The World According To Anne Arky

We had old home week a few weeks ago in what’s left of my family. In this case, though, it didn’t mean getting together with people you haven’t seen for a long time, which I actually do on a regular basis with people other than my family. In this case, it means we sold Mother and Daddy’s house. We didn’t even begin trying to sell it before July, and when everything came together so that we could begin trying to sell it, we didn’t even have to put it on the market. It is an old house, built during the Civil War, and although it has a lot of problems (the home inspection would have scared Stephen King, and he could probably write three novels based on it!), it is structurally sound and just a great old house. My sister (the oldest, upon whom all of the estate settlement fell as executrix) had gotten word of a couple of people in the town who buy, restore and flip old houses and who might be interested in the house. She got in touch with two people and was told yes and then no. Quite as a fluke, one of them knew someone else who knew someone else (it’s a small town, and I’m probably related to everyone in it some kind of way) who might be interested in the house. They and my sister somehow got connected and they were more excited about the possibility of getting that house than a spinster would be if Brad Pitt asked her for a date. They were ready to sign on the dotted line almost immediately, even after the home inspector found six bats in the attic. (My sister did manage to refrain from saying, “Only six?” We’ve known they were there and tried repeatedly to get rid of them, even though they are an endangered species. I frankly don’t get that they are an endangered species, which is what I thought was a term applied to some species that had only a few of their number left on the planet – like manatees, for example. Bats can be found in the thousands in various places on the planet, to include an underpass out west somewhere where they number in the tens of thousands.) We addressed the bat situation and they STILL wanted the house. We never even had to put it on the open market.

I had some real sadness when we were still in the talking stages. The three of us kids had never lived in that house – my grandfather left it to my dad in 1968 when he died, and my folks didn’t ever live in it until we were all grown and gone – but it was, to me, the last nail in the coffin, if you will pardon a really bad analogy. It was the final tie to Mother and Daddy, and all my mental games of halfway believing that part of them was still there in some way so long as we still had it were blown to bits in the face of selling it. It was the only place we ever had to call “back home” after moving around all over the place, even though, as I said, we kids never lived there. Mother and Daddy lived there longer than anywhere else they ever lived during their marriage, and it was the place where Mother lived the longest in her whole life, before or after she married Daddy. I spent several days psyching myself for the finality of it all, which I assumed would be in a matter of days.

So between the Marx Brothers attorneys and the Laurel and Hardy lawyers, it only took slightly over two months to do the closing. By then, I was so tired of it, I just wanted it over.

Every day I woke up sure in the knowledge that something was going to happen today to cause this sale not to go through. I imagined every possible obstacle known to the modern world, and every day the lawyers and bankers were coming up with new silly shit to throw in the way. Then the national economy got in on the act and Freddie Mae blew the mortgage business out of the water and then this bank caved and that bank collapsed and so on and so forth. Then we finally got ALL the nitnoy obstacles ironed out and solved and settled and finally set a date for the closing. My sister, a most capable individual (she wrote the book on capable individual), left her husband at home and went to Mother’s hometown for the closing. In advance of all of this, to hasten the process (a waste of effort, obviously), my brother and I had already signed and had notarized our power of attorney to our sister so she could do this without having to send this copy there and get that signature and send another copy somewhere else and say an incantation over it (an anti-bat one, no doubt) and send it somewhere else and so forth. Before she left, she asked the lawyers if there was anything she needed to bring with her from home, which was about 350 miles from Mother’s town. No, ma’am, everything is in order, just come on down.

Closing day…guess what? My sister’s husband’s signature was needed for the whole process. You remember him – she left him 350 miles away at home!!!! Whoops. So she went home the next day, with the papers in hand, met him at the bank, had his signature notarized and fed-exed it to Laurel and Hardy --- er, the lawyers. So Harpo opens the envelope, and lo and behold if the notary public didn’t have to add her two cents of fuck-up to this situation already fraught with fuck-ups beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. She failed to write her name and date of notary license and whatever other notary information is required beside the stamp, which she DID somehow manage to apply. So we have to get the damned thing fed-exed BACK to my sister and go BACK to the notary (and try not to wring her stupid neck) and get her to write in her information, etc., and then fed-ex it back to the Laurel and Hardy lawyers. Then they had to do a little more paper finagling and then they would get it ready and prepare it and think about getting ready to consider trying to start making plans to get it to the Marx Brothers bankers and then the Marx Brothers bankers would disperse the funds from the sale (minus Mother’s mortgage and other things) to the three of us by bank draft. I was absolutely convinced that they were going to deposit the money in the wrong accounts.

Meanwhile, later on that next day, I’m driving to work and my car, which has a full tank of gas (a luxury here at that time), starts refusing to go uphill faster than 5 miles an hour, if that. Oh, goody – on level ground it’s going okay, so it isn’t the transmission, right? Okay, let’s get the thing to work and see if we can get it to the mechanic. Nope, at the next major intersection, while waiting for the light to change, I got to listen to this car roar like a mad grizzly and lurch like a hippo with a severe case of hiccups. I decided that rather than nursing the thing to work and then to the mechanic’s, I’d just go back home and take care of it from there. While the desire was great, that didn’t include hiding under the bed, no matter how much I wanted to do so.

I had to go to work, because I had to do payroll, and I had to work that night at my second job, so I had to rent a car. The good news was, Triple A came and got my car; the bad news was that while I could get a rental car, they couldn’t find any place to get gas for it. I got it with half a tank of gas FINALLY and ended up working about an hour and a half that day. The worse news was that my fuel pump had to be replaced AND my timing belt had to be replaced. All things considered, it’s still better than a dead transmission (been there and done that already, but not with this car, thank goodness), and you might wonder what this had to do with closing on the house. Well, if the Marx Brothers bankers and Laurel and Hardy lawyers had gotten their shit together two months prior, I would have traded cars by then and it would have been someone else’s problem.

It took a whole nother week for the Marx Brothers bankers to screw things up a little bit further, just for good measure. I mean, who doesn’t like an extra verse of a really good song, just because you hate for it to end so soon? My brother and sister got their money on Wednesday. Nope, mine’s not there yet. Nope, still not there. Any guesses? Yeah, you got it – they deposited mine in…the wrong bank account!!!! Off by one number! Fortunately, they didn’t have to go to the owners of that bank account and explain to them that they really can’t have that money, it belongs to someone else. (I seriously doubt it would have still been there anyway – just watch how fast I can get the hell out of Dodge when someone inadvertently dumps a huge sum of money in MY bank account!) So okay, let’s try again. What? Still not there? Miss Arky, I just don’t understand it. Let’s read off the account number again. Oh, we accidentally omitted that six. I don’t know how that happened. Let me try again.

Okay, Harpo, here’s the deal. If it doesn’t work THIS time, I want you to take out the cash from your bank, go to the nearest branch of my bank, walk in and get one of their blank deposit slips and call me on the cell phone and I will read each number to you sloowwwwwwwwwwwly so you can put it in the right blank and go to the nice teller and make the deposit up close and IN PERSON.

I’m sorry, Miss Arky, it doesn’t work that way. Well, hell, Harpo, it sure as shit ain’t workin’ THIS way!

So finally, with no more drama and trauma, they showed me the money. THANK GOD!

The next day, when the “pending” cleared and I sat down to pay my bills as I always do on my “big” payday (the one from my main job), I paid off my credit cards in full, and I’m sure three different banks fell over in a state of shock. But when I wrote the first check that actually cut into the money, I cried like a baby. Yes, right there at my desk, in front of God and everybody.

Mike is back in the newspaper again; apparently he took his ID down so he could modify it, and his profile (which was blank) now says something to the effect of "Proud dad of two and now retired…". I guess when one wants to change one’s profile, one has to disappear and ruminate for several weeks to be able to come up with a 10-word description of one’s life.

Retired, huh? So retired is what they call it when your employer won't let you take two weeks off without notice to go to Disneyworld, eh? In my neighborhood, they always called that “fired” or some synonym thereof.

When the subject of baby names came up in the newspaper, he posted, “I had a son in the late 1980s, soon after Hurricane Hugo struck the Carolinas. We had already decided to name him Mike Jr, but I got the bright idea to name him Hugo instead. However, because I had been married before, I cleared this with my wife before taking action. Mike Jr. is 19 now and is getting ready to go into the military. The punchline is, if it seems like a great belly-laugh-producing notion, but you have to approach your wife with, “Hey, why don’t we…” STOP!”

I had to laugh -- especially since I got honorable mention in that post, if not by name (I'm the "because I had been married before" one). I'm not sure what that had to do with anything, unless it was a veiled reference to the fact that he wanted to name our first son Superman and I told him he could name the dogs and I would name the children. I think I mentioned that once before. Hugo -- give me a break! I wish he had done it -- then she would have killed him!