A Dog's Life

I began writing this piece on 4/19/2022. I plan to work on it until our close friend, Gypsy dies. It isn’t a journal of those sad days. It is intended to be an obituary of the most amazing non-human life I have ever experienced. Gypsy died on 4/29/2022 at about 12:30PM. In death, as in life, she did her best to be as thoughtful as possible.

This week, as I begin to write this essay, which is very likely to become an obituary, Mrs. Day and I are watching the last days of our 15-year-old best friend, Gypsy, play out. She joined our family, often as the smartest member, a little more than 14 years ago, near Mrs. Day’s birthday in September, 2007. She was a shelter dog and she and a sister had been caged convicts in a puppy mill that the Minneapolis SPCA had raided a few weeks earlier. Gypsy looked like a cross between an Australian Shepherd and a Blue Heeler, so that’s what we described her as her whole life. Her sister appeared to be a classic, black and white spotted Australian Shepherd. Both dogs were being treated well by the adoption agency where Mrs. Day found her and they appeared to be calm, friendly, and intelligent. It could have been a quarter-flip as to which dog we picked, but Mrs. Day really liked the Heeler color and markings. So, we went home with Gypsy (the name Mrs. Day gave her, not the name the shelter had given her). Our previous dog, Puck, who had lived with our daughter’s family for a few years, had died a few days earlier and Mrs. Day was convinced our granddaughter needed a dog to live with. I still hadn’t finished mourning the dog before Puck, a chow mix who had died 5 years earlier. I doubt that I would have ever brought another animal into my life if Mrs. Day weren’t so resolute that we “needed” one.

The ride home was a warning of what the next 15 years would be like. Gypsy whined, shivered, and paced frantically in the back seat of the car all the way home. As soon as the car stopped and she jumped out, she was “normal” again. For at least 15,000 miles of our lives, Gypsy put on that same show every time she was in a moving vehicle of any sort. She was terrible to travel with by vehicle. If we’d have wanted to walk from Minnesota to California, Gypsy would have been all for it.

The first day Gypsy was introduced to our household, she knew she belonged there and did not ever want to leave. We had a cat at the time, Spike. Spike was a neutered male who pretty much thought he owned the house. When we first got him, Puck was already part of our household. Puck accepted that kitten as if they’d known each other their whole lives. Likewise, when Gypsy arrived terrified, shy, and confused. Spike took a good look at her and walked away, back to his usual routine. Until the day Spike took off on us, after about a week living in our camper, they were the closest of animal friends. I am not lying here, but I wouldn’t believe it if you told this story to me: Spike would catch and kill rabbits, squirrels, and other wildlife in our Little Canada backyard and deliver them to Gypsy to devour for the cat’s entertainment. I really wish I’d have taken a picture of that behavior. Spike would just drop the dead animal at Gypsy’s feet and she’d make the prey vanish as if it had never existed. Barely a puff of fur left over, at most. When our most recent cat, Doctor Zogar, came into our family, Gypsy gave that nasty little brat the same kind of generous welcome Spike had given her. Gypsy played with both cats as energetically as if they were all kittens from the same mother, but she was always careful not to hurt them. I can’t say that care was repaid with any sort of kindness by Zogar. (Who I always called “Stinker.”) Zogar regularly spiked Gypsy’s nose and tried for eyes occasionally. I never hit Gypsy in anger, ever, but I batted that damn cat across the room fairly often when he hurt my dog.

Mrs. Day took her for a walk in our Little Canada neighborhood that first afternoon and Gypsy slipped her collar and ran off several blocks from home. Mrs. Day was convinced her $300 “investment” had run off and vanished on the first day, but Gypsy was waiting on the front porch when Mrs. Day came home. For several weeks, Gypsy didn’t want to leave the house and had to be forced out the door into the backyard to relieve herself. If we weren’t quick enough, she had decided the area in front of my office closet was a satisfactory “bathroom.” In a few days, the carpet and floor under the carpet were ruined.

We had a fenced yard, but she was unhappy inside that fence. So, I bought a “wireless fence containment system”: essentially a transmitter with a shock collar. I sent the collar to the lowest shock setting and walked her around the wireless fence perimeter, which I’d marked with flags. She freaked out at the first shock and we only stayed near the border long enough for the collar to beep after that. We did the same routine the next day, without the shock and she had it figured out. From then on, she was the smartest animal any of us had ever known. She marked out exactly the boundaries of her electronic “fence” and patrolled that area like a military guard. She did discover, much later, if she ran through the border and kept running down to the lake shore she’d either escape the shock or it would be brief enough not to be a problem. She rarely did that, though.

In December of 2011, I had a full hip replacement. I was determined to be mobile again in time for the 2012 motorcycle safety training season, which would start in mid-May for me. I had even loftier, less realistic goals for before that deadline and I was slowly failing to meet any of those targets thanks to pain and Minnesota winter. By then, Gypsy was a spectacular frisbee dog along with several dozen other amazing tricks and behaviors; including being able to jump into my outstretched arms on command, leap head-high (to me) to snag any object out of my hands in a running, flying leap, and jump on to any reasonable object around 5’ high from a standing start. One of my favorites was called “go ‘round.” On that command, Gypsy would run the perimeter of our yard full blast, which was as fast as I have ever seen any animal run. I’d seen something like that in the sheep dog demonstrations at the fair and Renaissance Fairs. My grandson helped teach her the trick by running ahead of her until she figured out the routine. Then, no one alive could have kept up with her let alone lead her. She was the dog I’d dreamed about when I didn’t even know I liked dogs. (I delivered newspapers as a kid and read water meters for the City of Dallas for 3 years. At the end of those experiences, dogs were never high on my list of interests.)

So, as I was struggling with maintaining my rehab discipline I kept up our afternoon walks and tried tossing her the frisbee. The problem with the frisbee was that I had initially trained Gypsy to drop the frisbees at my feet. We would sometimes do a kind of relay toss where I’d flip her a frisbee 15’-20’ out and she’d return it on the run, drop it at my feet, and keep running in the same direction where I’d toss her another frisbee. (I wish someone had video recorded us doing those things, but I’m the only person in my family who knows how to use a damn camera.) After the hip surgery, bending over to pickup a frisbee from the ground was close to impossible. Gypsy figured that out on her own and started handing me the frisbees about waist-high. That became a huge, incredibly distracting and enjoyable part of my daily physical therapy and, thanks to my dog, I was back walking 11 miles a day and teaching a full schedule of motorcycle classes in early May of 2012. My dog was my best, most dedicated, most sympathetic physical therapist and I can only hope I never need that kind of help again because she won’t be there to take care of me.

If you are one of those unperceptive, species-centric goobers who believes that animals do not have a sense of humor, Gypsy would have laughed in your face and you would have to be a complete fool not to know it. She had a wonderful laugh and a smile that was, literally, ear-to-ear. Her joy in running, jumping, wrestling, and performing her many tricks/behaviors was undeniable. On my worst, darkest depressed moments, Gypsy could make me smile and laugh. As happy as she often made me, I don’t think I ever realized how sad I would be at the end of our life together. As I write this, I feel like my head is overfilling with tears and sorrow. It physically hurts as badly as the worst headache I have ever experienced. I can’t imagine being willing to go through this ever again.

Gypsy had so many tricks (“behaviors” for the politically correct crowd) and she’d taught herself most of them. Speaking of the sense of humor, one of the first things she did was when someone would say “cute face,” she’d cover her face with both paws and act shy. That unmistakable guffaw would often follow that if someone would pet her and talk baby talk at her. She had the most gregarious hand-shake of any animal on the planet. She would raise her right paw even with the top of her head and swing it into your hand to shake. It looked like she was someone almost impossibly happy to meet you. The usual “roll over,” “sit,” “lay down,” “stay,” “speak,” and dozens of other words and actions were almost naturally in her vocabulary. We had to spell words like “walk,” “hike,” “go out,” “outside,” and anything else that might imply going for a walk or she would be whining at the door, looking up at her leash, waiting to go for a walk. Like most dogs of her breed, “heel” was a tough command to obey. She could do it, but she’d much rather take off to the end of her leash and nose about. Early on, she was a plow horse but she learned that obeying “don’t pull” got her a lot more freedom. She also understood “right” and “left” even off of the leash.

While Gypsy might have been the worst traveling companion possible, whining in spectacularly irritating and painful ways non-stop for whatever the length of the car ride, she was the best camp dog imaginable. She was fearlessly protective of Mrs. Day (as seen at left worrying about Mrs. Day on the back of a horse) and kept us aware of everything and everyone who came near our campsites 24-hours/day. She slept at the foot of our camper bed, every night, and always seemed to have one eye open for threats. Once, when she was tried to the bumper of our camper, a coyote had the gall to try and cross the outside edge of our campsite and Gypsy nearly pulled the camper uphill to get at the coyote. The coyote ran away with the knowledge that he’d have been in a fight to the death if Gypsy had gotten loose. People, however, were automatically given a pass unless Mrs. Day seemed nervous. And she was always ready to go for a walk, on a leash or not, and delighted to do it.

She liked everyone and loved many. For most of her life, she was free to roam our backyard and when delivery people came into the yard to drop off packages, she was always quiet and friendly. Many of them came to like leaving packages at our home because they got to visit with Gypsy. Deer, rabbits, and squirrels, not so much. One of my favorite indoor activities was, when I would spot a squirrel attempting to mangle one of my bird feeders, I’d let Gypsy out into the yard and say “squirrel!” She’d dash into the yard, looking for squirrels, and chasing any who were dumb enough to ignore her into the trees, over the fence, or up the hill into the woods. She loved terrorizing squirrels and rabbits and would not tolerate deer or other large wildlife in her yard. Mrs. Day’s hostas will likely be substantially less lush without their guardian.

Her will to live is inspiring. As of today, April 25th, she can’t eat or drink anything without throwing it back up. Her energy is a microscopic fraction of what it was a week ago and she was a shadow of herself then. Every morning, she drags herself out of bed and walks to the back door to be let out. (Yes, she has always been smart enough to know where her home is and did not need a fenced yard or tether until the last couple of weeks.) She is mostly operating on habit, since she isn’t ingesting anything she rarely expels anything. It is very much like she doesn’t want to inconvenience us with the process of her dying. If you are one of those who believe dogs are incapable of love, I can’t imagine what I could say to you. Even when she is on her last legs, she would rather sleep on the floor near Mrs. Day than in a comfortable bed in the living room. She has a bed in the bedroom, too, but in these final days she wasn’t to be closer.

Gypsy died today, 4/29/2022, at about 12:30PM. She had a rough night, mostly waking up and thinking she was alone. She didn’t seem to be in pain. For the 2nd time in the life we’ve known her, she soiled herself last night and when I carried her outside to lie on the deck bench she was still responsive but had no strength at all. She couldn’t even hold her head up and I had to carry her like a baby, supporting her head when I laid her down. We went for our last walk 10 days ago, it that one didn’t last long due to her strength. The day before, we walked almost a mile and she was slow but still moving well at the end of that walk.

Her will to live throughout all of this miserable week was inspiring and humbling. She did not want to give up and we did not feel that we had the right to make that decision for her. She was struggling out of her bed and staggering to the back door to be let out up to Tuesday evening. Wednesday, I carried her out after she was able to get up but couldn’t walk without falling down. We stood in the backyard for a while, listening to birds and night sounds, but she needed to lean on his leg to stay upright. Thursday, she soiled herself and wet the bed overnight. She was conscious most of yesterday and responded to being touched and our voices, but we think she was in a coma most of the day.

Last night, we left her in a bed we’d made for her in the living room but at midnight, just as I was going to bed, she started whining for the first time in a week (Gypsy whined a lot, that was her “voice” for communication, so the silence over this past week has been weird.) and we laid down beside her. That was what she wanted. I carried her into the bedroom where she had a “bed” and she was fine most of the night, but she woke up twice afraid and I comforted her until she was quiet. I honestly think Mrs. Day’s snoring helped keep her calm for most of the night. Me, not so much.

She seemed to be comfortable on the outside bench and she was there for about 4 hours before I discovered she had kicked off one of the blankets and died. She had been alone for about 5 minutes. I guess she was being considerate to the end.

Life is short, precious, and painful. And if you are as special as our dog, when you go your loved ones will miss you desperately.

That Top-Down Problem . . . Again/Still

For more than 40 years, I’ve argued that everything is top-down; ethically, competence-wise, and functionally. Both as a manufacturing manager in the 70s and 80s and as a consultant in the early 2000s, I unsuccessfully tried to convince CEOs and other pointless and unproductive upper mismanagement types that the example they set with their own ethics and productivity filters down to every person in the company. That, obviously, clashes with the Harvard MBA career development motto, “push blame down and pull credit up,” and it was not only not received well it wasn’t even acknowledged. A good friend, who had recommended me for the consultant job in her firm, eventually gently, kindly, and very firmly told me that “Today’s executives want to be told they are right, not that they should be doing something right.” The posterchild for that kind of mismanagement today is Elon Musk who not only needs to be constantly spoon-fed congratulatory Pablum but can’t tolerate any injection of reality into his self-promoting world. So, I left mismanagement consulting (a turning point for this blog, which was once a consulting website) and did other things for the last 18 years of my career.

Like our declining, decaying, and mostly obsolete  manufacturing sector, the US has suffered a long string of incompetent, corrupt, and dysfunctional presidential administrations beginning with Eisenhower and Nixon, continuing with 8 years of Reagan’s corruption and outright stupidity, almost two decades of moronic Bush shenanigans, and peaking (so far) with the dumbest, most corrupt, laziest, least competent President in the history of the United States; Trump. (Ending that sentence with Trump’s identify is only there for you Qnuts, everybody else knows how stupid that man is.) The dribble-down moral effect is pretty obvious.

You can find dozens of articles about the the dumbing down of America (including Canada, unfortunately) along the lines of “Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” The argument that we’re getting dumber and heading for an Idiocracy is not only not new but coming from all directions: right, left, and center. Even stupid people think the country is getting dumber. Of course, 65% of Americans think they are of above average intelligence and, obviously, more (white) men think they are above average than women, mostly proving that Americans suck at math and statistics. The Dunning Kruger Effect is in full bloom.

The combination of top-down stupidity and corruption is the cause of practically ever breakdown in the country. For four depressing years, we suffered an administration full of corporate criminals, the 3rd tier of our 1% elite who are too dumb and too useless to work in a real administration, and some outright low life mobsters. (Yeah, I’m talking to you Giuliani.) Now, every unemployable deplorable in the country has been empowered to gun down anyone they don’t like, steal anything that isn’t nailed down and chained to a metal pole, and run wild in the streets pretending “this is our 1776!” [It was, by the way, conservatives’ 1776 and just like the last time they lost another war. In 1776, conservatives were called “Tories” and, just like today, they were on the side of an authoritarian theocratic government.] The amoral right wing have loudly claimed the various gods are on their side, including the freakin’ godless Russians!  In possibly the most arrogant example of Orwell’s double-speak since Trump’s last sputtering Russian Deputy of the State Duma Vyacheslav Nikonov (a grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov) claimed, "In the modern world, we are the embodiment of the forces of good. This is a metaphysical clash between the forces of good and evil . . . This is truly a holy war we're waging and we must win.”

In other words, just when you think life can’t get crazier, insanity doubles-down and lowers the bar even further than you imagined it could fall.

It’s going to get a lot worse before, if ever, it gets better. Americans are, by nature, conservative and uncreative and they whole idea of “the American Experiment” makes most of us uneasy. “Experiment” means trial-and-error and using logic like the scientific method to determine the success or failure of any part of an overall experiment. Admitting failure is tough even for scientists, but it is apparently impossible for the average American citizen. That means the failures of our national experiment have to rise to the level of the great depressions of the 1890s or 1930s before Americans will make any adjustment to the terms and assumptions of the experiment. 2007’s Great Recession was not enough and the unnecessary deaths of more than 1,000,000 Americans in Trump’s Plague didn’t even put a dent in the direction conservatives want to take their perversion of the country’s ideals. If we ever decide to make a correction in our experiment’s assumptions, it will require the collapse of the dollar in the world financial market (which is most likely going to happen in my lifetime), at least 20% unemployment, massive inflation at the Mexican or Venezuelan magnitude, and/or much worse.

The best argument most people can give for doing something they way they do it is, “We’ve always done it this way.” For most questions, that is the dumbest possible answer. When it comes to trying to hold back change and cling to historic “values” in the face of a raft of evidence that those false values are based on superstition, ignorance, and prejudice, the obvious result will be some kind of catastrophe.

If it happens before bankruptcy, this is the kind of disaster required for corporate reform, too. My favorite example is Ford Motor Company in the 1980s. In the early 80s, most of us in the manufacturing sector assumed Ford was heading for the dustbin of history like Packard, Studebaker, Rambler/American Motors, and the rest. In 1980, Ford lost $1.5 billion dollars. Those useless talking heads who had been the media darlings, like Lee Iacocca, had thoroughly trashed Ford with a collection of wrong-headed product and marketing decisions and grossly inflated executive salaries. By 1980, having done their worst, Ford’s executive staff were jumping ship like the rats they were. The last man standing was Donald Petersen, the head of Ford’s truck division and an actual engineer instead of the usual MBA, sales/marketing, or accounting refuse who had populated the CEO’s office for too many years. Petersen listened to engineers, including the company’s long-ignored quality and manufacturing engineers, and turned the company around in less than a decade. Those were the “Quality is Job One” years, a slogan that actually had the weight of action behind it. The company is still living on the standards created during those years.

Likewise, the 1930s Great Recession created a national economic disaster along with the challenge to democracy, capitalism, and decency provided by Hitler/Mussolini/Stalin forced the citizens of the United States to put up or shut up. The country came (mostly) together and created a collection of New Deal reforms that took Republicans and other regressive forces 40 years to destroy. We can only hope to survive the next challenge as successfully, but it will take a disaster to force responsible action and that means the outcome is totally based on luck: good or bad.

When “Owning” Isn’t Enough Different from Renting

This is pretty funny, “How the pandemic housing market spurred buyer's remorse across America." I’ve been predicting this almost from the moment house buying became a trendy thing to do. Looking at those lines of young people stacked up in front of some obvious “fixer-upper” provided me with many moments of entertainment in the last couple of years. The couple interviewed for the start of this article said, “Every time something does come up, I say to my husband, 'Maybe we should be renting.' Like, if only we were still renting, then the landlord could deal with this." Go figure, houses need maintenance and a generation who have spent much of their time complaining that every other generation had it easier while living in their parents’ home are discovering what every other generation knew early on, “Life is hard, then you die.” In the middle, there is maintenance.

I get bored sometimes and start prowling Zillow, almost randomly. Today, I decided to look up my parents’ first house in Dodge City, Kansas, an 800 square foot place built in 1950 that they moved into when I was 3 (’51). I believe they paid about $5,500 for it. Dad’s teaching/coaching salary at the time was $2,200/year plus he had various summer jobs that probably added another $300-$350 to his annual salary, at best. The minimum wage was $0.75/hour then and most jobs, especially part-time jobs, paid that. Supposedly, that house is worth $75,000 today, although the only house for sale in the immediate neighborhood is selling for $60,000 and has been on the market for more than 100 days. Asking price and selling price often differ in rural areas. The house is for sale is larger place with a larger lot, so it’s probably worth at least $10,000 more than my parents’ first home. The “rich family” in our neighborhood, lived diagonally across from us in a 1930’s 1100 square foot, 4 bedroom, 1-bath house and there was a small “park” in the lot next to us (it was a corner house). Our rich neighbors had the first television I ever saw. We didn’t have a TV in our family for another 5-6 years.

The cool, interesting thing I found today was the official Dodge City “rich family’s” house is for sale now. The family that owned this place had been in large scale construction since the 20’s. They built this place in 1938 (according to Zillow). I was in that house once, sometime around 1970 to repair a television set. I was still in tech school, but my instructor had recommended me for the job. I don’t remember how that played out. I’m sure it was a tube set. Odds are good that the repair was fairly simple. 

When I left Denver in 1996, there must have been 10,000 houses being built that were bigger, fancier, and more expensive than this Dodge City mansion, just around my neighborhood in Parker. My daughter used to give me crap for owning a “tiny” 1,400 square foot house. I thought the place was ginormous, especially when I had it all to myself.

I also did a price search on Minneapolis, the most expensive city in Minnesota and found a lot of perfectly nice homes (800-1100 square feet, like my current house) and my parents’ house in Dodge for sale at well-under $200k, some close to $100k and a few under that. With today’s microscopic interest rates, a $150k house is about a $550/month Zillow-estimated monthly home cost.

I think the problem most young people have is that they want to start off where previous generations ended up and they keep spinning fairy tales about how easy earlier generations had it. Having worked my way through to a degree, nights and weekends, I’m not particularly sympathetic to kiddies who think their over-priced but worthless liberal arts degree/party animal school debt should be paid off by the rest of us and I really doubt that these kids are going to do well with managing and maintaining a home if they manage to buy one. Even when their parents’ do all of the up-front financing and work, these snowflakes will be overwhelmed by homeowning responsibility.

The characters who bought our house in Little Canada are good examples. When we were selling it in 2015, a realtor told me that the trick is to make it look as if nothing needs repairing. “The house should look like a ready-to-move-in apartment and a blank slate so they can imagine their own stuff in the spaces.” So we emptied the place out, painted almost everything white, and polished every surface so that they looked totally unused.

I had some doubts about selling the ready-to-move-in aspect of the 2 1/2 acre lot that came with the house. I mean, how can you make a small farm look maintenance-free? The realtor said, “Don’t worry about that. It’s part of the dream.” She was right. The buyers and their goober “inspector” nitpicked all sorts of silly stuff in the house, most of which I ignored, but they didn’t ask a single question about maintaining the large yard and several gardens. Stupidly, I left them a riding lawnmower and a shed full of lawn and garden tools. A year later, one of our ex-neighbors was visiting and among their many stories about our home buyers were all sorts of hilarious bits about those kids wading through waist-deep grass in the backyard, finally asking another neighbor to mow the lawn for them because they couldn’t figure out how to start the one I left them (the battery was in the garage for winter storage). They even rented a large lawn tractor, but couldn’t figure out how to get it off of the rental company’s trailer. Again, that same neighbor bailed them out. Six years and a divorce later, they sold the house to another young couple who immediately asked their helpful neighbor, “I heard you take care of the yard in front of our house?”

My own kids are also good examples, unfortunately. One of them moves when the dishwasher drain needs cleaning and the other will literally go without a functioning kitchen sink rather than either fix it or pay to have it done. Even maintaining bicycles seems to be a family disability. Clearly, I suck at leading by example.

There is a “1% home maintenance budgeting rule” that few people want to acknowledge. (The formula is something along the lines of “Annual maintenance costs will run about %1 of the value of the house.”) From my experience, that number is conservative for landlords. Renters are destructive, often entitled and spoiled children, and sometimes outright crooked. I don’t think I ever escaped paying only %1 maintenance costs on the two rental properties I owned. 5% was probably closer to the real number.

Obviously, I know a few young people who are doing fine with all of the adult life stuff, but none of them are bawling about how hard their lives are compared to earlier generations. They buy “starter homes,” fix ‘em up, and trade up when they have some equity; like most everyone did before them.

Yeah, I know the major cities are expensive, especially in the ‘burbs and the desirable urban areas. And they always have been. In the 80s, I could barely afford a 750 square foot, 2 bedroom apartment in Huntington Beach, California on $80k/year ($1600/month no utilities included when I left in 1991). That is why I left, among other unaffordable things. Just like every generation in the last 150 years, young people want to get out of the country and move to the cities where there is stuff to do and jobs to pay for the stuff. With an additional 100 million people in the country, from 1983 when I moved to California, there is a lot more competition for city housing everywhere. As someone recently said, “Housing prices in coastal California are almost comical.” Finding a house that costs less than $1M almost anywhere urban along the coastline from San Diego to San Francisco might be impossible. Just like it has been my whole life, everybody wants to live in California, even the rubes who pretend they don’t (because there is no way in hell they ever could).

Not even a little bit surprisingly, it costs a lot less to buy a house in a small town and there is no shortage of rural housing. Also, there are a lot more ways to make a living in those places; even Kansas! So the argument seems to be “It’s too expensive for me to live where I want to live in the kind of luxury I expect.”

Well isn’t that sad?

Life does suck for unskilled minimum wage workers, especially the ones who imagine they deserve better; the theme song for white entitlement. My aunt, my mother’s younger sister, lived in Minneapolis in the 1950s with her 1st or 2nd husband. They were both restaurant/bar employees, and that was her “career path for life.” All she remembers about Minneapolis was being cold all the time. They lived in a drafty apartment, barely able to keep the lights and heat on and always scrimping to get by. I don’t think they were in Minneapolis a whole year before they retreated to small town Kansas and she didn’t leave her hometown until she remarried in her 60s. Minimum wage in 1950 was $0.75/hour ($28/month at 40 hours).

I moved to Dallas in 1967 and the minimum wage was $1.40, but my department store job wasn’t covered by minimum wage and I made $1.10 ($41/week) as a drug department manager. Ms. Day and I lived in a very small, single-car garage “apartment” that cost $10/week for the first year we were together. $10 for rent, $10 for my tech/computer school tuition, $10 for food, and $10 for taxes, transportation, and everything else was a budget I will never forget. The first time we had a meal in a restaurant together was a half-dozen years later, in Hereford, Texas. A friend who had a field service job with one of my ex-employers would come through Hereford and take us out to dinner at a hotel restaurant, on the company dime. (They wanted to hire me back.) That was roughly when our first, Holly, was born in mid-1971. That restaurant meal was a big deal for me, although Robbye’s family (military and government jobs) were pretty used to travel and restaurants. She married way down and I was way out of my league. A few years later, we were dining out at McDonalds, Burger Chef, and the occasionally truck stop restaurant once a month at most.

We bought our first house in 1973 for about $8,000. It was a ramshackle, two-story 1920s frame house in Central City, NE. I was making a red hot $126/week at 40 hours, but I worked 80-100 hours a week. So, with overtime, I was usually bringing in close to $200/week by 1976. Our house payment was probably about $70-80/month but the place was a wreck and I rebuilt it from the plumbing in the crawl space to the 2nd floor bedroom ceilings; or from below-ground-up to the roof. About my only real memory of the place was holding ¾” sheetrock up to a sloped 2nd floor ceiling with one hand and pushing nails into the sheetrock with my right hand thumb, followed by driving them in the rest of the way with a hammer I gripped in my teeth. Today, I can barely drag a 4’x8’ sheet of 5/8” into the basement by myself . Mostly, I slide it along the floor.

You could buy that Central City house for $35,000 today and we sold it for $16,000 in 1976. Our next house cost $20,000 in ‘76 and when the ag floor collapsed around 1980, we sold it for $20k. However, I had to give the “buyers” $5,000 under the table so they could fund the down payment. Between cost of materials, sweat equity, and an actual $5,000 loss, I don’t want to think much about how much economic damage home ownership did to us then. We moved to a small town in northeastern Nebraska where a friend rented us a ramshackle 1900’s 2 bedroom house for $80/month plus bills. That house had actual “central heat,” a large natural gas stove in the middle of the house that barely kept that room and the kitchen from freezing. The windows on our bedrooms, the bathroom, and the mud room regularly had a 1/4” layer of ice on the inside panes. I replaced our washing machine pump several times when the room froze and split the pump and hosing. 

I didn’t have a shot at owning another home until I moved, as a single guy, to Colorado in ’91. Denver, as is usual for that town, was the first to crash in Reagan’s recession, crashed the hardest, and was among the last to recover (lucky for me). I bought a home that was built in 1981: 1400 square foot “3 bedroom,” two bath, single car garage house for $71,000 (It sold for $180k new, a decade earlier.). I put the 3 bedroom in quotes because one of the bedrooms was sized about right for a dresser, a lawn chair, and a military cot.

I desperately wanted to keep that house for the rest of my life, but we moved to Minnesota and I tried renting it for several years. After being a landlord, it’s pretty tough for me to generate much sympathy for renters, though. All three sets of mine were given a lot of latitude and all they ever did was shred the property and whine. The characters I was stuck with for renters wrecked the house badly enough that I gave up on it and sold it in 1998 for $108k. I had zero luck finding a Denver rental manager who wasn’t a total deadbeat and crook.  Supposedly, that house is worth a half-mil now, but the house and the neighborhood are dramatically improved now. It has gone through a few owners since and I suspect I’d have given up on it in the Recession for lack of rental income, the low quality of rental candidates, the long-standing problems with lack of active policing in the area and the resulting squatters/vandals/meth cooks, and the fact that I was marginally employed in those years.

I almost owned the place, when I sold it; having made double and triple house payments for the 5 years I lived there and putting all of the rental “income” straight into the principle for the next 4 years. Even getting screwed, as usual, by realtors I came out of the sale with about $70k in cash. As much as I liked the house and regardless of how well that area of Denver has done in the last few years, I did even better with the investments I made with that $70,000. Denver is so overgrown, under-resourced (especially water), and crowded I wouldn’t want to live there now, anyway.

Over the several houses I’ve owned in my 70 years, I’ve learned a lot about home ownership, maintenance, and unanticipated problems and costs. None of it has been painless, most was expensive and time-consuming, and a little heartbreaking. Homeowning, like life, “is hard, then you die.”