On our way to Ogdensburg, New York, we made a pit stop along I-81 in Adams Center, NY. There we left mom at a Dunkin Donuts to spend a few hours on a webinar. (Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do.) After a quick review of the map, we (my son and I) directed our car along S. Harbor Road toward Lake Ontario. Who can resist the draw of a Great Lake?
On the map we saw a lighthouse. We traveled the roads through farmland to find it. Disappointingly, when we got there we discovered that the lighthouse is a private residence. We had hoped to walk the grounds and see the lake from there.
Plan B: we drove north on Rt. 3 along the lake. This brought us to Westcott Beach State Park where we were very happy to find many stones and calm water on which to skip them. I have a pretty good skipping technique, probably average like most guys. But to my young son, I am a master skipper. I’ll take it.
Westcott Beach State Park
It was a beautiful blue sky day. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t windy. It was a good day to be outside in the sun. The break from driving was highly enjoyable.
Afterward, we picked up mom and headed north toward Canada. Like I said, our destination was Ogdensburg. Our purpose in making the trip was to see the total solar eclipse the next day.
What should I tell you about it? Should I give you the plain story about how we went about buying a house? Or should I get philosophical about how I once owned a home many years ago and thought I’d never own one again due to multiple adversarial life circumstances? Let me tell you a little about both.
Setting the Financial Stage
First, let me set the financial stage. Four years ago, my wife and I decided to get out of debt. We followed Dave Ramsey’s Baby Steps after hearing him on the radio and taking his Financial Peace University course. We paid off a significant amount of debt over 19 months. It was an amazing feeling to make the last payment and be debt free! No more car payments. No more student loan payments. No more credit card payments. We were (and still are) debt free! Over the following two years, we saved up a three-month emergency fund and enough money for a down payment on a house.
Looking
Our next step was to look for a house. Since we were very fond of Dave Ramsey and his instruction, we found Gordon Crawford through Ramsey’s Endorsed Local Providers. Gordon was wonderful! He took his time in showing us houses and pointing out important features and flaws in homes which we would not have thought to look for. Gordon was so good natured. He will be remembered in our home as the guy who first introduced our toddler to Fruit by the Foot.
Fruit by the Foot – Pure Amazement to a Toddler
We began looking for a home in July. We quickly realized there was steep demand for homes due to people flocking out of New York City into the suburbs. Here’s an example from a New York Times article dated August 30, 2020:
Over three days in late July, a three-bedroom house in East Orange, N.J., was listed for sale for $285,000, had 97 showings, received 24 offers and went under contract for 21 percent over that price.
Trust me, East Orange is not a town in New Jersey where people would normally rush to spend $285,000 on a house. But it’s an indication of the level of demand for houses at the same time we began our search.
We found a house we really liked on a Friday evening of torrential downpour when there was some miscommunication between the listing agent and the seller, who had no idea potential buyers would be washing up on his porch. He was kind enough to let us see part of the house. We had to wait a few days for the open house to come back and see the rest. That was a sunny day and we liked all that we saw. We made an offer quickly to get ahead of the New Yorkers.
Oh, the Drama!
Despite that sunny day, there ended up being quite a bit of drama in order to get to closing. I don’t feel like writing about the gory details. It went on for three months. At one point we walked away from the deal. Even after the deal was re-initiated, we found ourselves wishing we stayed out because of further drama. But ultimately we closed and the house was ours.
Now let me get to the philosophical part.
I owned a home at one other time long ago. I once wrote about that home. As I said there, that time of my life “feels like a tale from someone else’s life, or a portion of an old book that I vaguely remember.” That was 25 years ago. That’s almost half my life ago. Think of how much a guy experiences in half his life, all the downpours, all the waves that wash over him, and the many currents that carry him through depths and breadths in life’s ocean, until he reaches the balmy shores of his new home.
BOOYAH!
Well, isn’t that some sappy philosophical flotsam and jetsam that just washed up into your browser! The truth of the matter is that I’m now a guy that has a mortgage payment who has to fix anything that breaks around here because I ain’t got no landlord to do it for me. But the shiny side of that coin is, in addition to being free from debt, I am free from the obligation of paying another man’s mortgage to live in a house he owns while I have no real equity to my name. BOOYAH!
Unicorns are REAL! They talked to us and told us many wondrous things that I’m not allowed to reveal.
My wife and I ran the George Washington Bridge Challenge 10K today. How often does anyone get the chance to run on one of the busiest bridges in the country? (One time per year, as far as I know.) That’s what made this race so appealing.
The race started in Fort Lee on the New Jersey side of the Hudson. We took a ramp up onto the bridge. Then we ran out and back over the bridge twice. Coming off the bridge we ran along Main Street in Fort Lee and then down Henry Hudson Drive to the Ross Dock Picnic Area to finish. The majority of the race was on the flat bridge and then downhill after that, hardly any uphill. A nice run!
Considering I had only run twice in the past two months, including this race, I was pleased with how my running felt and the fact that I finished in 1 hour, 7 minutes. I struggled now and then, walked when I felt like it. I went into the race with the idea of simply running according to how I felt and not worrying about my time or pace. I didn’t worry about comparing myself to anyone else. I just chugged along and enjoyed the scenery and the satisfying feeling of moving my feet. I was actually surprised that my time was as good as it turned out!
Here are some photos:
Getting startedEntering the lower level of the GWBLooking toward ManhattanOverlooking Palisades Park in New Jersey. If you look real close you can see the yellow arch at the finish line.On the GWBUnder the GWBFinishing upMany thanks to our friend, Zach, for the cool signs and for tending to our child!
Near the end of E. B. White’s essay, “Here is New York,” published in 1949, there are these prophetic paragraphs:
The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
All dwellers of cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer might loose the lightning, New York must hold steady, irresistible charm.
It used to be the Statue of Liberty was the signpost that proclaimed New York and translated it for all the world. Today Liberty shares the role with Death. Along the East River, from the razed slaughterhouses of Turtle Bay, as though in a race with the spectral flight of planes, men are carving out the permanent headquarters of the United Nations – the greatest housing project of them all. In it’s stride, New York takes on one more interior city, to shelter, this time, all governments, and to clear the slum called war. New York is not a capital city – it is not a national capital or a state capital. But it is by way of becoming the capital of the world. The buildings, as conceived by architects, will be cigar boxes set on end. Traffic will flow in a new tunnel under First Avenue. Forty-seventh Street will be widened (and if my guess is any good, trucks will appear late at night to plant tall trees surreptitiously, their roots to mingle with the intestines of the town). Once again the city will absorb, almost without showing any sign of it, a congress of visitors. It has already shown itself capable of stashing away the United Nations – a great many of the delegates have been around town during the past couple of years, and the citizenry has hardly caught a glimpse of their coattails or their black Homburgs.
This race – this race between the destroying planes and the struggling Parliament of Man – it sticks in all our heads. The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people an all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.
A block or two west of the new City of Man in Turtle Bay there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolizes the city: life under difficulties, growth against the odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: “This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree.” If it were to go, all would go – this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death
Dear E. B., just over 50 years later, the “perverted dreamers” with just two planes appeared to be winning the race of which you wrote. The “struggling Parliament of Man,” to many of us, has not lived up to the expectations which you and others held for it at the time its home was being planted in Turtle Bay. The “spectral flight of planes” has taken on corpreal horror for New Yorkers, for those of us who love New York, for Americans, and for civilized people the world over. There does not appear to be a way by which to “clear the slum called war.”
