Baņuta:
And they lived happily ever after.
The mouldy pumpkin granted their wish and a prospect appeared. An enchanted Family was leaving their gingerbread house with a brand new kitchen, and the news spread through the alleys of Facebook and the greedy kingdom. It was on Vaughan near St Clair which all the elves said was the new College Street.
And Alan and Baņuta went to the house twice, and measured it with a strong steel tape, and they saw that it was good even though the rent was as tall as the trees.
The landlord was the best in all the realm and his name was Brett. And Brett said he would call on Monday or maybe Tuesday but when by Wednesday Brett hadn’t called, they could hear the sleigh bells ringing, ding-a-doom, ding-a-ding-a-doom.
And so the happy ending was not be. Baņuta flew on a broomstick to a faraway country with cheaper rents, otherwise known as Portugal.
…And the rest is Alan’s story and today I walked past a house Hans Christian Andersen lived in and thought about fairy tales and how sad and scary they can be and what makes a city not rapacious.
Alan: It’s been a while eh? I know that because I ran into a few people on the weekend, who told me they read our blog, pointed out that we hadn’t had an entry for a while and asked if that was because found a place. As if we wouldn’t tell you we’d found a place. I told them maybe we had because that’s what I thought.
The people who asked that day were at my high school reunion. I won’t say how many years it had been except to say I don’t think I’ve ever heard of one with a higher number. If we have another one in ten years… make your own joke, I’m not going to encourage your ageism, unless of course I can think of a good joke and I can’t, though I am reminded of the old joke where the guy goes to his old friend’s funeral and when it ends and everyone is vacating the place, he says he can’t bother leaving, he’s just going to be back there again soon.
It was probably only four or five people that told me they read the blog but I was surprised it was that many. Most people there, if you mention Facebook make one of those faces and say words like “farkukte” or “mishegoss”. Or maybe I’m thinking of my parents. But a lot of the people I went to school with remind me of my parents.
So on the one hand it was kind of nice to have my old high school friends tell me they read the blog and ask how the search is going. On the other hand, I’m kind of tired of people asking if we’ve found a place. Not that I blame them. It shows concern, I get it. But this has been going on too long don’t you think?
I was talking to this guy I have known since public school, someone I would not have recognized had he not been wearing a nametag. And he asked me where I lived and I told him, and he said “oh that’s a nice neighborhood”. For some reason I didn’t want to give him the incorrect impression that I owned a home in this pretty ritzy area so I quickly told him that we rented and that we wouldn’t be here long because we were looking for a place.
He told me that he builds condos and that at this moment he was building five of them at Yonge and Eglinton.
“Oh” I said, “that’s great”. Because it was too early in the reunion to stab him in the heart yelling “Die land speculator!”
We’ve seen about four places since we last blogged but I can’t even bother trying to remember them. Except for one. One of our kind readers sent me an announcement from Facebook, in which somebody said essentially “We live in this nice place. We are moving. It’s not till February. But we thought we’d offer it now before it goes on the market later in the year”.
I didn’t think about the fact that, as tenants, they didn’t really have the right to rent it. I just went there. It was on Vaughn Road, a ten minute walk from St. Clair. I could talk about the area and the parks and the ravines and how it’s so close to where I grew up and where I used to toboggan and how my sister lives nearby and how my daughter was planning to go for regular walks with her aunt, but it’s just too painful to expound on any of that right now.
I went there and I liked it right away. Banuta went to see it. She texted “I love the place”. That was great to hear.
We went back and ended up deciding that though it was a little smaller than we wanted, it was a place we could imagine living – boy could we imagine it - so we asked the tenant could he talk to the landlord and tell him about us. Which he was glad to do.
Just to fill in the context, the present tenant was on the case because he and his wife (and four young children) had bought a house in the area and they were due to take possession before their lease was up. That’s why they were pre-emptively looking for a new tenant.
We’ve seen a lot of places. We’ve been interested in three or four. And the thing that they all have in common is not so much size or price but more the feeling that we could see ourselves there. What my parents would have called “haymishe”. I guess this is the entry where I reference Yiddish words. You can thank my reunion for that. I’m almost never in a room full of tribespeople.
So we waited to hear from the landlord. That was about ten days ago. In the meantime, Banuta flew to Portugal to have a vacation with her kids. And I stayed here to take the call from the landlord and negotiate the price.
He called tonight and dashed my hopes. And I’m feeling kind of empty right now. I’ve been having fun in the last few days going through my records and doing a “major purge” as I call it, trying to get rid of a third of them, which I wouldn’t have had to do if we got the house on Vaughn by the way. I just think it’s time to downsize. But the distraction of records is not working at the moment.
I realize that without thinking about it, in the long wait to hear from the landlord, I had done a lot of imagining. I imagined us in the nice kitchen, I imagined us in the backyard, I imagined us in the livingroom or in the back sun room or in the basement which would have accommodated my office and records, I’ve imagined Banuta making her sunny front room into a good room to write in, and I’ve imagined walking through the ravine to the subway, taking my daughter to school, hanging out on St Clair which somebody told me was “the new College Street”.
I imagined us in our new home.
But that will have to wait till we find one. And so we have to get back on the fucking horse. The one good thing about the waiting was that we didn’t go see any places for a while. But we’re back baby.
I guess I left a piece out. We had heard from the tenant that the landlord was raising the rent. I thought that if he called and we ended up not taking it, it would be because I couldn’t negotiate him to a reasonable price. As it turned out, he did want more than we hoped to pay. But that wasn’t the kicker.
We would have taken it.
The reason he hadn’t called in the last week was because he and his wife had been thinking about moving in themselves. He was calling because they had decided against moving in. But he thought that might be only temporary. He thought they still might move in. Or maybe he thinks it’s likely. I didn’t really understand the reason but apparently it has something to do with all the construction where he lives now.
He would give us a one year lease but after that it would be month to month.
Any landlord might decide at any time they’re moving in or selling the place, or whatever our present landlord is planning to do after they get us out of here. But I’m not going to move in someplace knowing it’s probably going to end soon.
It’s hard to feel at home when you expect every phone call from the landlord will be an eviction notice.
We can’t go through all this again a year from now. And you won’t want to read another six months of blog posts. So in deference to your tolerance for reading our sob stories I told him “no thanks” and tried to stop imagining myself living there. I figure I’ll still be imagining involuntarily for a day or so but by the time you read this I figure I’ll have stopped having ravine dreams.
Hug to you both.