I took a walk tonight through the neighborhood adjacent to my condo. It is a really beautiful subdivision with lots of long winding well-treed roads and huge homes with massive windows from which light shown out onto their manicured lawns. The homes are way over my price range, but yet not so wealthy as to feel unlived in. These are the types of homes you often find in central Charlotte and it adds to the feeling of charm and community. It also adds questions because in this time of economic crisis when so many Charlotteans worked in banking, which has hit a pretty big bump in the road, how are they still managing to live such an affluent lifestyle when the rest of us struggle? Then I looked closer and realized that maybe they’re not unaffected, maybe they are just like the rest of us.
The economy is still front page news, but it’s no longer a surprise. We’ve become accustomed and almost expectant of stories about unemployment, foreclosures, and families in financial troubles. Still, it’s almost become the new normal. As much as we’d all like it to turn around, I think we have adjusted and learned to live within this new climate. What I still wonder about are those families and people who have neither lost everything nor managed to thrive. What about your neighbors? Who are the people in the middle and what secrets are they hiding?
That’s when I took a closer look at those big houses and I saw cars that had seen better days. Chipping paint, burnt out light bulbs and other signs that things weren’t as good as one might think from first glance. I watched one family leave their back door and get into a station wagon that had to be at least ten years old and had a squealing belt in obvious need of replacement. How do you live in such a nice house and yet have such a crappy car to drive your four kids around in? Could this be a family that is only one paycheck away from foreclosure? Did they live above their means to such an extent that now they are trapped?
Jeff and I don’t carry a lot of debt. We’ve tried to be responsible with credit cards and we always live within our means. I have some old debt I’ve been carrying around for years from the days when life wasn’t so good, but as a couple we’re pretty responsible. While I might long for a day when we too can have that big house with the verandah for evening cocktails and space for large dinner parties, I also like knowing that my scaled down life in a one-bedroom condo means we take vacations and buy what we want. Then again, we’re also lucky in the fact that Jeff is in a recession-proof job. The Army is not likely to experience lay-offs anytime soon.
I don’t know when the economy will get better or when we’ll have one of those big houses, but I do know that it’s not worth it if it means you don’t know that you’ll be able to feed your kids or even have a home should hard times come. I have felt the grip of this recession and with each resume I send out and hear nothing back, I feel it again. For whatever reason I’m just not one of those people that needs things for status. I like nice things, but I’ve been poor. I have been, sell my plasma, CD’s and anything else I had to eat, poor. It’s a scary feeling to not know how you will eat or pay your bills and I don’t ever want that feeling again. So I’ll stay in my little condo and I’ll keep shopping the sale racks and I’ll stay on the sidewalk looking into the lit windows of those big, beautiful homes from the outside. The sidewalk is pretty comfortable after all.
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