Home Owner
And many more like it... K and I are on the verge of the biggest purchase (or debt) of our lives: we're trying to buy a house. I asked a friend of mine whether she ever saw me as owning a house and her answer mirrored my sentiment: never.
I turned it over in my head over the next few hours asking myself why I never saw myself in one. The tempting answer is that I belong in New York sitting in a café working on something "fabulous" or that I should be taking notes from the next episode of Globe Trekker and planning a trip to Berlin.
I wasn't quite satisfied with the big city answer and I couldn't see how having a house would make it impossible to visit Berlin. It would require more effort, to be sure, but it wouldn't be impossible. There would be inertia in home ownership too, but someone recently asked me about surfing and I realized I could probably count on a single hand the number of times I went swimming in the Pacific for the 10 years I lived in southern California. Inertia transcends location.
The answer was pretty obvious, once it presented itself; I had been so sidetracked with the "cool" reasons to not be in a house that I hadn't paused to notice that I never really thought I could own a home. My parents never owned a home; we always rented in Nairobi since Kenya was never really our country and they didn't plan on being there permanently. We rented different places over the years, migrating from neighborhood to neighborhood as we got older. We even moved out of a house and then moved back a few years later. People don't really own houses in Nairobi, at least not the people you talk to on the street. The big Africans and the enterprising Indians seem to own the real estate, renting it to working people and the very small expatriate middle class, to which my parents belonged.
Although I've never thought I could own a home I did have - I do have - many aspirations of what I to be. I love architecture. I privately fantasize of engineer's work. I like to tinker with my computers. I want to collect books.
The same question always presented itself when I was surveying my various competing interests: how could I be each of those things? In a world that is so specialized, how does a run of the mill person do the type of citizen engineering that built the world we know today?
Then out of nowhere the connection between my lack of thought over home owning and the various aspirations I'd always had made itself perfectly clear as we were walking the grounds with our home inspector, Don. Don was looking at a retaining wall and abruptly got a twinkle in his eye as he was mentally taking note of things after which he slipped into a story that he must have told many times: that he was a trained civil engineer and retaining walls were a tricky affair. One of his first projects, in fact, was building one and as he was explaining to us the calculation for water pressure on the wall, which is a function of depth and not necessarily volume, I had my epiphany: as a home owner, my challenge would be all of my aspirations: engineering, architecture, and other forms of craftsmanship. If we were to own the house, I would need to know about this retaining wall, the structural durability of the basement, and the mechanics behind sprinklers and fireplaces. K and I would become architects: concerned with the outer form but even more importantly inner space and orientation. I would go back to system's engineering: letting my computers out of the closet, where they are now stored, and into a workshop where I'd have the chance to see if I could figure out how to automate lighting or security with some free distribution of Linux.
It has become an exciting thought. It's an excitement that is mixed with a lot of apprehension since I don't know the first about furnaces or siding or carpentry or landscaping or any of the other myriad of things to which one becomes a caretaker when they have a home. But I'm willing to make an effort and learn with a big premise: no one is going to care as much as you will about what you have, including your home.
Nothing is final, of course. But one day I hope to think of myself and K as distinguished engineers, chief architects, head gardeners (okay, I might not be carrying my weight there), master systems administrators (K will gladly yield this one), and superior snow shovels during winter. Yes, I know: it will be a lot of work. But when would an interdisciplinary mix that produced as much satisfaction be easy?
11:56:06 PM 
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