We are conditioned to think that, to the extent we are nurtured, our personalities are formed by the important people in our lives, and I agree with this sentiment. However, I also know that pets and inanimate objects like stuffies and houses also reformat our temperaments. To be raised in Downton Abbey makes you a different person than if you were raised in the small, one bathroom house (shared by six people with varying sizes of bladders) that was my home for the first eighteen years of my life. I don’t say this to make a judgment call. Well, I do actually, but I am not going to discuss it other than to say that I might have loved my parents more had they raised me in Downton Abbey! Just kidding…
I suppose I have lived in a couple of dozen homes in my life and the memories I have of them are mostly of warmth and humour within the walls that contained the spiders, rodents, and lizards that, for a time, shared life with me.
I may be wrong about this but here is the narrative form of my thesis.
I grew up in a small resource town on the windward side of the Canadian Rockies. In many ways it was an idyllic existence because the ski hill was a few minutes from the house and when there was snow, we were skiing. In fact, school was arranged to maximize time on the ski hill.
But with ski hills comes snow - lots of it. I can remember shoveling the sidewalks every couple of hours in a snowstorm causing the snowbanks to rise over my head. I cursed every time the grader came down the street and filled in the access to the street with compacted snow that my mother could not climb over. A couple of times per year, the city fathers would haul away the snow in the alley because there was no more room to put it. My relationship with snow was love-hate. The powder was wonderful when skis were on my feet but cursed when a shovel was in my hands.
To prevent the snow from collapsing the roof of our house, my brother and I had to shovel it off a couple of times each winter. It was a full day job and took away from ski time but having a bed without a pile of snow on it was sufficient motivation to do the work. Standing on the roof, I can remember looking at our neighbour’s steel roofs devoid of snow and thinking,
“My dad must hate me because we don’t have steel roofing.”
When I was still quite young my mother realized a long-held dream and carpeting was installed over our shiplap linoleum. We all loved the warmth and comfort of this sudden rush to the 20th century. Especially our dog. At first, to protect the new purchase, he was not allowed into the carpeted room. With persistence he would generally sneak into the room and sleep at my father’s feet. Until the night of the itch.
Anyone who has had dogs knows that they sometimes suffer an overwhelmingly itchy butt and they can develop unusual methods for ameliorating that which bothers them. In the case of our dog, he sat on the carpet and dragged himself along to the rapturous relief of his nether parts. Unfortunately, he left behind a streak that was a somewhat darker brown than the beige of the beloved carpet. The silence that accompanied realization of what was going on was split by the shrieks of my mother who might easily have murdered the dog were she not so concerned about getting blood on the carpet. It was very funny.
Another job that I shared with my siblings was to do the dishes after dinner. It was always accompanied with grumbling and fighting over who was to wash and who had dried the most dishes. In the living room, my mother would suggest to Dad that he attend to the rising crescendo from the kitchen, and he would silence the house by dropping his foot off his knee with a resounding thud. This got the attention of the mice.
On one memorable occasion, the thud was missed in the cacophony of the fight and suddenly my father appeared in the kitchen. My father was a tall man, and I can remember the spectre of his appearance to this day. His face was far enough above me that his features were lost in shadows as I looked up in fear.
“Hold out your hands!” he commanded.
Our family was wedded to the ideals of primogeniture and so my brother was to go first, then my sister and then me. Watching, as twice the belt whistled through the air and hearing the smacks as it struck flesh more than unmanned me. To this day, I have no explanation for what happened next. When the momentum of the belt accelerated down towards my hands, my hands dropped to my thighs. The belt, in its unbroken descent, struck my father full force on his legs. I must have passed out because my memory is very fuzzy beyond this point.
When I left home to attend university, I was surprised to return at Christmas and find a dishwasher in the renovated kitchen and that summer that we installed a steel roof. Could not these accoutrements of the modern age have been installed early enough to make my life easier? Apparently not.
One of the first homes my wife and I owned was the apartment building we had lived in as a young couple. It was bought to condominiumize the building, sell the units separately, and live happily ever after at our beachfront, Caribbean home. It almost worked but timing is everything. For almost a decade we suffered to pay the mortgage on a building that had no tenants and no offers to purchase. (Curses on you Pierre Trudeau for creating such dire economic circumstances!) When an offer to purchase was made, it was conditioned by a demand that the apartment be painted. Fair enough.
As I stood on a ladder painting the third floor, I conversed with my sole tenant who drank beer while sunning on a lawn chair.
“Hey Roddy, why don’t you just buy your unit. It would be cheaper than renting it.”
“Murray, you may have missed the fact that you own the building and are on a ladder painting it. I, the renter, am sitting on a lawn chair and drinking beer.” Quite so…
I sued when the person who made the offer reneged and took back his down payment. He was from Toronto, and I was sure he would never come out for the court case. Imagine my surprise when he walked into the court room. The price of success just went up. The judge had called us for a pretrial conference which meant that he read the details of the case and attempted to make us settle rather than tie up court time. I will never forget his words,
“Mr. X, you committed to buying this building on the strength of your down payment which you were somehow able to get back. My suggestion is that the two of you go for coffee and come to an arrangement. Probably you should split the down payment.
Mr. Lytle, I say the same to you. You will have nothing left of the down payment when the court costs are paid, and you may or may not win. So, my advice is to settle. Having said that, (with a hard stare at my lawyer) you should also know that you have a wonderful case against your legal counsel.”
All my anxiety and privation was worth it for the look on my lawyer’s face. Every time I drive past the apartment I smile at the remembrance and easily quash any inclination to set it on fire.
We did go for coffee, and we did split the down payment. Six months later the building was sold without a hitch. A year later the buyer resold it and made $20,000. Timing is everything.
When I first visited Lima in 1994, Peru was exiting twenty years of war with a Marxist terrorist group. Graffiti covered every building… literally… every building. Garbage was piled high on boulevards and empty lots. Rats scampered everywhere and mangy dogs seemed happy to share the cornucopia with them. Patrick Symmes, in his examination of the life of Che Guevara (Chasing Che: a Motorcycle Search for the Legend of Guevara), nicknamed Lima “Scorch” and it fit remarkably well. Millions of people who had fled the mountains to escape the violence (some authorities estimate that 60,000 Peruvians were killed in the fighting) lived on the outskirts of the city in houses with dirt floors and made of bamboo mats with neither water nor power. Over the two years that I lived there things didn’t change much.
By 2003, when I returned to Lima, the city had been transformed. New shopping malls were everywhere. Homeowners had painted over the graffiti, lawns and flower gardens were planted in city parks and boulevards. New stores and sidewalk cafes were everywhere. New highways became parking lots for greater numbers of cars because everyone wanted and bought a car. The transformation, due mostly to globalization, was remarkable.
Our company rented a large house with a lovely garden near a high-end shopping district in an area called San Isidro. I lived on the second floor and the corporate office was on the main floor. My office was a small coffee shop called Capriccio which boasted the best cakes in Lima. We installed a larger hot water tank on the roof and a hammock in the garden. Life was good.
With the permission of our landlord, I hired a “gardener” to thin out the rhododendrons and palm trees to reduce the number of rats cavorting in the thatch. His work resulted in a back yard piled in three feet of cuttings. The gardener assured me that it would be gone by 8 pm as he had a friend with a truck. About 7:30 I got a phone call from a community supervisor asking me to verify that the truck owner was working for me. It turns out he was dumping the cuttings in an area reserved for the city workers. My cuttings were supposed to be taken to the dump several kilometers away. Who knew? Fortunately, we were busted on the last trip. I went to meet the young municipal worker who wanted to explain the facts of life to me and, like a man, I took his stern remonstrations to hire something other than a “Mexican” truck next time. The lack of fenders and bald tires were a giveaway apparently. When he exhausted his lesson, I offered to buy cokes for his work crew, and he refused my offer.
“No, it is not a bribe. It is hot and your guys look like they need a drink.” Nope.
Instead, I wrote a letter to the municipality and congratulated them on having such an earnest, polite and honest employee. Three weeks later a man knocked on the door of the office and asked to speak with Señor Lytle (pronounced “Leetlay”). He asked if I had written a letter of praise for his young employee, and I tentatively agreed that I had written it.
“Oh, oh… I am in trouble now,” I thought. He floored me with what came next.
“I too am an honest man, Señor. Would you be able to write a letter for me as well?”
I am pretty sure I laughed out loud and told him that when he demonstrated his honesty, I would be happy to write the letter.
We left that property when the financial crisis of 2008 destroyed our ability to finance the operations of the company. Financing was received in 2010 and the exploration property is now an operating gold mine. I, of course, was no longer involved because timing is everything.
When I returned to Peru in 2012, the house had been torn down and a seven-story apartment building now occupies the lot. It is too bad.
We have lived in many other homes. We started our marriage in a fifty-foot mobile home and once rented a 12th floor apartment big enough for our kids to race their bicycles. One year we moved four times in eleven months and owned three of the houses we lived in. Whether for months or years, each home has its particular memories and idiosyncratic impacts on my character.
Be they ever so humble, there are no places like homes.
Murray - it's too bad that the office in San Issidro was torn down! What a great place! I enjoyed spending time there when I wasn't up at Igor - helping to start up the mine. Those were glorious - adventurous days! Here is to Peru! A land of fascinating geology - and fascinating women (at least for me - I married one of them!). Well Amigo - keep up the good work! - Randy Henkle