IN TRANSITION #9
I spent my lunch break the other day browsing furniture shops near campus. I've never felt so old. And poor.
All around me, my former schoolmates laughed and shopped, happy to be reunited for another semester. They frolicked from store to store, buying books and school supplies, planning the decoration of their dorm rooms.
Meanwhile, my mind kept returning to the bookshelf I found abandoned down the street from my apartment -- my new stand-in for a dresser. It beats boxes and suitcases. But this recent graduate is wondering about something more permanent.
My Somerville apartment is finally showing (faint) resemblance to a home. Last week I bought a tablecloth and toaster. This week: My roommates and I christened the living room with toasts of Smuttynose Brown Ale and Sierra Nevada Porter.
The little things help distract us from the age of the floorboards, the draftiness of the windows, or -- shudder -- the thick layer of black slime in the cabinet beneath the kitchen sink.
Someday maybe I'll get bedroom furniture.
That is, if my pockets aren't empty come rent time.
A friend has been searching for an apartment for months. It's painstaking. The lease on his old place ran out in August. He's sharing another friend's studio while he keeps looking. I've tried asking whether he's just being too picky.
''It's too old. And dirty," he complains about every other place he looks at. ''And it looks like hell from the street."
He's from Texas.
''Back home, you could get something four times this size. With all new appliances!"
Of course, you'd have to live in Texas.
Still, he's got a point. If you want to live in the city, you've got to be willing to forgo a lot of amenities. Or sign over your paychecks. If you're lucky, you get bigger paychecks. The only place that has excited my friend costs more than twice as much as his last place.
''You know, I woke up really happy and peaceful the other day and smelled something familiar. I didn't know what it was at first."
He asked me to guess. I couldn't.
''Fresh-cut grass," he responded.
Across the street from his old place in Cambridgeport, developers had laid down a new lawn, part of their conversion of an old triple-decker into luxury lofts. That new lawn and its smell were things he didn't even realize he had missed. They almost brought him to tears.
My brother, faced with rising rents in San Francisco, did what so many have contemplated. He fled. I visited him last month in Portland, Ore., where he now owns his own house.
True, it's old -- with probably 15 layers of paint and wallpaper on the walls. And it looks like a construction zone (months of do-it-yourself renovations have gone, well, typically).
But it's his.
While I visited, he had the fir floors in his kitchen refinished. Within hours, 80 years of black sticky residue vanished. That night, my brother came home and saw the wood grain of his own kitchen floors for the first time. Months of stress peeled away from his face.
''That almost makes it all worth it," he said, his eyes alight.
Maybe there's hope after all.
Benjamin Toff works as a temp and lives in Somerville. He can be reached at benjamin.toff@gmail.com.
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