We Bought a New House
We bought our new house in the dead of winter. The trees were naked the bushes were spindly and it was very very cold. The house itself met all our needs and plans except was a fixer and we wanted a move in ready house.
Tip: Don’t look for a house in the winter in North Carolina. Most people that want to sell are busy with the Holidays and, if they are smarter than we are, wait until Spring. Its hard enough to find a house in the dead of winter, its even harder to find a ranch style house. We are old and Sam insisted that there be no stairs. Well there were some single story homes and they were listed that way BUT they had basements and basement garages. We’d been there and done that and frankly I don’t want to go up and down stairs to carry groceries and I don’t want a basement laundry room.
Another picky point was size and location of the garage, and flat lot. We were looking for a house in the mountainous area and the houses looked like they’re on a flat lot but they would fall off in the back making it hard to mow and actually use the back yard.
We visited NC the year before and because our brand new Winnebago broke down in the Raliegh area and Camping World was nearby in Garner, that’s where we camped and that’s where we looked at the housing situation. We found lovely places with ponds and ducks. Cary is not too far away and is where our daughter and her husband were going to look for a home when they too sold their house and moved from California. We looked at Fuquay Varina which I think is an hysterically funny name. Sam has a cousin that used to live there.
When our daughter and son-in-law sold their home in L.A. and moved to N.C. they decided to move to the Asheville area in stead of Cary. Amy is a Voice Over actress and has lots of friends there. Paul works from home and can live anywhere. There are lots of really good reasons to move to Asheville and climate is one of them. I was born in Miami and lived my childhood on Southwest 13th Avenue and 8th street, Cuban Memorial Blvd and Calle Ocho. It wasn’t a Cuban neighborhood when i lived there it was actually more Jewish than anything.
Never the less the weather was warm and hot. Those were the two seasons, warm and hot. Now I live in a mountainy area that has four distinct seasons for the first time and I love it so far. There are some wonderful town names, like Mountain Home, Travelers rest, S.C. and Bat Cave. That's where I wanted to live but nothing was for sale.
My family has always had a great sense of humor. We lived in a no bedroom apartment and Mama would ask Daddy to tell us a story. Mom and Dad slept in a Murphy bed and I slept on the couch. Daddy’s stories were interesting. One I remember starred a mouse that lived in the headlight of a train. He had wonderful adventures but then mouses story would turn dark and Mama would start saying. ”no don’t go there don’t make this sad.” which would make the story even sadder or scarier. It was really funny to hear mother try to stop Daddy and his imagination run wild. Sometimes his stories could make you cry.
My Dads heritage was Half Irish quarter French and quarter German. I think Irish dominated his personality. He was a great story teller and he was a wonderful joke teller. When I was little he was a practical joker. There was a story about him convincing friend to dress up on St. Patricks day in green long Johns and go through a woodsy area in another friends backyard. Now you’d think the friends whose house the leprechaun approached was the subject of the joke but you’d be wrong it was the man in the green long Johns. Another friend of Daddy’s was a policeman and it was arranged that when he was called he would come an pretend to arrest the the leprechaun. Well apparently there was a shift change or something but the policeman that showed up wasn’t the friend. Apparently there was a wild chase and the leprechaun managed to get home without being caught. There was another one involving a grooms shoes that I don’t remember. it seems there was a lot of joking, poker playing and drinking at my house.
Daddy played the piano and worked for long time as a musician. When mother was pregnant with me there was lots of planning that I would be a singer and Daddy would accompany me. Dreams of fame and fortune shattered by reality. I took after my mother’s mother, an incredibly talented seamstress. If it had anything to do with yarn or thread she was the master of it. I didn’t inherit any of that, what I did inherit was her complete tone deafness. I cannot, nor could she , sing on key. I still can’t. My poor children went to school knowing all the nursery rhymes songs off key.
Daddy went to work for Pan American Airlines. Their dreams of my fame were dashed until …Ta Da I became a comic. I was forty when I began this venture. My parents were able to see me perform at the World Famous Ice House in Pasadena, CA. It is one of the premier comedy clubs. Ask any performer who has had the pleasure of working there.
