Home-Staging / I am the Walrus / Safari Man

My Real Estate Agent
 

My first mistake was to tell her that I thought my house was special and that I wanted top dollar for it. Her first mistake was to tell me that everybody thought their house was special and wanted top dollar. As if I didn’t know that. What I really needed to tell her was that my house was my home and I didn’t want to leave it at all. In fact, I was feeling quite tender and maybe, at that moment, a bit hard-done-by. And what she should have done was to look around my home in astonishment and offer me a million dollars. No harm in that. 

 

I was wary of barracudas sniffing out my soft spots, my resolve, the urgency of my situation. In fairness, she was not a barracuda. But not a rainbow trout either.  She came highly recommended as the top seller in my area, and I could see why. She was a professional. Honest, thorough and tough. But what I needed at that moment was a soft mother.

Being a professional, she saw my home through the eyes of a prospective buyer. I was seeing it through the eyes of a creative person who saw potential, had a vision, wanted challenges. I was still seeing my property in the way Rod and I first saw it, as though we had just fallen through the rabbit hole and entered Wonderland. 

 

It was 23 years ago that we stumbled onto this place. The real estate market had been super hot. We were desperate to move out of the city, but we entered the game late, and there were few properties left on the market. In fact, Jack, our agent at the time, didn’t even want to show us this property. It had been on the market for ages, and the price had come down considerably (a good thing, but telling). Also, there was the threat of a dump being built just downhill from it. But what the heck, so far we’d seen the best 3 properties in our price range, and none of them appealed to us. Jack took us in his car, drove past unpromising fields backing on to HWY 401, then turned south on an unpromising little side road, and parked in front of a sort of shack next to a cedar hedge. Was this all that was left in our price range? No wonder he’d been hesitant to show it to us. But then! It was when we first stepped through the opening in the cedar hedge that we fell in love. A long golden field led to the edge of the hill, and in the distance was the lake. On both sides of the field there were mature trees.

The house itself? Jack was right, no one in their right mind would want to live in this old farmhouse. The stucco had crumbled ages ago and it was hard to tell what colour it had once been. It was still inhabited by, for lack of a better word, young hippies, who sat on the floor with their legs sprawled out. Furniture was scarce. We had to step over their legs, as they did not acknowledge us and did not budge. But neither were they hostile. They just lived in their own world and felt no need to ingratiate themselves. That was fine by me. The little house was basically a shoebox with a few gingerbread trimmings suggesting a divide between two spaces, er, rooms. The windows were charming, made up of small square panes. The kitchen was like an afterthought, narrow as a hallway, but with a window overlooking the edge of the woods. The shack in the parking lot, it turned out, was now a work space, having once housed horses and, I suppose, a tractor.
 

Maybe we weren’t in our right minds. We thought the place was wonderful. Soon after buying it, quietly one day, the value of the property went up considerably when the threatened dump was not to be, at least, not in our back-yard. And now, 23 years and two major renovations later, people ask us how ever did we find this magical place tucked away behind an unassuming cedar hedge. Yes, I know, everyone has a story to tell when asked how ever did they find such a special house. 

The truth is, I wasn’t in my right mind when I met with Marilyn, the real estate agent. She brought out an “attitude” in me, when she implied that my home left much to be desired. It didn’t get any better when she pointed out that my artist’s touches would not be appreciated by the average buyer – in fact, they could be intimidating or off-putting. What? The average person couldn’t see beyond the paintings on the walls and the sculptures placed here and there? They couldn’t see beyond my chosen colours, pale apricot with silver-mauve trim? They couldn’t see beyond the rather old-fashioned kitchen that does not have a granite counter-top? Beyond my “tired” bathroom?

She explained to me all about home stagers. As if I didn’t know. But now I feel the needle on my emotional compass is beginning to tremble, not knowing which way to point. Something is amiss. I’ve seen the websites of those home stagers. Most made-over rooms look like IKEA show-rooms: Stick to neutral colours, create focal points, get rid of clutter … and thus you move from “untidy” to “elegant”.  Place a couple of potted plants by your door and transform your entrance from “unappealing” to “welcoming”. And yet, I had to step over some sprawling hippies when I first saw my house! Dust bunnies everywhere. How does that work? Marilyn said that not everyone has the eyes of an artist, like me. Ri-ight. Nevertheless, I can’t argue with reality. “Staged” homes apparently do sell more readily than unstaged ones. What has happened to us? What has happened to human imagination? Now everyone wants a home like the one on T.V. after the make-over crew has come and gone.

O.K. My compass needle has stopped quivering, is settling down in a specific direction. Here is what is bothering me me: We are told that selling a home today is essentially the same as selling a product. And a whole new profession has materialized to make us feel insecure about our own abilities to enhance, or add value to that product. I get it. Why not? As a painter, I know that visualizing space is fun, and why not do it for money for other people? And how can I complain about a whole new niche market having been carved out? People need jobs. I guess what bothers me is that professionals are now inserting themselves beween us and our imaginations. Maybe I should hire someone to help me enhance my visual appearance too, choose my colours, my style, my whole wardrobe … Oh, wait! Didn’t I just see that being done on TV? What next? Someone to arrange my intellectual life? Someone to choose and pre-read the books I ought to read? (NYTimes Literary Review does that.) Choose my friendships for me? Pre-date potential husbands or wives to see if they are good enough for us, save us the trouble of dressing up or being bored? And if I were younger, choose my husband? Oh ... that's already been done too? You see where I'm going with this? There are endless niches that could be carved out by professionals, sparing us the need to think at all. I feel some basic hard-earned freedoms are being given away if we're discouraged from visualizing, from examining our own selves, our personalities — but, this is getting too heady for a small blog. I'm just saying.

Well, Marilyn knows her job and she does it well. Her parting offer was to pay for a home-stager to come and visit me and give me advice. Over my dead body, I thought as I thanked her and demurred. Since she left, I have entered into a frenzy of wall-painting and de-cluttering and re-thinking to my own heart’s content. In any case, down-sizing is inevitable at some point. I don't want my kids to clean up the attic and wonder whether mom would have thrown out those hideous lamps. And what should they do with those old love letters? After all, their dad's name was not Harry.

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I Am The Walrus


Walking around my property, where we have lived for 22 years. The garden has grown according to my energy, my needs, the plants available – a rambling garden, meant for walking through. The wind is fierce. Forty years ago I might have imagined myself at the end of the dock – wind from behind, my skirt billowing romantically. Always someone watching, of course. The big willow and the smaller corkscrew willow by the dock dancing wildly. The male gaze holding me in focus. A reason to live.

Forty years ago, like Scarlet O’Hara, I would have resolved to hold on to this Swallow Hill at any cost. What is there to say when a good thing comes to an end? Then you are left with memories, until, at some point, the memories, too, come to an end.

In the meantime, my husband is in TO at the moment, seeing his oncologist at the Princess Margaret. If his blood chemistry has come up to an acceptable level, he will have round 6 of his chemo cycle this week. There may be 8 rounds in all. So far so good, though there are some glitches. What can I say? The garden is overwhelmingly beautiful even now when the trees are next to bare and the morning sun lights up their trunks.

Last night I was trying to get some depth into my sleep but my husband was snoring, albeit ever so lightly. You know the kind of snoring where each breath that is exhaled sounds like the death of a tiny bubble? But the rhythm of the breathing is oddly compelling — the bubble is easy to visualize and you find yourself rooting for it — maybe this time it won’t burst! I decided to take a closer look to see how it actually worked. I kept the tiny flashlight away from his eyes but let the edge of light fall on my husband’s mouth. To my surprise, there was no bubble. It’s the soft membranes of the lips which barely touch, and then are blown apart by the exhalation. Anyway, I ended up in the spare room, where I still couldn’t sleep, but at least could concentrate on different visuals — the action takes place somewhere in the brain, though it feels like I’m watching Imax.

Sometime before dawn, one of my 5 cats let out a heart-rending yiaaaooowl, and my heart was rended. I felt great pity for her. My cat in trouble? Perhaps being bullied by the other four cats? My cat yawning out of boredom? My cat expressing the joy of living? Why could she not be more specific? It would all sound the same, wouldn’t it? A cat-whisperer I am not.

My sadness at my cat’s plight kept growing. Who of us has never cried out in the wilderness? Who of us has never experienced the fear of being misunderstood? Finally I had to scold myself. It’s not cool to have one’s heart rended so easily. If we all went around weeping, stopping at street corners to blow our noses whenever we felt misunderstood, this country would come to a halt.

 Ah, tenderness, you are so under-appreciated! Living with nature as I do, I’m already helping lady bugs off their backs and onto their tiny feet. I gently lift them onto a leaf of a house plant, thinking that if there are any aphids, that’s where they’d be hanging out. At the same time, I vacuum up the the hoards of ladybugs that accumulate in corners of windows or in the track of my patio door. But tenderly. I do weep as they rattle down the vacuum hose. I am the Walrus.

                                                                         *

Safari Man

I met a man once who took white men on safaris. This was perhaps thirty years ago. He had friends among the tall lion hunters with spears, that is, the Maasai. He had feasted with them and sang songs with them by camp fires. Taking white men on safaris was his way of making a living so that he could travel. What was he doing at a Rosedale party mingling with women who shopped at Holt Renfrew and hired nannies to look after their children? Well, he was drumming up business. He showed slides of his beloved Africa, and of white people on safaris enjoying the sighting of elephants, giraffes, lions, rhinos, and so on. After he was finished with his presentation, we all went outside into the garden. There Safari Man became the outsider. Obviously not at ease in the enclosed Rosedale backyard, he stood to the side, his back against the trunk of a copper beech tree.

People living in the margins eventually bump into each other, so we did. He had many stories to tell me. Perhaps he thought I had money and was pitching to me, but I think he was in love with Africa, and lovers love to talk about the beloved. Anyway he was not a good salesman because he said nothing about sharing his beloved.

He told me something I have often thought about. That the people of the Masai tribe had no existential problems. They were at the center of the world. They never doubted that. They would not understand questions about identity, or existential angst. O lucky men! Could this be so, or is this western fantasy? I believed him, of course. I'd like to believe that someone somewhere has never asked the question: Is the self an illusion?

They never doubted that all cows belonged to them, even if they were kept behind white men’s fences. They did not understand property laws. It was soon discovered that to sentence a Maasai warrior to spend a few weeks in the confinement of prison was the equivalent of a death sentence. To a Western mind this might seem like a romantic gesture of defiance: give me liberty or give me death! But, inside those prison walls, what was happening inside the warrior’s head? What caused him to die? Death by grief? By the unraveling of identity, of the mind, of meaning itself?

My western mind wondered whether wrestling with a bit of existential angst might not have made him more emotionally resilient? It seems almost an obscene question because the romantic notion of the warrior is so beautiful and pure. It’s a bit like saying that innocence should be corrupted in order to give it a better chance to survive. But it doesn’t work like that. Once you go down the path of knowledge, once you are introduced to the bogeyman, there is no turning back.

Sometimes I can almost see my own desire to survive as obscene. Me with all my contradictions, a product of fragmented cultures. A Maasai might well wonder what I have to live for. Occasionally I have done so myself. As a student I never envied the simplicity of the cultures I studied in anthropology. I saw them as prisons. And now? Well, once you go down the path of fragmentation… In other words, it's too late for me to imagine the sort of wholeness that once existed for the Maasai.

All that happened thirty years ago. So much has changed. I wonder if Safari Man still sits around a campfire with his Maasai friends.  Is there anything left on this planet, which has not had to adapt to the modern world?

From Wikipedia: 

Cold Calls

I don’t like telephones and avoid making or taking calls until absolutely necessary. But my husband is mindful and decent, answers all calls, even the 1- 800 ones. He’s been Canadian all his life, which may account for his moral diligence.

I’m talking about 8 o’clock last night. The phone rang. I could tell by the sound of my husband’s voice that the call was for me and someone was going to ask me for money. He handed me the phone with an uncharacteristically sly smile. Deal with it. I sighed my ill humour but took it.

Good evening, Miss…is it Lou-gas? Already I knew it was my Alma Mater calling. I had not honoured my last pledge, due to financial difficulties, so I braced myself for some very artful guilt-tripping. (Were you ever helped by a bursary, or scholarship, Miss Lou-gas?) Instead, the young man started to tell me all about the wonders of the Robarts Library. You must be familiar with it, Miss Lou-gas.

Well, actually I had never stepped inside it, but I felt much relieved that we were not going to dance around the subject of dishonoured pledges. I told him that I had watched the library being built when I was a graduate student. His vocal cords did a strange little bird call, not wanting to call me old, exactly, but needing to indicate that he understood what I had just revealed. And then I told him to hold on while I turned the radio down. That’s when I realized that I didn’t mind talking to strangers, especially the young – just didn’t like the abrupt surprises that come with answering the phone.

Don’t know why I had to tell him I’d been listening to a CBC account of the continued repression that was happening in Syria. Surely to impress on him that though I was old, I was still engaged with events of our times. Also, let it be said that he had a strong accent, and I guessed that he, too, was keenly interested in world events, the thrust for independence despite cruel reprisals. In fact, I think that’s what I was after— I wanted to hear a young voice express concern and consternation for what was happening on our planet. By his response I could tell that clearly someone had passed him the baton, and he had taken it. It was good to know. I liked him.

It’s odd what bonds are possible between strangers. Outside the constraints of any social boundaries, we established a sort of trust. I sensed he was far away from home, and perhaps was susceptible to a voice that carried no agenda, made no demands and told no lies.

As the older person in a discourse, one might be aware of the opportunity to impart some wisdom. I don’t remember recognizing wisdom when I was in my twenties. Practical advice, yes, such as: take care of your kidneys and wear woollies when it’s cold. Wisdom came from the strangest sources, and often went unrecognized until some specific predicament arose. Easier then to let the young man in on what the terrain looks like, way out here in his future. Hey, we’re still having fun; we’re still rocking, as amusing as that may sound. Most of all, we have great perspective on who he is, how wonderful he is simply because he is young, starting out on his long, exciting, frightening, mysterious journey. We can tell him that all young people are beautiful and that pricks along the road can be detoured. The world is large, but wherever you go, there you are! (I love that one. Thank you Jon Kabat-Zinn.) We wish them a long fruitful life, and, towards that end, before they put the phone down we can be excused for reminding them about the woollies.

 Next, of course, he had to tell me about the various services and functions that Robarts provided, and how much it cost to continue the excellence of it’s programs.

In my mind I was already calculating what sort of donation I could make to his cause. I didn’t want his efforts to go unrewarded. Maybe a smaller pledge. And then, in a flash I saw the truth of this whole situation — what he was required to do — what was to be achieved — and at whose expense.

I said to him: I know this is your job, but the person you are talking to is an artist, and artists are not doing very well under the current economic circumstances. Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to talk to corporations, or to those who are profiting?

Ah, you are an artist! His game changed instantly. He then proceeded to tell me about his own aspirations in architecture and design, &c. As for corporations, he had, in fact, approached several, and mostly they were very rude. Most often, the person at the other end simply picked up the phone and hung up.

I sympathized and told him that I could never in a hundred years do what he was doing. Cold calls. Absolutely true. But that is another story.

Now he was making different bird sounds, soft cooing ones. Then he thanked me for our conversation and wished me a good night. And that was that. He let me off the hook. No pledge. No guilt. 

                                                                     *

That phone call from a stranger reminds me of another one, so, so different, many years ago…as many as 40! I was in my early 20’s, married, reading a book in the evening with my first born daughter fast asleep in the adjacent room. My husband was working late. The phone rang, and the second I said hello, I knew there was a heavy-breather at the other end.

What are you doing? a voice asked in a hoarse whisper.

I played dumb. I’m reading a book. How does this work? I was wondering. This was something I’d read about, and I knew that I was supposed to accuse him of perversion and slam down the receiver. But I was curious to know more.

What are you wearing? he asked.

Sweater and sweatpants. Um…how does this work? What are you doing? Are you, like, looking at a centerfold or something?

The breathing normalized. Yeah. Sometimes I get so…so…you know…and I just dial a number and work it off. Or something like that.

So you just dial at random?

From the phone book. Sometimes the wrong person answers the phone but you sounded nice.

Really, I laughed. Just the way I said Hello? You sound pretty young. Are you a student or something? I sensed I was talking to someone roughly my own age, a bit younger.

Second year at U. of T. He perked up, sounded almost proud telling me this.

Really! So you must be pretty smart. What are you taking?

Mostly interested in psychology…might switch to pre-med. Don’t really know.

I took some psychology too. In fact, maybe you know my husband. He teaches—

CLICK

Later, I told a girlfriend about the call. At age twenty-four I had thought it was pretty funny, especially the speed at which he hung up.

My friend looked at me with incredulity. Of all the things she knew I had done, this was the dumbest, she said.

It was my turn to look incredulous. She was a coke-snorter, for heaven’s sake! At her parties there was always a special “powder room”. At the time I had been so naïve I hadn’t even known what it meant, and had entered in thinking to fix my lipstick! It was a strange room, full of mirrors, but no one was looking into them. Instead, several heads were bent over a table.

As for the ‘pervert’, maybe he learned a lesson. In any case, his first serious girlfriend would sort him out. Or not. Once a pervert….?  I really don’t know. Sex perverts have nowhere to go in this world. Once they’re discovered, it’s over. They are the social lepers of today. No one wants even a “safe house” near them. Has anyone thought of “pervert colonies”? I understand that in the middle ages, people with red hair were thought to be agents of the devil and, so, were cast out. They formed their own little colonies and survived the best they could. In the case of “sex perverts”, it would be interesting to see what moral codes they would work out amongst themselves. Would they calibrate the degrees of “perversion”? How many? How severe? Mother Theresa, where are you?