Regular Life

(readers of Falcon go see Part 17. Those who aren’t reading it yet, get started.)

When I was a kid, I went door-to-door gathering pledges for each mile I would ride in an upcoming bike-a-thon. I did that at least twice, and invariably at least one person was a bit taken aback when I came looking for their $40. They learned then to pledge 25 cents per mile rather than a dollar.

In later years, I joined a few of my classmates visiting various neighborhoods knocking on doors to raise money. Usually the cause was band, and we were selling fruitcakes or pancake breakfast tickets.

Inevitably, we ended up amongst very expensive homes predominantly occupied by folks who had retired to Arkansas for cheaper living. We figured out pretty quickly how they could afford large homes — because they didn’t like to give away their money. Our efforts were much more fruitful in the more modestly priced subdivisions. My image of the very wealthy at that time was a bunch of stingy old crabapples who lavished themselves but wouldn’t help local kids hoping to help their school replace a few banged-up musical instruments.

Growing up, I never spent time inside the mini-mansions in our town. My father was a successful dentist, and once they got settled, neither he nor my mother cared to move to a house bigger than about 2,000 square feet. In fact, for 33 years he’s lived perfectly comfortably within the same walls that saw two boys grow up to be exceptional young men (ahem). (My mother went on a 22-year hiatus, but that’s another story.) Likewise, most of my parents’ friends, although financially comfortable, avoided domicidal opulence.

My wife and I married while still in college, and there were some very lean years. Picture a trailer park (albeit one that did not allow cars on blocks) and a couple who moonlighted as an office cleaning team, and you get an idea of how tight the money was. In 14 years, the largest home we’ve owned was about 1600 square feet, and now we’re in one barely under that number.

Through various means, my wife has met many mothers in the area, and they’ve visited each other’s homes. I’ve had the pleasure of joining her a few times, and a couple of the hosting houses would have raised the ire of the younger me, certain they belonged to stuck-up rich people who looked down on anybody from the wrong side of the tracks.

More than once now, I’ve been convinced otherwise.

Today, we attended a birthday party at a home of at least 5,000 square feet. While plenty commodious to accommodate a large family, it houses but one toddler and his parents. Each car out front sells for at least twice what we paid for that brand new mobile home from our marriage’s early days.

In my experiences around the owners — at our house, another friend’s home, and now their house, I’ve discovered something. They’re two very warm, sincere, funny people around whom I couldn’t feel more comfortable. They told us how to save money on a toy we’ve been thinking about getting for Ben.

This is just one more case of my discovering that, as much as humans may like to do it, labeling people is just plain lazy and shortsighted. It’s just as unfair and elitist for me to assume that residents of big houses are asses as it is for them to believe that all trailer park inhabitants eat mayonnaise sandwiches and draw a welfare check. I also cannot ignore that, although I like to believe I’m immune to certain human weaknesses, envy often is the catalyst for dismissive judgment.

So far, all the people I know who live in big houses got there through hard work, and still manage to be good parents. Sure, there are jerks in every exclusive neighborhood, just as there are in efficiency apartments. Would I ever want to live in a home whose electric bill is barely shy of my current mortgage payment? No. However, I want out of the business of labeling people, and I’m working on it.

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