It looks as if the Emperor and I are going to be homeowners. Everybody involved in this undertaking did their jobs (including me) and in May, we'll have a new place to live that is our own. I am remarkably calm about it -- I'm now $135K in debt for thirty years. That said, the monthly mortgage payments (plus all the other stuff) will still be significantly less than what we're paying for rent, so if we're smart we'll be all right. I fully intend to be smart.
Our closing date is May 19, to allow the person who owns it now to use vacation time to move.
We enjoyed our little jaunt to the big city last week, but in the end we didn't really do a lot of shopping and instead, just did what we had to and came straight home.
Last week I received a letter from Don, who I've been friends with for many years. I met him through Troubled Soul, and over time we both got to know my friend Jeannie (who passed away a few years go -- the one for whom I make the Day of the Dead offrenda). Don's chatty letters are usually about Indian beadwork projects he's working on, or what his kids are up to (both in college), but in the latest one, he mentioned Troubled Soul for the first time ever. We just don't talk about him. At any rate, he wanted me to know that Troubled Soul's father had passed away about two weeks before.
Without delving into The Whole Thing, I will say that I was sorry to hear that, mostly because I really liked Soul's mother, and she was utterly devoted to her husband. They had the kind of loving relationship that most people only dream of, and I know losing Mr. B must have devastated her, although I gather that her husband's passing was at the end of a long illness. They had been married just short of fifty-nine years. Don's letter led me to look up Mr. B's obituary online, and that was a trip down a rabbit hole that I was not expecting to make. Instead of posting a simple obituary, the family had put up a huge album of family photographs, going back to Mr. B's childhood. I knew he'd grown up in rural Texas during the Depression, and here were the pictures to go with it -- you could feel the heat and the dust. The young man in the Navy, the girl he took to her senior prom and then married a few weeks later, the burgeoning family (they had five children), Little League coaching... vintage car collecting... I knew all of the stories. I also learned that those five kids pumped out a mass of grandchildren and at least one great-grandchild.
Intellectually, I know that time doesn't stand still, but when you don't lay eyes on someone for thirty years, the changes made by time can be shocking. Again, without delving into The Whole Thing, the pictures jolted me. I had known Soul's sisters really well -- even attended their weddings -- but I hardly recognized them. The oldest had been arrogant and vain, and had a tenuous relationship with telling the truth (not going there, not going there!); time has not been kind to her. She was so fat as to be unrecognizable. To be honest, I'm not sure I'd recognize either of the other two, either, but they had not changed as much as their sister had. And Troubled Soul -- well, let's just say that karma doesn't just bite, it kicks ass. As a young man, Soul badgered me and hounded me about my weight, my clothes, my wild curly hair -- to the point that I had started to fall into anorexia and depression. (Let me just add here for the record that I was young and stupid and just as culpable in my own down-dragging. But as a troubled soul, he did it on purpose, and that's what I had a hard time getting beyond all those years ago.) But back to the story -- Troubled Soul is a massive pyramid of flesh, going bald, has terrible patchy graying facial hair (a neckbeard!), and displays execrable taste in clothing. He's unmarried and will remain so, because he's a closeted gay man (I figured that out thirty years ago, too). In every single picture, he radiates unhappiness. I take no joy from that.
Again, I'm really sorry for Mrs. B, who is an absolute saint. If I knew where to send it, I'd send her a card. However, I have derived a good measure of satisfaction knowing how much Soul and his sister have changed over the years, and if I met them on the street I would not shrink back in shame at my own giant arse. This, dear readers, is a big deal for me, and I feel like I've finished business that's been unfinished for a long, long time. I have put a period on a sentence, and closed a book.
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