Thanks For The House, Pops!

If all goes as planned, my wife and I will have our house paid off in twenty-something years. We’ll each be inching our way towards the senior life, our hair grayer, our faces more wrinkled, our bodies and our wits perhaps not quite as quick as they once were, but hopefully not too far gone just yet. Aged though we may be at that point, we will hopefully have succeeded in bringing our long term debt to a close, at which point we will truly become home owners. The only problem is that we won’t get to enjoy it for very long.

Last year some time, my eldest son got really fixated on my age. Not my age actually, but the things that he himself was going to do when he reached my age. “When I’m 33,” he began many a sentence, and would then proceed to fill me in on his plans for that distant point in the future.

“...I’m going to drive a great big truck!”

“...I’m going to play the guitar!”

“...I’m going to go to work with you!”

After my birthday, he smoothly transitioned into listing the many accomplishments that his 34 year old self will tackle. Then one morning not long ago while I was buckling him into his car seat, he dropped a bit of unwelcome news on me.

“When I’m 34, I’m going to live in your house!”

“Oh?” I said. “You’re still going to live with Mommy and Daddy, huh?”

“No, just me. You’ll have to live somewhere else.”

My hands fumbled with the car seat’s straps. I’ll admit it, it was a bit jarring to learn that homelessness lie in my future, and probably my wife’s as well, though the boy, who will then be a man, may take pity on his poor frail old mother and let her stay in the garage. But what about his old man, eh? What am I to do? Where am I to live? After thirty years of clubbing a mortgage over its ugly head, stabbing it through its hide again and again and again, setting it on fire, shooting it, throwing rocks at it, then punching and kicking it until finally it drops dead, my wife and I are to be tossed out? And I’ve brought this fate upon myself simply by fathering this child?

“Brother can live with me too.” he said. Oh good. So not everybody’s getting evicted. Just us old people. That’s about as comforting as a cold bowl of mush in a nursing home cafeteria.