The Topic of Conversation in New York is Always Real Estate (Even Mere Hours Before the Apocalypse)

During a meeting at work last week, one of my colleagues was laughing about the fact that the whole apartment she shares with her husband and two daughters was about the size of the room we were sitting in.  We were gathered around a large table, and the only other piece of furniture there was even room for was the buffet table from which we had all just helped ourselves to lunch.

I think about this a lot -- too much -- the fact of how strange it seemed that I, who had loved the sunny studio apartment where I'd lived years ago, would be living in such a big house now:  just me and my three cats.

The place had certainly had its time, years ago, of being filled to capacity.  There had been a time when Steven and I had shared the ramshackle ground floor  with three cats, three newborn kittens, and a fairly large dog.  That sounds like Noah's Ark to me, but I'm sure that people think a thirty-something divorcee, living with only three cats, currentlyy using but a third of the house's living space (in real-estate-scarce New York City) sounds much crazier.  (My protests that not only the pets but the handyman special real estate itself had all been his idea always fall on deaf ears). 

At that same time period, an old friend was living in the top floor two-bedroom apartment with her boyfriend.  The middle floor between us -- the parlor floor, where the cats and I are now living, this being the most recently rehabilitated area of the hundred-year-old house -- was occupied at that same time by another friend and his roommate.  This was also back when the basement (and even the parlor floor hallway) were packed with building materials, including piles of drywall and salvaged wooden doors Steven had dragged in along with the cats and the dog.

Summer is almost here, and I have more time on my hands to relax, but there's been more to what I've been feeling this spring.  I was having trouble putting my finger on exactly what it was -- and that's when I realize that the last tenant, this time last year, had still been yet to leave.  And so there had been this nagging presence, this burden literally on top of me, upstairs. 

I am of course never entirely free -- still a captive of my own obsessive mind.  I have been wasting this newly liberated time on idiotic things like cruising the internet for items I've needed for a while but am only now getting a chance to think about buying. 

All is not lost, however; a lot of this involves MacGyver-like problem-solving.  (Does Home Depot sell some kind of tape I could wrap around this rusted water pipe that threatens to crumble apart and flooding my basement? Is there some kind of tall, inexpensive, sturdy, weather-resistant shelving I could hang outside my window upstairs so that my spoiled cats could let themselves out through an open window instead of harrassing me constantly? Is there a relatively bug-resistant, inexpensive metal cot I could put my encased old futon cushion on downstairs, so that I could still use the ground floor as a late-summer heatbomb shelter --  those nights when the 5-degree temperature difference down there will keep me from losing my mind? Should I just break down and buy an air conditioner finally -- my lack of which being yet another blasphemous oddity in the City That Never Sleeps Without Air Conditioning? If so, what kind could I buy/where could I put it, to ease my fear that air vents leading from my bedroom to the pile of infested mattresses across the street won't make my home seem to be giving off some kind of entomological version of McDonald's No. 5?)

One might argue that it's ridiculous to be thinking about spending money the day the world is slated to end -- but really, what good will having any money left be if I'm no longer around to pay my bills?

But not so fast; I'm thinking that the people spreading that version of "wars and rumors of wars" actually have it all wrong:  only the people getting raptured will be off the hook; the rest of us will be left here holding the bag -- didn't I read that somewhere? 

I say "us" because I'm pretty sure that the fact that I'm slowly reading the Kaballah book, God is a Verb (I just got to the part about "practicing joy," which includes things like taking a bubble bath and sitting outside and looking at flowers and otherwise making sure to have "me" time, and apparently I've been a natural at this for years; I'm not so sure what that says about me exactly) does not entitle me to a one-way Rapture ticket. 

I think I may remember, though, something in Revelations (or something) about how "riches" will do a person no good when the End Times arrive. 

Even if it's not written down anywhere, it's kind of a big ol' "Well, DUH," as far as I'm concerned.  Which is fine by me, because personally, you'll obviously find me with plastic wrap around my head, doing a deep conditioning treatment that finally uses some of that light mayo that hasn't gone bad in my fridge for the past three years, drinking a cup of tea with whatever honey I didn't mix in with it, and writing haiku in my back yard; in other words, I will be fully armed. 

Each day as I walk through the crappy downstairs floor that I no longer use, past the rustic old furniture I've left there (from under which I have finally had the chance to at least clean up the dustbunnies) -- and then through the leaky old kitchen extension that leads into the back yard --  I am struck with this previously unnoticed, not unpleasant, wet, mineral-rich scent that takes me back to the dilapidated two-hundred-year-old house in the country where my ex-husband's mother lives.  And I am enraptured with this notion of having my very own, very musty, very old country home, right here in Brooklyn, just downstairs -- my shelter from the elements.