Getting personal

You’ll forgive me, Bush, if I’m a bit preoccupied today with personal matters. I know there are big things out there to get worried about: I think of the Newsweek story that caused riots in Afganistan, the “nuclear option” that your Frist is threatening, your Rice’s surprise visit to Iraq, the Bolton nomination, and so oo. But all I’m thinking about today is the house that Ellie and I saw last week—and the offer we’re about to make on it tomorrow. We meet with our real estate advisors tonight to draft it out. And tomorrow, an hour before we make the offer, there’s another house we need to take a look at….

We’ve been thinking about downsizing for some time now. We have acted on that impulse in some ways already. A single example: I traded in my prized Jaguar for a Toyota Prius, and have been delighted with the change. I have been busy preaching that it's time for us each to think about somehow occupying less space on the planet, and demanding less from its resources, so I feel the need to practice a little more of what I preach. We have been living in our big old house at the east end of the Hollywood Hills for more than thirty years now: we bought it in 1972, remodeled in the early 1980s, and filled it with all the passions of our lives. We brought up our daughter there, so it contains not only all the material things we have accumulated in all those years, but also incalculable layers of memory: earthquakes, both literal and emotional, Bush. You know what I mean. It’s not only a beautiful house—and it is that: it’s also, more importantly, a beautiful home.

But it's undeniably too big for us at this moment in our lives. We rattle around inside it, and long for something a bit more smaller, a bit more intimate, a bit more accomodating to the age we have now reached and to our current needs. We’re looking, too, for change. The house feels encrusted with years’ worth of life’s accumulations. It has started to feel a bit stale, a bit musty. We need a breath of new air. The house itself needs a breath of new air, a new lease on life, with new people, perhaps a new family…

So here we stand, excited, at the brink of a whole new way of living. The house we’re looking at is only a couple of blocks from where we have lived for all these years, but offers a different view, a different perspective on the city, a different angle of vision from a different part of the hill. It’s smaller, more compact, easier to maintain, more intimate. It’s also—an important consideration for us—in move-in condition, beautifully remodeled and updated. There are a few improvements we COULD make, for our own purposes; but none we actually NEED to make. We WOULD need to take a careful look at everything we own, and make some serious decisions about what we love so much that we couldn’t part with, what we could not live without, and what we could part with, no matter how important they might have seemed, and how painful it might be to let them go. That’s a part of the downsizing we have been thinking about: disencumbering ourselves of a lot of the stuff we don’t actually need to clutter our lives with.

It’s all a huge challenge. Enough of a challenge just to think about. I can scarcely yet imagine what a challenge it will turn out to be, to move out of a home of thirty-plus years—and a challenge that is not only physical, but emotional. There will surely be a lot of wrenching pain involved. And yet… in my experience, change is ALWAYS for the good, no matter how radical. I’m hoping that we’ll be able to work this out, and looking forward to having to sacrifice the daily comforts and expectations of my life, and building it anew.

Thanks for listening to all this personal stuff, Bush. We’ll get back to your problems soon enough, I’m sure.