It was 1996. I was 46 years old. My children were already high school, and kept dreaming of living in a house with a garden. The house I was building was not going to be finished any time soon. It was too large. But I wasn't the kind of person who'd alter plans. I had a strong personality -- in other words, I was difficult to live with. I had a way of annihilating my family verbally -- whether I was right or wrong -- and I was drinking and eating too much for my own good. So, it became a mathematical impossibility for a person to live with me full time. My wife sold the apartment they were living in to buy a house.
We saw a number of houses -- this time by car because my wife owned the car. I mostly gave up driving after that. She'd take me to the places I did not want to or could not walk to. My car simply froze in place until I sold it for scrap metal many years later.
On a dirt road, the last one before the city ended, we found a tiny house with a large garden. It was owned by an old couple. They were younger than I am today. Yet they seemed so very old at the time. He was bent at close to a straight angle. His nose was almost touching the ground. She was selling flowers at street corners to make ends meet. They had to sell the home they had built and raised their two sons in because the oldest son had taken a loan with a money lender, where he had placed his parents' home as a co-lateral. He took the loan without paying attention to the interest in order to buy floor tiles and faince for his apartment, and less than a year later, when the loan reached the value of the house it had to be sold. The house was already on the name of the money lenders. The old couple asked for twice the amount owned -- 16,000 Deutsche Mark. We had sold our apartment for 13,750 Deutsche Mark. My wife and I pulled together all our savings to reach the full amount so that I could offer them exactly what they asked for. We met with both parties at the notary. The money lender asked for all the money, but I asked them to write how much they were owned, and made sure they got only that, and that the old couple received their share. Had they sold the house to anyone else, they would have lost everything. With the money, they bought an apartment in a shared yard, which was central and ended up being more valuable than the house. She continued to sell flowers and strawberries. We'd sometimes meet her at street corners. Within five years or so they were both gone. I'd like to think I made their final years less painful than they would have been had they not met me.
We demolished their kitchen, and built a house of the same size with a ground floor and a finished attic. By the time we started building the house, it was 1998. My children were sick of basements. My basement wasn't finished yet. They wanted to prove a house can be built in under a year. My wife found two capable men from Maramures who built the house in a few months. It had two rooms and a bathroom: one room on the ground floor and one in a finished attic. My children were fighting over the room in the attic. In the end, Mihai received an Erasmus scholarship to go to Germany in 1999 -- just as the house was finished. Ruxandra lived there with my wife and mother in law for a year before she too went to college and graduate school in the US. At that point my salary had reached $400 a month. It was considered large. When Ruxandra left for college in 2001, I gave her all my savings. I had gathered $4000 in four years. My wife paid the plane ticket. It was $500. Ruxandra used the money to pay for tuition at Parkland college. One semester was $3600. This was the first and only tuition bill I paid for. With the other $400 she paid the rent to a small room. It was $200 a month.
My children had both talent and the ability to work hard in whichever direction they tried to go in. At first, they both chose astrophysics. They did well in school and, eventually, they both received full scholarships to go to college, and later fellowships to attend graduate school. They did not need more money from me or from their mother after their first year. They both chose to work and support themselves. As empty nesters, my wife and I finished our two houses. Eventually, street plumbing was installed. The city even paved the roads. She built seven bathrooms in hers. Each bathroom has a room and tiny kitchen attached to it. I built four bathrooms in my house. Now that the pandemic is almost over, we hope to rent them to help make ends meet. While my end is close, my children's life story still has plenty of parts left unwritten.
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