Exclamation
Points! Are what I wanted. I didn’t get them.
Ok, I am incredibly fortunate. I am now a homeowner. Well, actually the bank is a homeowner, I’m a 10%-of-a- homeowner, but that’s not my point. My point is that I’m incredibly lucky in a world, in a country, with such mindboggling poverty and homelessness, to have the wherewithall to purchase a home. A home with my partner, my husband, my other-and-better half. That said…
I wanted bells. I wanted whistles. I wanted a big, “Hurrah!!!” at the end of the process.
This process, not counting the four months of prep and waiting that preceeded today, consisted of 2 hours of signing. Signing form after form after form. As our wonderful lawyer pointed out, it’s like a Monty Python routine.
“Sign here. And here. And…here. Initial here. Sign. Here. And here. Initial here. And now here, with full name. And initial. And here, with full name in reversel alphabetical order… no sorry, lawyer’s joke… Well, we find it funny. And here. Here. Here…”
I was warned that there would be a lot of signing of papers; I felt prepared for the ordeal. I never imagined that there would be that much signing of papers. There were paper covering this. There were papers covering that. There were papers stating that we had the right, or no right, in the future to sign yet more papers should the need arise. There were papers to be signed stating that we had indeed signed the papers. There were lots of papers. There were two hours worth of papers. An entire forest was decimated by our transaction for a smallish one-bedroom apartment; this was the least green thing I’ve done in ages.
And when all the papers were signed, it all sort of piddled out. There were no more papers to sign, no more checks to write, nothing left to be done but go our separate ways.
Admittedly, I was the only one in the room new to this process. The lawyers do this for a living; they can close in their sleep. Jamie has gone through this process twice before, although as it was in FL where they use no lawyers, I’m told the process is much more… compact. This was however, to me, a totally alien experience.
And… I wanted something more. I suppose I wanted more closure from this closing. This is something I’ve been anticipating for four months and, to be fair, when something has been anticipated for that long, imagined for that amount of time, the actual event couldn’t possibly live up to the hype that has been built up in your head.
I wanted Be Our Guest from “Beauty and the Beast”; corks popping, people whirling; an orgy of frivolous mayhem and celebration.
But there was none of that. Before I knew it, the last paper was signed and there were quiet congratulations and hand shaking and parting of ways. Like smoke in a gust of wind, it was over and done.
I suppose the lesson to be learned here is that the really big moments in life most often aren’t accompanied by thunder and lightening. They often slip by unremarkably. And they are no less earthshaking for their modesty, just harder to recognize.
Jamie and I went back after the closing to look, for the first time unaccompanied, for the first time crossing our threshold, at our new home. Needs work. Needs lots of work. That’s when I realized: it’s not about the bells and whistles and corks popping. It’s about Jamie and I tearing out the old carpet, painting the dirty walls, replacing the faulty toilet. It’s about building our home together, our life.
And that quiet realization is better by far than any fireworks or popping corks or any other noisy whoo ha could ever be. I’m building a life, a home, with someone I love, who loves me. Who could need anything more than that?
Nite,
k.
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