Finding Home

In The Garden at Sunset

Candy and I have been together for abut 11 years at this point. We started in a rented house in Denville, NJ that we shared with an insane woman and her spawn from hell. Within six months we were looking for a place without the sharing and bought a townhouse in Succasunna, NJ. We were there for two years. Friends moved to the Poconos and we went to visit. It was a "light years" improvement over the townhouse. Not that the town house was a bad thing. It was good and it served its purpose well.

We inherited a house in Tucson, AZ about five years ago ... well, 1/4 of a house in Tucson, anyway. That, and a condo in upstate New York. We turned the condo in Upstate New York into cash and bought the other 3/4 of the house in Tucson with the intention of keeping it as a winter hideout.

Within a year, the company I worked for decided it was going to merge operations with another company it had purchased several years before. Knowing that it would be a hassle and sensing that I was getting too old for that kind of BS and, more importantly, being aware from years of experience that the first man to the captain with a plan .... has THE plan ... I took a plan to management that would give them everything of any significance they had been getting from me for the last decade for less money; I would pay my own benefits; I would move from a head count (liability) on the books to being a business expense (read dollar for dollar tax deduction). In exchange, I would never have to go into the office again and they would pay me against a monthly invoice under the terms and conditions of a consulting contract we would agree on.

Off to Arizona as an independent consultant! We moved from a 2,100 square foot, 4 bedroom house in the Poconos to a 1,400 square foot, two bedroom house in the suburbs of Tucson with the intention of blowing it out to about 2,500 square feet with second story office space and mountain views of the Catalinas that one would have to pay on the order of a million to get elsewhere in the Tucson area.

We hired an architect and one year into the project we were nine months behind the schedule he'd outlined, and just getting working drawings. We'd retained a contractor who, in his quest for a building permit to start work, uncovered a zoning issue that the architect should have been aware of before he started drawings. I fired him at a cost in five figures.

In a rage we sold the little hose at a nice profit and bought a two story home that backed up against a major traffic artery. The space was far from perfect. It was not "our" house, but it would do.

The point of all this? I had a conversation with Candy recently. I told her that since I was 18 and left my parents home, I have moved on an average of every 2 years, 11 months and 10 days,. Honest! I figured it out. In any case, what I told Candy is that I've never had a feeling of being home. Everything has always been temporary, transitory and somewhat alien in nature. I've never felt a connection with a place nor have I ever experienced the sense that where I lived was "home" ... MY home ... OUR home ...

I'm pleased to say that our new place runs contrary to all of that ... we both have a sense of "home" here. It's a new feeling for me. A previously unexperienced sensation, at least for me. Unlike any time in the past, we both plan to be here, in this place, for a long time. As Candy says, the next move will be with coffins.