American. . .

. . . dream. . .

"You're throwing away your money," she would sometimes say.  "Buy a house."  In her eyes, paying rent was throwing away money.  It was the prevailing logic of her generation, the children of immigrants who arrived in this country with very little, worked hard and carved out a well-deserved place in the American landscape.

I, unlike most of my, and successive generations, left my parents' home when I got married, and did live in a rented apartment at that time.  It was a wonderful place in a lush, wooded area within the city itself and within minutes downtown.

To my simple mind, it was the ideal living situation.  We put furniture in the place, hung pictures and lived.  If anything broke, leaked, stopped heating or cooling, made too much noise, cracked or otherwise caused a problem within our 'home', we called maintenance.  When we got home from work the next day, the problem was solved.  All we had to do was pay our rent, preferably on time.
And we did.

But oh how Mom thought that 'owning' a place was what young adults were supposed to do.  It meant staking out one's own turf.  It was putting money into something that was your own;  and investment in the future.  And of course she was correct.

Only now. . . there is no 'maintenance' to call.

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