Floored

Trying to force himself to remember a moment from his childhood, Tommy Fawkes squints at Katie Parker.

"I had a little red car..."

"Yes," Katie says, in her charming, French accent as she smiles in the slightest sympathy at Tommy, "and you drove it into everything!"

"Funny Bones" is my favorite (non-Wes Anderson) movie, because it is as funny as it is painful as it is charming as it is dark as it is passionate as it is flawed.  It's everything life is-- or should be.  And I knew, when I first saw it, almost half my life ago, that I wouldn't see a film that touched me the way this one did, that filled me with fun and hope and despair like this one did.

And I haven't.  But I still go to the movies when I can anyway.

I still go to my parents' house when I can anyway, too, although, with twins, it's hard to go pretty much anywhere.  "Oh, yeah," parents of one muse gently, "I guess it would be harder with two..."

Yeah.  Only twice as hard there, duck-shoes.

I went to my parents' house yesterday because they'd just gotten new flooring put in, throughout the entire first floor.

"It's beautiful," my mother said on the phone earlier in the week, "there's shades of green and purple and it looks just like stone-- it's going to feel like we're eating outside on some patio."

My father, speaking to me on the phone later in the week, had something slightly different to say.

"It's fuckin' floor-- I put my fuckin' feet on it and walk around-- what?  I'm supposed to care about it or something?!  Who gives a shit?!"

My nearly three-year-old nephew, a clear moderate, said, "I like this floor" as he ran his fingers over it when I came by yesterday to see it.

I mean, it's sheet linoleum made to look like stone.  They did a good job with it, it almost looks like real grouting in between the large square "tiles", but it's all one flat sheet of linoleum.  It's ugly.  Unless the people who buy my parents' home when they die are in their seventies already, the floor will be the first thing they'll replace when they move in.  Sure, it's nicer than the linoleum it replaced, but it's still ass-ugly.

If I'm honest with myself-- and, by turn, with you-- it's not so much that I don't like the floor, it's that I'm always kind of insulted when a change is made to the home in which I was raised.  I remember being ten or eleven and putting up quite a protest when the time came to replace the sofa and chairs in the living room, which, admittedly, looked as if they'd been through a hurricane and a pogrom.

"They're FINE!" I'd insist, "and so COMFORTABLE!" as I'd do a head-first dive into the warped sofa cushions that had virtually no filling left in them.  The next thing on their agenda, after the floor is finished, is to replace all the carpeting in the living room, and the staircase, and, of course, all the furniture in the living room.

Again.

Every time I go there, it seems, it's less and less, um, mine.

Not that it ever was mine-- it's not-- and not like I have any right to it, because they offered to will the fucking house to me and I said no, but it's mine in memory.  And the memories are still there, but the reality is changing.  It would be easier if some random family were living in there now, gutting it, making additions and deletions, trashing it and rebuilding it to greater glory.  But that my parents are there doing it themselves, it's like they're trying to erase the past we'd all built together that, in my head at least, was so happy.  Most of the time.

That old, peeling, yellowed, disgusting linoleum floor was mine.  And I had a little red car.  And I drove it into everything.

This Old House...

...can suck my dick.

When my wife were young and stupid, and childless, and when she wasn't my wife, we'd go traipsing around quaint neighborhoods and looked at lots of charming old houses, because that's what we liked.

In the end, we bought a house that was more old than it was charming. We made it charming inside, by painting its walls all kinds of fucked up circus colors, and by adding our tchotchkies and our touches and our random piles of shit.

We have such charming random piles of shit.

1928 was a long time ago. It was before the stock market crash. It was before color television and before women going to work and women going to war. 1928 was before the "Wizard of Oz"-- that's how long ago 1928 was. Do you believe there was a time before that movie?

Our house was built in 1928 and, thus, it is eighty-four years old. When you're young and stupid, the idea of living inside a thing built before your parents were built doesn't seem absurd at all. Having lived in this house for some time, it does now. Noam Chomsky is eighty-four years old, and I wouldn't want to live inside him. I can't stand the fucking guy. Shirley Temple, I just learned, was also born in 1928. Somehow, living inside her sounds better, but only marginally.

At first, the old home was fun-- it gave us things to do. Old lady wallpaper? Let's strip it and paint! Nasty linoleum floor the color of a three-year-old's vomit? Let's rip the bejesus out of the floor and replace it! Old windows-- caked in decades and decades of lead paint? Let's....

FUCKING SHOOT OURSELVES!

See, 'cuz window replacement people don't like dealing with lead paint. And a new law was passed recently that says that they don't have to-- that the onus is on the homeowner to get an environmental hazard specialist into the home to either remove or encapsulate all the lead paint and provide the window people with a certificate of non-PB-ness before they can proceed with the work.

Can you say:

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

Because, with two month-old children bleating their tiny genitals off in the next room, I sure as Christ can't!

These days, it seems that everywhere I look in this old house of ours there is something to be replaced, fixed, updated, re-done, dealt with. The windows are the obvious priority. Last year, before this fucking regulation was passed, we replaced half the windows in the house. The downstairs, mostly new windows, is toasty warm. Our bedroom and the rest of the upstairs, mostly old windows, is like living inside Shirley Temple's Kelvinator. After two horrifying nights spent shivering in our bedroom with the twins, we moved "OPERATION NEW LIFE" downstairs. The twins sleep in a pack-n-play in the dining room, the parents sleep on the sofa in the living room.

That's right, we're crashing on the couch in our own goddamn house, and we have been for over a month. And we will continue to do so until the windows are all replaced.

There's water damage on the wall in the nursery. There's water damage in the wall in the 1st floor bathroom. The roof's probably falling in because it was clearly installed by a guy with a sixth grade education. When you're feeding and changing and clothing and burping and wiping two little children, projects are no longer fun, old houses are no longer charming. You finally get why young couples buy pristine, 4.5-year-old homes in developments where the biggest dilemma they have is choosing the white, the off-white, the bone, or the creme one.

I get it now.

You win.

I can't take it anymore.

If I have to spend another month on this sofa, it's not going to be pretty.

Don't get me wrong, I love this house. We're not going to go live in a gated community because we've got "a few holes in the floor, the odd door missing" (to quote Basil Fawlty), but you can love something that makes absolutely no sense. It's nice to know that, even though we went and got married and had kids and got a mortgage and two dogs and two cars and some more gray hairs, that I'm still basically just as fucking stupid as I was before.

I was worried there for a second-- weren't you?