Mercator effect as Julie and I drove away from the antiques mall and went in search of our fourth almost house. Because the F Street house is farther from our home than all of the other almost houses, Julie and I are forever forgetting its exact location. Usually we have to drive up or down F Street for a mile or so before we finally spot it. Today was no exception. We can never remember the address of the F Street almost house or even the name of the nearest cross street. But once you’ve made any sort of a connection with a house, it seems to stand out from the rest of the houses around it. If you are cruising a neighborhood looking for the house of a friend, or a relative, or even a house that you almost purchased, it always seems that when you come upon the house you are looking for it just sort of jumps out at you in some way, even if it is the smallest house on the block. The F Street almost house is not only the smallest house on its block, it was far and away the smallest of our five temptresses. It had only two bedrooms and one bathroom, and a total of perhaps 900 square feet. The front and back yards were tiny. But it had one delicious feature that I really loved. Above one wall of the dining room there was a small loft. Leading up to the loft was a stairway that looked like one of those narrow ladders that run between the decks of a naval ship. The loft wasn’t even big enough to stand up in, but it would have been big enough to accommodate a small writing desk and a handful of books. In short, it would have been an ideal writing nook. And I could imagine Julie, with her love of ships, joining me up in the loft at night where we could sit and pretend we were relaxing in adjoining deck chairs on the observation deck of an old tramp steamer. The F Street house was the coziest and most romantic of our almost houses, a tiny little fairy-tale cottage. Today, as usual, we had trouble finding it. After leaving the antiques mall, we proceeded slowly down F Street in a westerly direction, but the house didn’t seem to be where we had last seen it. Of course, we hadn’t checked up on the F Street almost house in a couple of years, so our bearings might have been off a bit. Just as we were beginning to think that we must have passed it by somehow, we came out of a curve in the roadway and, voila, there it was on the left, as big as Greenland. And it was beautiful. Whoever owns that little fairy-tale cottage seems to possess a magic wand, or maybe a pot of gold. It has never looked better.

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