We had both seen how he thrived in the Montessori environment, but there was no Montessori high school within driving distance. So Little Bear visited almost every private school in the area in hopes of finding a place Cubby could be successful. They had names like Hartsbrook School, The Common School, or Deerfield Academy, and every one followed a different teaching philosophy. At least that’s what they claimed. When you read about them, each school had a slick set of arguments for why their method was best. I’d never have guessed there were so many ways to run a school. Like many dads, I had taken school for granted. You put your kid in as an ignorant toddler, and he emerges twelve years later doing reading, writing, and arithmetic like a champ. If only it were that simple.
With all the educational variety we looked at, none followed the Montessori method, and we had no idea how Cubby would do in them. I looked at the school materials briefly too, but seeing pictures of smiling kids in school sales packages just made me mad, as I thought about my own failures years before. So I mostly left school selection to Cubby’s mom.
She jumped into the task with both feet, but she ran into some fundamental problems right away. We had been thinking so hard about what school we would choose that it took a while to dawn on us that the school had to choose us back. To my dismay, I learned that Cubby had to apply, and that he might be rejected. Still worse, we found out that we were long past the application deadline. How full can they be? I wondered. They charged the price of a nice car for a season’s tuition. At those rates, I figured they’d take anyone who came along, if the parents were willing to pay. To my shock, half the places we looked at were full.
In the case of the ones that still had room, we now faced the ugly prospect of Kid Assessment. Was he good enough? I had known all along that Cubby would have to compete if he wanted to get into a good college. Every sixth grader knows that Harvard and MIT only admit a few of the kids who apply. But competing to get into high school? The mere suggestion sounded crazy to me, and when I met some of the parents who drove their kids to go to those places, I decided they were not for us.
Not that there was anything wrong with those moms and dads, but they exhibited a strong surplus of what I’d charitably call “competitive spirit” on behalf of their kids, and with that sentiment totally lacking in me, I did not see a possible fit. I had as much desire as anyone to see my kid succeed, but the idea of calling my son’s history teacher and bullying her because she only gave Cubby an A-minus was alien to me. Actually, Cubby getting A-minus grades was alien too, and that made the whole thing moot.
I wanted him to do well and go to college, but my desire only took us so far.
There was also the possibility of homeschooling, but Cubby’s mom ruled that out. She was finally on track to earn her doctorate at UMass, but she had run out of time extensions, and taking on the job of teaching Cubby would have meant throwing all that away.
By then it was August, and we did not have too many choices left. One or the other of us could move somewhere with better public schools, or we could keep him in the South Hadley school system. Mom was in no position to move, but I was. I had no ties to Chicopee, and I liked the idea of a nicer home in a more rural setting. So Martha, Cubby, and I started talking about a new home. We wanted a town where we could all feel like we fit in—a place that accommodated geeks and freaks, was safe, and within commuting distance of Springfield.
By that point, my business had brought me into contact with people in most every town around us. I’d learned which ones had good schools and which ones were troubled. The towns with the best schools—Longmeadow, Wilbraham, and Amherst—were very different from one another. Longmeadow was a town of large traditional homes populated by business executives, doctors, and lawyers. Wilbraham was more rural with a similar population. Between them, those two towns seemed to contain most of the affluent people who worked in the Springfield area.
Unfortunately, I didn’t identify with the denizens of those places at all. I might have serviced their cars, but I never saw myself as one of them. After all, I hadn’t attended a fancy college, and I had failed in my efforts to play executive. I didn’t play golf, and I was the farthest thing from a backslapping good old boy at the nineteenth hole afterward. I wished I could do some of those things, and I wanted to be a different person, but I knew I wasn’t.
Then there was the problem of rules and regulations in those upscale executive neighborhoods. That became apparent as soon as I began looking at property. “They have a neighborhood association here,” one Realtor said proudly as I stood before a fine home smack dab in the midst of twenty more identical properties. “What does that mean?” I asked. She was quick to answer. “It means they keep the riffraff out. No vans with tradesman markings in the driveway. No pink flamingo or stable boy lawn ornaments allowed. No boats or campers parked out back. No fences or sheds or other structures allowed.”
Jesus, I thought. These people might think they own their houses, but they have no rights. No tradesman vans? What am I, if not a tradesman? I fixed cars for a living. It didn’t take long to conclude that neighborhood was not for us. After all, if I couldn’t fit in myself, I surely wasn’t going to be able to help my son fit in. As nice as some of the Longmeadean and Wilbrahamian homes were, I knew we had to keep looking for a place with less anal zoning regulations.
We found that in Amherst. The people who lived there wore tie-dye shirts instead of fancy polos. Many of them worked at the nearby colleges—UMass, Amherst, Hampshire, Smith, and Mount Holyoke. Others did creative work, like composing or performing music, writing books, or developing computer software. I didn’t do any of those things (yet), but the eclectic mix of people made me feel more comfortable. Also, I had grown up there and Cubby’s mom was finishing her degree at UMass. Cubby had attended Montessori right downtown and liked it the best of any school he’d attended. Some of his friends were now at the high school. Best of all, Amherst still had rural homes in communities with no obnoxious regulations. I would be free to do whatever I wanted, surrounded by woods. All that considered, moving to Amherst made a lot of sense.
The only thing that stood in our way was cost. Of all the towns around us, Amherst was the most expensive place to buy a home. A few towns away, you could buy a nice home for $150,000. That same house would cost three hundred grand in Amherst. That’s the price you pay for a town with good schools. All the parents want to raise their kids there, and that drives the house prices up. It would be a stretch, but we decided to do it. We’d move to Amherst.
With our minds made up, all that was left was choosing a house. We began our tour the following weekend. Cubby was excited for the first half hour but quickly became bored. I didn’t feel bored; I was just disgusted. By that time, I had a fair bit of experience fixing up houses. The house I’d moved into in Chicopee had been a wreck, but it was also inexpensive. The houses we were looking at in Amherst were worse wrecks for twice the price.
I was finding out that the premium for living in Amherst was even higher than I had thought. I compared the housing situation to the used-car market, because I was a lot more familiar with cars. If you want to drive a high-end car like a Mercedes, there are two ways to do it. You can go to the dealer and buy a new one. That doesn’t require anything but money, but it takes a lot of that. More than I had. Alternatively, you can buy used. There are like-new cars with like-new price tags, and junks one step from the scrap heap at somewhat lower prices. There’s always some do-it-yourselfer waiting to fix up those old beaters.
Finally, there were the cars with major problems, like a blown engine. Those cars sell for next to nothing, because most do-it-yourself bidders won’t tackle projects that big. Those were the cars I bought for myself. I could always fix them up and sell them for more than they cost, and I did that for years.
After a bit of study, I concluded the same philosophy applied to houses. Indeed, we doubled the value of the Chicopee house through well-chosen repairs and improvement. Unfortunatel
y, there were no suitable fixer-uppers in Amherst.
That left one more option that did not exist in the car-repair world. I could build a home on an empty piece of land. That would give me the chance to use my engineering skills to design the place, and my mechanical skills to put it up. I wasn’t planning on hammering every nail myself, but taking an active role in the design and management could save me a huge sum of money. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that was really what I did at my car company. I didn’t turn the wrenches there, but I planned the jobs and supplied the vision. That’s what had made the money to buy our last home, and I hoped those skills would deliver us an even better home now.
That’s what we decided to do. Just after Cubby’s thirteenth birthday, we picked a lot on a tract of land one of my friends was developing. Then I got out a book of home plans and sat down with my AutoCAD drafting system to work out the details. I’d designed all sorts of things for work, I figured, so how hard can a house design be? Cubby would finish high school in the same school I had attended, thirty years before. I was very sure he would do a great deal better. And when we broached the idea with Cubby, he was actually enthusiastic.
Since we were building the house ourselves, I seized the chance to design in features that would maximize the chance of a happy outcome for everyone. For example, the new house would have radiant heat, which would make it much more comfortable in winter. I’d never lived in a house with radiant heat before, but many of our more affluent customers did, and they recommended it highly.
All my life, I had lived in houses that didn’t have enough electrical outlets. I’d tripped over extension cords for lamps because there were no lights in the ceiling. I’d endured tiny windows that leaked cold air in winter and air conditioners that struggled to cool the house below eighty-five in summer. “We are going to address all those deficiencies in this new place,” I told Cubby.
Most people think architects design houses, but that’s not completely accurate. Anyone can draw a door or a window onto a plan, but it takes an engineer to ensure the structure will stay together and do its intended job. Architects deliver style, convenience, and many other things, but proper home design starts with engineering, which for our house meant me. “You have to think about what you might do in a room,” I explained to my son, “and engineer the room to do that job. For example, if we want to be able to move heavy objects, we can put a steel beam in the ceiling to support a travel crane. We can have a miniature version of a shipyard hoist, right in our garage!”
Seeing his surprise, I realized my son had not foreseen the full range of uses the rooms of our house might be put to. “Why would we want that?” he asked. I reminded him that we use the lifts and cranes at my work every single day. Indeed, we’d be crippled without them. “If you have a travel crane, it will get used.” He nodded his head, realizing the wisdom of that statement.
“We need to think through every nook and cranny of this house, and design in whatever features we may need,” I said. I showed him the computer program I used to calculate the heat load for the air conditioner, and we looked through climate-control catalogs together. I told him that every kid needed to understand refrigeration systems, and he nodded thoughtfully. My son even helped work out the placement of light switches, water faucets, closets, and cabinets. We have allergies, so we designed in a central vacuum system, with pipes in the walls, outlets in each room, and a big vacuum in the basement. Whatever air and dust that system sucked off the floor got exhausted into the yard, not recirculated back into the room as with an ordinary vacuum. Our new house was going to be really special, and totally unique.
The pile of blueprints grew steadily larger. I opened a charge account at the architectural printer in town so I could keep the workmen up to date. As the months passed, one crew of tradesmen after another passed through. First there were framers, then roofers and siders. The most unique were the plasterers. Making walls out of lath and plaster is becoming a lost art in America, so my plaster crew was imported from Russia. They didn’t speak English, but they read instructions, and they walked all over the house on stilts, telling obscene jokes, laughing, and spreading plaster on walls and our twelve- and fifteen-foot ceilings with big plastic trowels.
When they were done there was no sign they’d ever been there, and the surfaces were silky smooth. No one would ever guess that men on stilts had made it happen.
As the pace of work ramped up, we visited the job site every day. I brought Cubby with me as often as I could. He helped me answer the endless questions from the crew that was putting our new home together. Where should the electrical outlets go? How about shelves in the closet? When you walk through a finished home, it’s easy to forget that someone had to make a choice about everything you see. For our home, the decision maker was me—with some help from Cubby and Martha.
His contribution to the construction was back in a corner of the yard. There he found a great big tree with a trunk two feet in diameter. Seeing it, Cubby had one of the workmen saw him a series of planks. He took them out back and nailed them to the tree, forming a ladder. Then he rigged some rope—hammock style—to make a platform. Then, below and behind the tree, he dug a six-foot-deep foxhole and surrounded it with stones. We could do what we wanted up at the house—he had us all covered from his fort in the back!
The plans showed three bedrooms on the main floor. One was labeled “Master Bedroom,” and it was visibly bigger than the other two. “I’ll take that one,” he said as soon as he saw the choices. “No you won’t,” I answered. “I am the King of the House, and that is my room. You pick one of the others.” Cubby snorted.
“I’ll take the one in the corner,” he said, and we set about laying it out. One of Cubby’s friends had a seat built into the wall beside his bed. The top of the seat opened to reveal a large storage area. “Can we do that in our new home?” he asked. “Sure.” Cubby and I drew a window seat into the plans. “Can we build a secret room in the closet, too?” So we did. That’s the thing about building your own house—you can do anything you want. And that went for me, too.
“I want to keep track of what you’re doing in that room,” I told him. “Let’s add cameras so I can watch you day and night.” “No!” His objection was loud and immediate. I wondered what he was trying to hide. He was certainly changing as he got older.
We never installed those cameras, but we did build a walkway all through the attic and installed nice bright lights in the attic and the basement. No dark crawl spaces for me. If there was a storm, I told my friends proudly, I could walk through the attic and inspect my roof for damage from the safety of my walkway. I could not tell if they were impressed or puzzled. “I’ve never inspected my roof,” one said quizzically. I didn’t know how to respond.
Finally, I put in a platform, nestled in the rafters, four feet above the ceiling of Cubby’s room. The platform was connected to the attic walkway above it with a short ladder and was designed to serve as a work space for anyone making repairs in the attic. I even had a pipe to the basement, in case we needed to pass electric cables from here to there in the future. The whole thing was rather nice, if I did say so myself. Cubby didn’t agree.
“What’s that up there?” he asked warily. He had become very suspicious of my construction suggestions, especially when they involved him.
“It’s the Demon’s Nest. If you can’t handle cameras,” I said, “my supernatural guardians will do the watching for me.”
Because, well, you just never know.
We put the Chicopee house on the market a few weeks after starting construction in Amherst. I felt a little anxiety about that, because I figured it would take at least six months to sell, and the builders were racing forward on our new place. My worst fear was that they’d finish the new house with the old one still unsold. What then? To my amazement, the Chicopee place sold right away for almost twice what we’d paid a few years before. I felt smart and proud, attributing its rise in value to my
own fixing-up efforts. That was a few years before people began talking about the great housing bubble.
Unfortunately, our quick success selling the old place meant that we had only sixty days to move out, and our new house was nowhere near ready. On top of that, we discovered that there were very few houses for rent, and most required one- or two-year leases. “You should rent a motel suite,” one landlord suggested helpfully. We finally found the place Cubby named the Interim House through a friend’s son who knew a landlord with a two-story farmhouse. She was willing to rent out the first floor month to month, and I grabbed it, sight unseen. “How bad could it be?” I asked my family. “And anyway, we’re only going to live there for a little while.”
So we packed up the household and put it in storage, keeping only the barest essentials, and installed ourselves in the farmhouse, about four miles from our new home site. That was good. There were trails to walk on, and the setting was pretty. That was good too. Then school started, the students returned, and we found ourselves living downstairs from four girls who liked to stay up all night and party. That wasn’t so good, especially when their friends got drunk and sang songs in the backyard.
“It’s okay,” I reassured Cubby and Martha, as revelers banged on the ceiling above. “We’re only going to be here a few more months. We’re better off putting up than starting over.” There was a crash outside as someone or something upended a barrel. I didn’t tell them there wasn’t anywhere else to go, but it was true. In a college town, there are plenty of places to rent in summer, but once the school year starts, forget it. Every room in town is rented to students.