Thursday, October 19, 2023

A Golden Moment

Mary and I are getting ready to do some work on the house that was deferred in our 2010 (or was it 2011?) renovation due to cost. Some bookshelves in the rec room and a couple of closets upstairs. We are using Bobby and Julie's son Thomas to do the work. Can't find a web site to link.

To get ready for this we need to cull some of our many things. Mary probably needs to do a little more than I do, but there's work for me too. Mary has been going through some of her stuff and in the process came across this little picture, which we had inserted in our seasonal mailing back then, back before this blog had sucked up so much of my writing oxygen. We had moved from 48 Wilton to 29 Linden in Princeton in the spring of 2003, that brings up a whole bunch of memories around the house sale which I may chronicle another day because it was before the launch of the blog.

In general this was a golden moment in my life. Graham had just been born, Natalie was cute as a button. We bought this bigger house (1850 square feet, 4 BR 1.5 BA) with so much character, if no central AC. In general I was feeling like I had made it and had acceded into membership in the New York suburban bourgeoisie, in many ways an astonishingly interesting group of people. There's so much talent, energy, and intellectual and cultural diversity hiding out in houses like this within commuting distance of the cities of the Northeast.

Professionally I was still trying to figure out how to settle in to the private sector. I was having too much stress at work and was picking probably some of the wrong battles. There were periods of horrible insomnia in the first year in this house. Then I had a breakthrough...

No comments: