The Perfect Home

I have a thing about perfect homes.  Inside, outside. Rentals, condos. Minimalist Levittown-style capes, pseudo-palatial McMansions. It doesn’t matter. They just annoy me.

OK – that sounds perfectly un-reasonable.  And even a little nuts.  Maybe so.  But they still annoy me.

Maybe because the Boston I grew up in was a bit shabby, before the Route 128 high tech “miracle” pumped seemingly unlimited money and growth into the city’s neighborhoods, universities and suburbs.  Maybe because my busy voice coach mother – who DID love perfect homes – made me dust the perfectly clean apartment every morning before I left for school.  And nagged me constantly to clean up my typically teen-messy room where only I knew where to find everything.  My mother was the type who cleaned the apartment just before the cleaning lady arrived.  Fortunately I didn’t inherit that gene.

My own house -- the one I live in with my husband --  is what the perfection-focused HGTV would kindly call “cluttered”. There is cat hair occasionally on the cushions. Plants, paintings, photos, computers, iGadgets, books, video tapes of every format and the players to go with them, vinyl LP’s and folders for every story I ever covered vie for space. 

We (or at least I) like to think the result is “eclectic”.

Our current landscaping is – to put it succinctly – nonexistent.  But the annuals and perennials and bushes and grass -- and the pots my husband fills each spring with impatiens -- somehow blend into the rocks and trees which occupy most of our land in a way which says “welcome friend”.  It’s a place which looks like people live there. Comfortably. 

Which is, perhaps, another way of saying it would qualify for an HGTV makeover.

When I walk or run around my gym’s neighborhood of small, 50’s era houses – many expanded over the years – I think of all the young families which once or currently live there. Starter homes we used to say. Typically the owners are stretching to make the mortgage payments. So how do they afford the landscapers on riding mowers I see manicuring the tiny lawns?  And why?  I could mow those lawns myself in 10 minutes with an old fashioned, unpowered mower.

I guess it’s that perfect house syndrome again. Even handyman specials are perfect on HGTV. And as we walk or drive through our towns we all see the same perfect, estate-sized McMansions built out to the property lines. We watch as each leaf which falls this time of year is swiftly blown away by a small army of men with leaf blowers. The flowers never droop from lack of water and never wither publically because their heads are professionally snapped off at the first sign of brown.

Remember what Albert Einstein once said? “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”  He of course was talking about creativity. And so am I.  I’m talking about the overall environment needed to think big thoughts.  Or as Tinkerbell would have put it – lovely thoughts.  The ones which allow you to fly.

A house is not a home until it’s lived in.  Until there are piles of real print magazines from a nearly forgotten era sitting, nearly forgotten, on the floor. Until someone puts his feet up on the slightly scratched coffee table and gently transfers the cat from the couch to his lap. Until half the tiger lilies lining the walk are eaten by the resident deer each summer. And the other half die a natural death as fall closes in. Until there is an oak chair in need of more varnish where one can sit in the midst of it all and contemplate the universe.

You know – maybe I DO like perfect houses after all.  It’s just how you define perfection.

 

Ordinary People

Throughout my long career as a reporter, it has always bothered me that when my work was done, my story shot and written, my live shot with the victim’s home perfectly framed over my shoulder finished – my camera person and I simply left.  Went home.  Back to our own, presumably comfortable and hopefully loving lives. Leaving the victim(s) of some awful event trying desperately and miserably to cope with his/her/their tragedy.

I didn’t cover yesterday’s shocking and tragic shooting at the Washington Navy Yard.  I didn’t have to face anyone’s grieving, unbelieving loved ones.  But I couldn’t sleep last night anyhow. 

I couldn’t forget that the 12 people who were murdered and the three who were hospitalized (out of the 8 hurt in the rampage) were just ordinary people. Many civilian employees or contractors.  They left home yesterday morning in the same way they always did. By car or bus or Metro or train. Said an ordinary “‘bye – see you tonight” to roommates, spouses, partners, kids, dogs, cats, birds.  THEY JUST WENT TO WORK!  And they didn’t come home last night.  12 of them never will.

Ordinary people. You, me, the guy down the block, the woman who sits next to you at the office.  Ordinary people with ordinary lives. Their lives.  That a man named Aaron Alexis – whom we are now learning kept his security clearance despite reportedly growing mental problems and past run-ins with the law – cruelly took from them for no reason that we know at this point. 

Because the shooter was himself killed by responding police we may never know his motive for the killing spree. But even if we find out, in the end it won’t change anything.

12 ordinary people living ordinary lives are dead. They will never be able to live those lives – THEIR LIVES – again.

The High Cost of Fixing My Teeth

I am now the proud wearer of a new, all metal crown.  It covers the very last rear molar of my bottom teeth. So far back it can’t be seen when I smile. A poor little, worn-down tooth which once sported another crown.  Unfortunately it fell off years ago.  Probably didn’t cost enough.

This is not about teeth or – really --  fixing them.  It’s about the totally off-the-wall, totally outrageous cost to maintain an essential part of one’s body.

Hello Washington? I know you’re there – and probably eating your taxpayer-subsidized lunch somewhere with your taxpayer-subsidized, nicely filled and crowned teeth. 

So a quick reminder. Without teeth, people can’t eat.  If they can’t eat they get sick.  And before they die of starvation and malnutrition and fall out of the health care system – they can cost Washington, insurance companies and all of us who pay for things a great deal of money.

What set off this rant was the cost of repairing this one, afore-mentioned poor little worn-down tooth.  It started last April with the root canal, needed so my regular family-type dentist could build up the tooth enough with a core and post to hang a crown in place. Since I live in one of the most if not THE most medically expensive areas of our country – the root canal –performed by an endodontist who specializes in root canals - cost $1600.  Molars, should you not have had to find out, have four roots.

After a few months for my bank account to digest that, it was time for the crown. As I said it’s a metal crown. No room back there for the added heft of porcelain fused to the metal.  Doesn’t matter.  The cost, my dentist told me, was the same. $1250.  Add in the post and core, another $360.  Plus something called Intraoral-Periapical-First Film. An almost throwaway $32.  Total cost: $1614.

And grand total for the whole deal – root canal plus crown – a bank account draining $3214!

Now like most Americans, I don’t have dental insurance.  My union health coverage used to pay for $1000 worth of dental work a year.  That went bye-bye some years ago when medical costs began to soar. I could buy insurance myself but usually outside dental policies are so expensive and pay so little it’s not worth the effort. Even employees of giant companies with Cadillac health insurance usually get a measly $1500 worth of dental coverage annually.  At best it pays for cleaning and half the cost of a few filings and maybe a small, front tooth crown.  Medicare?  Foggedddaboudditt!

To get deadly serious for a moment, what do people do who CAN’T pull $3200 bucks out of their pocket? 

A number of recent studies have linked everything from heart disease and diabetes to Alzheimer’s Disease to poor dental health.  Our bodies are a closed system.  Each part connected to the rest of the parts.  As that old song “Dem (Dry) Bones” told us so many decades ago.

It makes absolutely no sense that dental health care isn’t simply part of the overall health care system. Included in our medical insurance of all kinds – private, Medicare and Medicaid.  As with so much of the mess that we call our health care system in the US --- we’re among the few highly developed economies without almost fully covered dental and medical care.

Therefore my bank account is now $3300 dollars smaller.  I don’t know what I might have done with all that money  -- fly to the moon and stay there perhaps -- but I do know that if I were a typical parent with my own tooth issues and kids who needed braces and such  – I’d probably be wishing they still made crowns out of gold – so I could pawn my mouth for next week’s groceries.