I don’t know about your neighborhood, but where I live the houses have gradually been
getting bigger. People surely are not significantly larger, but as a teacher, I have to say
that some of the kids do seem to have pretty large feet. Also, another neighbor up the
street is adding a substantial porch the length of the front of the house with a lovely
masonry foundation in fancy brick, so that now about one-third of the houses hereabouts
have these immense front verandas. Hey, I’m not complaining, because the value of my
simple house has shot up, but what is going on here? Everyone knows that people are
having fewer children, so much so that in some countries in Europe, the low birth rate is
almost a crisis. That is where those immense landscaping trucks that are almost like huge
buses hinged in the middle come in. The redoubtable army of lawn mowers, leaf
blowers, thatchers, rakers, and fertilizer spreaders not only provide a service, especially
to the lazy or people who don’t want to spend their retirement doing back-breaking yard
chores, but they represent new DNA. If this country gets like Europe, we may find
ourselves importing people to make sure that we have someone to pay the social security
and fill the schools of the future.
So what do we have here? Much bigger houses, filled with fewer and fewer people and
impressive porches with Victorian bargeboards and moldings. And some kids with
slightly larger feet. And fancy lawns, immaculately groomed and fussed over. I,
personally, have zoysia grass that hardly ever needs any care, and although in the front
my house looks like a little cottage, from the rear, with extensions for the kitchen and a
dormer, it looks about twice the size. So I am not completely innocent in this reverse
population explosion. The question is, why do people need so much space? I believe
that most people actually like bumping into each other and possibly even bothering each
other. The answer must lie in the status people get from having lavish homes. I suspect
that in the average immense suburban home people may be a little bit lonely.
Of course the pursuit of status does not stop there. Friends of mine actually went into
debt to build an exquisite designer kitchen. I said to them, what do you need with
rosewood cabinets, indirect lighting and soapstone counters in there? You are just going
to be frying eggs. I saw my host visibly stiffen. I remembered that they have the kind of
cookware you see on Martha Stewart and that their meals would generally include things
with a lot of vowels all together and a lot of accents and circumflexes. They also have a
device that slices truffles perfectly. They gave me a pan which is very nice, very wellmade in France. For a long time, I just assumed that the thing had no use, but I
discovered that it is great for heating up left-over chili (you can put the rice right under
it). I tell them I use it for ratatouille; I just don’t have the heart to let them down.
And then, of course, the most fun of living in a high-status neighbor hood is looking out
the custom-milled windows at other fancy homes. If you look out my friends’ designer
kitchen, over their beautiful sink that bows out over the finely crafted cabinetry (what do
you do in here, wash Fragonards?), you see a cluster of houses that look like a group of
motels. But they are houses! What do they do in them? One guy I know lets his kids
ride their bicycles around indoors. That solves the problem of getting your rainy-day
endorphins.
I read somewhere that ridding yourself of unnecessary possessions is the spiritual
equivalent of cleaning windows to let in more light. It’s probably a good idea to try to
live simply, but all this stuff that I have in my too-large house fills it up and makes it kind
of cozy. Right now, as I eat my chili re-warmed in my designer French pan, I am
pondering getting rid of about twelve years’ worth of New Yorker Magazines. What
about all those empty shelves? The Valentines Day cover from 1991, with the two cats’
tails forming a heart is really choice. Maybe I’ll wait.