Day Fourteen: Your Living Area
Nairn, Dovercourt, Indian Grove, High Park Ave, Woodfield, Coady, St Clarens, Benson, Earl Grey
Baņuta: I am pretty busy these days. Day after day I lure young people into making theatre. Night after night I pursue some unlikely and time-absorbing notion. I hate wasting my time looking at places I know we won’t take. Like I said, I’m busy. Nevertheless, I’ve launched a psychological experiment. It’s worth every minute and is of vital importance.
I’ve always wondered whether people can change. So have many others: preachers, advertisers, Marxists, cats. Anyone in a partnership has surely, at least once in their life, wished their lovely friend would change something. Alan wants me to stop telling him how to drive. Good luck with that. I want Alan to put the lids back on things. I figure I should start small. I’m focusing on the butter dish. First I asked nicely. Now I’m leaving notes. Next I’ll find some other passive-aggressive tactic. I think if the butter dish was always covered, my hope in the future would be restored. I could trust that even the most intransigent of people can change.
Alan did most of the legwork this week, but it’s not as if I let him down completely. All three of us went to see a house on the fragrantly named Earl Grey Avenue. Keely was sick that day and had made herself a schedule of things she would do: 3pm practice piano, back to iPad at 3.15. Something like that. She tried to schedule the exact time of our disappointment and was off only by a few minutes: 6:49 pm.
One day I got a hot tip from a friend and literally catapulted from my desk to drive as fast as I could to a house across from Wychwood Barns. Location was great; place was too small, though it had huge white wooden shutters. I felt like Cinderella’s ugly sisters, both of them: the slipper never fits. I dropped in on the hot tip friend to complain and she gave me a good kick in the pants with a reality check. She’s looking to house a family of refugees with four children. They’re living in a basement in Toronto; on a sea of beds, air mattresses, couches.
There but for the grace of a decent landlord— and so I spin into the familiar inner argument. Everything is unaffordable - we should live within our means. Given the rents, to live within those means, I’ll have to leave Toronto. Which would mean leaving Alan. And even if that was okay, where would I go? As my son once said, everywhere is bad.
It is important to stay positive. Things can suddenly improve, right? Dish, meet lid. Dish, meet lid. Dish, meet lid.
Alan: I think I saw seven or eight places in the last few days. And I was pretty disheartened at the end of them. And it’s not that what I’ve seen has all been so bad but when it doesn’t really work for you AND it’s way more than you want to spend AND it’s in a part of the city where you’d prefer not to live, then you kind of go nuts making deals with yourself.
I’ll only describe a few of the places, like the first one on Nairn around St Clair and Lansdowne, which was probably the best place I saw. The living room was kind of squeezed into the dining room which was beside the kitchen. I didn’t think I would be particularly comfortable having all the rooms squeezed into one space like that. But it could have worked I suppose.
One of the ways we might have organized the rooms would have had my daughter and I sleeping on different floors, but she vetoed that idea. You might find her reasoning interesting. “What if I try to call you —‘Daddy I’m vomiting!’ — you won’t hear me if we’re on different floors.”
This living and dining room combination on Nairn kind of set the tone for the other places. I left confused and unsure but when I described it to Baņuta, she wanted to see it so I called the agent but never heard back from him.
The next one I went to was on Dovercourt. The owner was there and there were a couple of people renovating. It was described as a three bedroom on the second and third floor, but when I got to the second floor, there were two locked doors. Which one was ours?
That was my first clue.
I figured it out and went in to find a decent sized kitchen. But that was it, nothing more. And in that moment, I realized what the two doors were about. Behind the second door was the rest of the floor, walled off from the kitchen in order to create another apartment and another income stream.
The owner sticks his head down the staircase and with a sweep of his hand, intones the following words: “This is your living area.”
There should have been a musical cue to accompany that line.
He wasn’t saying “Oops I’m sorry you don’t have a living room or dining room” but more like “hey look how we’ve achieved this miracle of space saving by combining your potential kitchen, dining room and living room into one brilliantly named living area.”
I’m not sure anything more perfectly encapsulates our position at this moment. We are leaving a place where we get to do our living – as opposed to our sleeping – in a kitchen and a dining room and a living room. And we are moving towards a future where we may have to do all our living in the kitchen.
And here let me state the obvious, which is that lots of people have it much worse than us, but we are moving a little closer to them. In this owner’s vision, we make our food, eat it in a breakfast nook, watch shit on our laptops and then send ourselves to our rooms for the evening.
On the third floor there were three rooms, with interesting nooks and slanting ceilings and while I was looking at them the owner says, “You could make one of these rooms your living area.” And again when he says this, he’s not saying “Maybe you’ll need to use one of these rooms up here as a living room” but instead it’s more like “The cool thing about this place is how flexible it is. You could skip having three bedrooms but have two bedrooms instead.” This guy missed his calling as a spin doctor .
So I answer him “Yeah that’s because this is really a two bedroom apartment.”And he answers right back: “There are different opinions about that.”
I told him I didn’t think there were that many different opinions and left. Another second and he might have invoked another great bullshitter to tell me, “A lot of people are saying this is a three bedroom apartment.”
Later in the car, I kick myself for not telling him where he could shove his fucking living area.
Baņuta and I went out together on Sunday morning. We had four places to see that day, three in the East end. It was a lovely day and the first place in Leslieville was on a very lovely street but it was too small. The second place was also in Leslieville and was a bit nicer but it didn’t work for us either. The third place was in the so-called Pocket, where my brother has lived for decades. It's a great neighborhood and the house was in a nice location but the owners forgot we were coming so we couldn’t get in and dragged ourselves back to the west end to see the fourth scheduled place.
I had so much hope for this place. It was the first home we saw that was under $3000, it was firmly in the West End, and it was on Facebook Marketplace so I thought maybe it had slipped through the cracks and this was the place we had waited for. I worked hard to get to see it even though repeated requests had been ignored. When I first saw the ad more than a week ago Baņuta thought it was too good to be true. Guess who was right.
The price became instantly less reasonable when I realized they weren’t renting the whole house as the ad had implied. The disappointment arc was so quick that by the time we viewed the third floor, we were able to joke about the staircase which was almost comically steep and way worse on the way down than the way up. If I slept up there then at least a couple of times a night, I’d have to wrestle with the choice of falling down the stairs, peeing in a bucket or an even worse solution.
I deal with stress differently than my lovely girlfriend. I wake up in the middle of the night with a chest pain, which I know is not a heart attack because every time I mention it to my doctor, I get sent to some other heart test even while I’m telling them it’s my ribs not my heart and that’s where I keep my stress.
Sometimes though it hurts a bit more than I expect and I admit I have a moment of doubt.
I don’t want to move. I don’t want to pay more. I don’t want any of this. I want to keep living in my living area and I would really like to keep living in the area of the city where I feel at home. I want to stress about all the other things I’m dealing with these days and not have to deal with this extra straw that isn’t breaking my back but makes my ribs ache at 4 a.m.
That’s what I want.
Baņuta wants me to remember to put the cover on the butter dish.
This all reminds me of an expression which I first heard on a record by P.W. Long from the band Mule.
“You can wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one gets filled first”.
Maybe you’ve heard that and like me, loved the poetry but didn’t quite get the meaning. Well, today’s your lucky day. Less poetically it’s telling us that we will get all the shit we don’t want before we get the things that we wished for.
I’m not going to get my wish to stay where we are or to find what we have somewhere else. But in the new place, when I spend the day confined to the kitchen table and my narrow new living area, my eyes may eventually happen on the butter dish and then who knows.