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The Value of
Money
by John
Bruce
Jim Burke’s parents flipped
houses. They’d started before
it was the thing to do; they’d started before Jim, their oldest, was born.
They ascribed to the views in all the self-improvement books, that if you
weren’t already rich, it was your own fault, and you’d best start catching
up. They never quite got
around to asking why the self-improvement authors and motivational
speakers have to sell people books on how to get rich, instead of just
playing golf or serving on non-profit boards the way real rich people
do. But the
get-rich gurus tended to advise that the real path to prosperity,
independent of education and hard work, lay in one or another variation on
flipping houses. It was a stumbling block for Jim
that the family also lived in the houses his parents were trying to flip:
we may assume that whatever formulae for no-money-down they’d tried hadn’t
worked out, so the houses had to serve both as residence and speculative
currency. As a result, Jim
was plagued with the not-quite-conscious sense that at any given moment,
his home could be flipped away from him. And if his parents were so willing
to flip the family hearth, what else were they capable of flipping? Their friends, their religion,
even their children? The
question was always inchoate, but it was always
there. He was nine years old when his
father bought the house that proved to be an exception of sorts. In
subsequent years, as he reflected with increasing maturity on his father’s
character, he decided that a big factor, though not the root issue, was a
certain crucial brevity of attention span. Something in the house –
perhaps a façade backed up by large volumes of empty space – attracted him
in a basic way, while he didn’t want to spend the time or effort to
research questions like whether the adjoining woodlot, part of the
property, could be sold off to raise money, how much it might cost to add
plumbing to the top floor, or whether the carriage house could be made
habitable. This, of course, was exactly the customer the realtor had been
waiting for, and she was willing to cut every possible corner to put the
deal together. People like Jim’s father didn’t come along every
day. It had once been a
very imposing house on Main Street in Canterbury, New Jersey. But early in the last century, a
new Presbyterian church bought the whole block for its building, and the
house was lifted from its foundation and, pulled by teams of horses,
turned almost 180 degrees and moved to a new foundation farther north. A
carriage house went with it. The new property where the buildings sat was
well over an acre, on an irregular piece of land the church didn’t want.
The house has been there now for more than a hundred years. The last time I stopped by it was
empty and up for sale, the Burkes having eventually flipped it in favor of
a succession of new owners. There are many good reasons why
the place isn’t selling. It was a bad idea, just for starters, to move it
off Main Street, where its ostentatious architectural detail was at least
competing with other grandiose buildings. In a quiet residential
neighborhood, it was out of place, and it’s grown more so over the years.
If you gave the original architect credit for placing windows where the
light was good, turning the building around meant the sunny side of the
house was now dark. Beyond that, the lot it was moved
onto was too big for it. On the other hand, it was just small enough, or
just irregular enough, that the town wouldn’t let any of the owners sell
off a piece. The whole area was graded for landscaping when the church was
built next door, but somehow a substantial wedge of the property never got
planted in grass. Instead, nature began reclaiming its own, slowly and on
the cheap, with saplings and vines, weeds and wildflowers. But whoever
owned the property wound up paying taxes on the useless
woodlot. Even so, more than anything else,
whoever sold the place that first time got out of the deal just before
everything changed anyhow. The carriage house had stalls for horses, an
upstairs for storing hay, and quarters for a groom, all of which quickly
became superfluous. Now it’s something the owners seem to hold on to,
thinking maybe someone will pick up the place next time wanting to convert
the carriage house to a studio just like on This Old House, except the
cost to have Norm Abram come around and do something with that drafty,
dusty, dung-strewn old barn would be greater than what anyone ever paid
for the whole property. Another anachronism was the grand
staircase in the center hallway, empty space you had to heat. Speaking of
heat, the furnace burned anthracite coal, dirty stuff that periodically
had to be shoveled over the stoker. So for a century, buyers had to be
only minimally shrewd to pass on the house. To find the place enticing
took someone who would be attracted by the ostentatious façade – no matter
it faced the wrong way in the wrong neighborhood – with a glib sense that
with a little work, it could be flipped. It would help if they saw the
woodlot as something they could sell off, without doing the research to
discover they couldn’t. You can’t, as they say, cheat an honest person. A
live prospect would need to look at the place and somehow think he was
getting something for nothing. The Burkes’ need to exploit every
financial avenue to support their big purchase affected Jim as soon as the
family moved in. Although part of the property was overgrown, there was
close to an acre of lawn that had to be mowed; on top of that, there were
flower beds to be mulched and weeded. The weekly mowing and garden chores
became Jim’s. That Jim should be doing this,
starting at nine years old, was yet another example of his parents'
pusillanimity. Had Jim not been there, the monthly expenses would have
increased by the amount paid to a professional gardener, as well as to a
local garage to plow out the driveway after snowstorms. What they actually
paid for this work was the token amount they granted to Jim for his
allowance. The reasoning went this way: an
allowance was what a child received independent of chores performed around
the house. (This was the received wisdom in child-rearing circles at the
time.) And manifestly, this was true: Jim's sister, who did no chores,
nevertheless received an allowance. An allowance taught a child the value
of thrift and planning. On the other hand, chores were important, because
they taught a child the value of work. But since Jim already received an
allowance, in the munificent amount of a dollar a week at nine years old,
there was no reason to calculate the value of his chores separately. He
did those gratis, as part of his education in the value of work.
“It’s time you began to recognize
the value of money,” his parents lectured him in a major sit-down a few
years earlier. “So we’re
going to start giving you an allowance.” There followed much
conventional wisdom on the value of money. Then his father furrowed his
brow. “You know,” he said,
“what we’re paying you is . . . is more than I earned on my first
job.” (The amount in question
at the time of this discussion was fifty cents a week.) Jim was, of course,
duly impressed with his parents’ generosity and sacrifice on his
behalf. Someone had planted an apple tree
in the side yard, probably for the springtime blossoms, but in the summer
and fall, there were apples to be dealt with. This tree produced small,
hard, sour apples. It was likely a cider apple tree, bought for its bloom
in the springtime and nothing else. Jim’s parents, not knowing this, made
it one of Jim’s chores either to pick ripe apples off the tree, or pick
them up off the ground before the birds got to them. Jim’s mother, not a
competent cook in any case, then dutifully baked them into inedible pies
and cobblers. In the fall, Jim raked the leaves
from the lawn and gathered them into compost piles. The apples that the
birds got to or which rotted on the ground also went to compost, with the
result that the property was generating a huge surplus of compost each
year, which had no effective use, since Jim’s parents had no real interest
in gardening and, despite their constantly straitened circumstances, never
even tried growing their own vegetables. They likely thought that was a
low-class thing to do. Owners after the McLaughlins moved out cut down the
apple tree and several others. Since it was New Jersey, it snowed
in the winter, which at least relieved Jim from mowing the lawn, but he
had to shovel the driveway and sidewalks. The driveway curved a few
hundred feet around the house and back to the carriage house; the sidewalk
was also a couple of hundred feet. By this time, it would have been usual
to have either a snow blower or a deal with a local garage to plow out the
driveway after a snowfall; Jim used an aluminum snow shovel from the
hardware store, the cheapest one they had. It went without saying that if Jim
hadn’t been there, his father would not have mown the lawn, raked the
leaves, picked the apples, or shoveled the driveway and sidewalks. It was
unanimous among the extended family that such strenuous tasks would
threaten to give his father, who to all appearances was in robust good
health, a heart attack. It was Jim’s duty to keep his father from having a
heart attack. Now and then, as Jim grew older,
he noticed that his peers had much smaller areas of lawn to mow, shorter
driveways to shovel, and no apples to pick, but they often received more
in their allowance than Jim did. Now and then he raised this issue with
his mother. The answer was always the same: to connect chores with
allowance was a fallacious argument. Allowance was something his parents
awarded him out of generosity because he was their son. Chores were
something he performed because it was good for him to learn the value of
work, and also due to the need to protect his father from having a heart
attack. There was no connection between chores and allowance. The boys who
got more allowance than Jim did were simply spoiled. Did Jim want to be
spoiled like them? Then there was the sleeping bag
for Boy Scout camping trips. This was another item that his parents
purchased as cheaply as it could be had, a sad, limp, thin thing that was
OK for summer nights. The problem was that the Boy Scouts went camping
year round, and they made several overnight trips during bitterly cold
months of the year. Jim found himself unable to sleep at night, shivering
and chattering with the cold when he used this sleeping bag on the first
such trip He compared notes with other Boy
Scouts on what kind of sleeping bags they had. He discovered that you
could buy sleeping bags that were rated for certain temperatures – 20
below, for instance. When he got home, he explained how cold he’d been in
the sleeping bag and asked his father if it was rated for any particular
temperature. “Fifty below,” his father said right away. “That sleeping bad
should be good for 50 below.” It didn’t look much like the ones the others
had that were rated for that kind of cold weather, but Jim supposed that
if his father said it was, then it must be. His parents tried various
expedients to remedy the problem on subsequent camping trips. They bought
an air mattress: perhaps the air mattress would insulate Jim in the thin
sleeping bag from the cold ground. They bought little kerosene-fueled hand
warmers: maybe Jim could tuck those into the thin sleeping bag and stay
warm. None of them worked. Jim came to dread the winter camping trips,
because he could never get to sleep and lay awake in the tent all night,
shivering. The one thing they never did was buy a new sleeping
bag. As time went on, Jim began to
recognize the darting business with the eyes that told him, subliminally,
that his father was lying, or at least not telling the whole truth. He saw
it more than he expected, as when his father claimed to have given up
smoking, but several weeks later tired of the sham, stopped sneaking
cigarettes, and went back to smoking them openly. There was darting of the eyes when
Uncle Phil Peck came to visit. Uncle Phil, it had long since been pointed
out, wasn’t really an uncle, just a good friend of his father’s who got
the honorific because he’d been the guy who trained him in his first sales
territory. The training amounted mostly to showing him what bars were the
best places to hang out and hide from the bosses once he’d made his quota.
Jim was 11 when, on a visit, Uncle
Phil sat down next to him on the couch in the TV room. Everyone was there,
in fact. They were all watching some show on TV. Uncle Phil put his hand
on Jim’s knee, a big, beefy, avuncular hand. “Later, Jim,” said Uncle
Phil, “we’re going to take a shower together.” It was an announcement of a
scheduled event, like Little League at 10 or homework at 7:30. Jim’s
father did the business with darting his eyes, but said nothing.
Jim, who couldn’t for the life of
him imagine taking a shower with someone else, found the idea creepy and
managed to avoid Uncle Phil for the rest of his
visit. Over the years that Jim mowed the
acre or so of lawn, he got to know all the quirks: the roots that stuck up
from the maple trees, and some that showed where trees had once been; the
ghost outlines of old flower beds; and a single, smooth, whitish,
medium-sized rock. The rock was peculiar in that there wasn’t any reason
for it to be there, it was alone. And you saw it only just as you came up
on it with the lawnmower. You had to swerve quickly to avoid it, of
course. No telling what would happen to the blade if you ran right over
it. His father never mowed the lawn
himself, so he knew nothing about the rock. It was one of the things his
parents didn’t know about the property – and there were many such things.
Having bought the place and moved in, they were remarkably incurious. The
carriage house, artfully designed in the shape of a rustic barn, his
parents always took for granted and called “the barn”, never wondering
what sort of farm it might have served had it been one. If you’d quizzed
them on the history of the various rooms that had once been servants’
quarters, they would have given you a blank look. They were just empty
rooms. Why think about them at all? But as far as Jim was concerned,
it was the little puzzles and oddities that made the house and its grounds
interesting, like the bones of an old shipwreck that stood up above water
at low tide, but which were at other times invisible. As the years went
on, the rock hidden in plain sight in the middle of the lawn began to
seize his imagination. What, after all, would happen if you did run over
it with the lawnmower? Would the lawnmower just hiccup and move on? Would
it notice at all? Thus it happened that one Saturday
morning as he mowed the lawn, Jim was driven in an instant to see what
would happen if he didn’t swerve the mower away from the rock and simply
let it run over it. It’s worth pointing out that he actually didn’t expect
anything to happen; he thought the rock was probably seated too low for
the blade to catch it. This, though, wasn’t the case; if he’d wanted the
most spectacular effect he could have dreamed up, he wouldn’t have been
much disappointed. The rotary blade caught the rock
and pulled it up from where it had been half-buried in the ground. The
speed of the blade at the end was great enough to toss the rock sideways
and into the casting that covered the blade, with a loud clang and a great
shock that Jim felt at the handlebars. This didn’t just tear a hole in the
casting, it sent a big chunk of the whole mower’s side flying several feet
away, including one of the mower’s wheels. The lawnmower was, in short,
totaled. Jim went into the house to get his father and show him the
damage. “But how did it happen?” his
father asked, on the way out to look at the scene. “I must have hit a rock,” said
Jim. “I didn’t know it was there.” “I don’t understand,” said his
father, getting angrier all the time. “You mow this lawn every week. How
could you not know about a rock like that?” “I don’t know, Dad.” And there
wasn’t much his father could say in the face of that. Unwilling to pay for
almost anything else, and certainly unwilling to give Jim a decent
allowance in return for the work he did around the house, he was at least
going to have to spring for a new lawnmower. Jim wasn't really old enough
to be unfilial, but he felt a secret satisfaction at what he'd
done.
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