The Condominium

I was at home last weekend when my dad and I started talking about the condominium he used to own along with our house. He once rented it to a couple whose children I knew from school. One of these kids was my classmate and I can recall saying one day, when he was poking fun at me, that my dad was his landlord and could evict him. In retrospect, this was a really low blow. The jokes he was making about me did not warrant this kind of counter. But I wanted to finish with the upper hand, so I played the best card I could think of off the top of my head.

He didn't say anything about it to his parents. I could tell because my parents never got a call from his parents about what had happened at school. The exchange stuck with me, though. I'm no longer worried about being scolded by my folks, but I am interested in how the space that a man calls home can be claimed by another. Renting apartments for college is one thing, but to truly dwell in place that is not really one's own is, I would imagine, unsettling. Maybe that's the reason why part of the American dream is to buy a home. The Levittowns of 1950s New York support this notion: everyone needed to own land, not matter how akin it was to the plot next door. Not having this piece of the dream leaves one isolated from the ideal and unnerved with oneself. I've noticed that true adulthood in this country is achieved when one leaves his or her parents and moves into a house of one's own. Maybe it's this tension between childhood and adulthood that brought up to the topic of the condo when I was talking at home with my dad. College is creeping closer to a close with the passing of each semester and I'm still not ready to grow up!