Two Years and Counting

I just read a notice on one of the neighborhood listservs that someone who was moving due to foreclosure was looking for a home for his dog. It was a brief message, with some links to pictures of the dog. According to economic statistics, the recession ended last summer; since then, the economy has stopped shrinking and has started to grow, but the growing is not enough to stop the world of hurt that's still going on. It would be bad enough to tell my children we were moving, but if we had to give away the dog...it would break my heart.

There is a house around the corner on Cumberland. Several years ago (before the economy crashed) the brick ranch house that use to be there was almost but not quite completely demolished and replaced by a big box of a house, with just a sliver of the old orange brick left (is there something about the building permitting process that made them do it this way?) . The new house never quite got finished, though. It never got garage doors or a proper front door and the outside of the house never got done, either. But there were people living there - we talked to them at a couple of yard sales, and Caroline bought a wooden porch swing like my grandparents used to have on their front porch that she set on milk crates and used as a bench in her room for a while.

And then, they were gone. Last winter, peculiarly, the upstairs windows were open for a long time. At some point a Pile of Stuff appeared in the front yard, the kind of Stuff that you don't sell but maybe you want it or maybe you throw it out but you never envisioned it would be all that was left when you lose your house and then you're gone. A padlock got put on the not-really-a-front-door and the tarps that covered the spaces where the garage doors should be were replaced with plywood. The house sits there, empty, and every time I walk by in wonder who they were and why they left the orange brick there when they knocked the rest of the house down and what conjunction of bad luck and recession led to the loss of the house and where they are now.

On our street, Angela is moving because her landlord is having to sell the house she has been renting. There's a For Sale sign too at the apartments at Wessyngton and Highland that suggests they can be replaced with three luxury homes, which seems to me to be highly wishful thinking. Businesses keep disappearing in the small commercial area nearby on North Highland. Some of them moved elsewhere (Caramba Cafe lost their lease), but most of them are just gone.

It's been two years since the bubble burst, the credit markets froze up, and we were on the precipice of Something Really Bad happening. The government stepped in to Save the Financial System, and I hear they are making money on Wall Street again. But in my neighborhood - my very nice neighborhood - there is a guy who is trying to find a home for his dog because he lost his house.

It just makes me want to cry.

What the House Inspector Failed to Tell Me

I don't remember who first explained to me - it might have been a visiting friend from medical school, years ago - the significance of the little plastic box, about six inches long and three-quarters of an inch wide, nailed to the doorframe of the back door. I bought this house more than 20 years ago, and the little box was there when I bought the house, and I didn't notice it for a while.

It is, of course, a mezuza, a tiny parchment scroll with verses in Hebrew from the Torah, in a protective container that holds it in place and protects it from the elements. I am thinking about this today because of a story in yesterday's New York Times, that because of turnover in occupants, mezuzas left by previous residents now are in doorways of many housing units occupied by people who are not Jewish. According to the New York Times article, "Jews leaving a home are expected to leave the mezuzas behind if they believe the next residents will also be Jewish. If not, they must take the mezuza with them, to guard against the possibility that a non-Jew might desecrate it, knowingly or not."

It would never have occurred to me to take it down, and I am glad that the previous owners of the house (who I am guessing are the people who put it there) didn't have their real estate agent ask me my religion; certainly it didn't come up when the house was inspected ("mezuza on rear doorframe"). I like having it there. It is part of the history of the house, and connects me and my family to the history of faith that is part of the history of our world.