along with it once people had arrived. The evenings would usually dwindle to a finish sometime after the end of Saturday Night Live. 4
Cori and I were the picture of responsibility in those years. We both worked all through our degrees to avoid onerous student loans. Aside from a couple of nights in Vancouver, we skipped our honeymoon so we wouldnât miss work. 5
We traveled a little bit (though we never made it to Europe as planned), and we got into the habit of going to New York as often as we could.
As our friends started to leave town after they finished their degrees, we grew closer. Our Saturday nights turned into games nights, playing Scrabble or Monopoly, eating cookies and drinking tea.
It was a good life. Comfortable.
And we bought a house.
Oh, the house.
After a fairly lengthy search in Victoria and its neighboring communities, we found a house close to downtown, a 1910 home that had been in the same family for most of its eight-decade history. We bought it from a couple with two kids. It felt homey, but we also bought the house with the idea of tearing it down, sundering the conjoined double lot, and building two skinny houses. That was our medium-term plan, a way of having a new house for the cost of an old one.
It was an old house. We didnât imagine being in it any more than five years.
Fourteen years later, itâs an even older house. Itâs riddled with problems (right now, thereâs no heat or hot water, and a mysterious amount of water in the basement). These days, the only thing holding it together is debt.
Thatâs the way these things go sometimes.
The old expression, that man plans and God laughs? Thatâs pretty much spot on. 6 Thereâs supposed to be a natural order of things, isnât there? Itâs like a checklist: you leave home, you go to school, you fall in love, you get a job, you get married, you buy a houseâthatâs how itâs supposed to work.
But it doesnât, always.
You donât realize, as youâre struggling to balance work and school, sacrificing on both sides, that youâre going to get fired at the first sign of problems, and youâll find that the degree you busted your ass to earn isnât worth much of anything.
You donât realize, walking through a cozy family home, holding hands with your wife, that someday youâre going to be up to your knees together in a sewage-flooded basement, or youâll be holding a ladder for her when she goes up to tar patch the roof. Again. That things will get so bad your home feels like a prison you just canât escape.
You donât realize as youâre kissing your wife for the first time that there will be days when youâre no longer two people fighting against the world, but two people fighting against each other, or that things you were once so sure of would become riddled with doubt.
And you donât realize, standing in the yard of the house you grew up in on a lovely warm spring day, watching the most beautiful girl in the world walk toward you on her fatherâs arm, that the road ahead of you is bumpier, and more fraught with peril, than you can possibly imagine.
Those are things you have to find out the hard way.
Thatâs why the Tunnel of Love rides in old amusement parks have that warning sign, just as youâre about to go in: âThis Is a Dark Ride.â
It ought to be easy ought to be simple enough
Man meets woman and they fall in love
But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough
And youâve got to learn to live with what you canât rise above
1 . Sort of like a marriage, that. Just in case the metaphor was too gentle.
2 . Emphasis must be placed on the word âseem.â We have no way of knowing, for example, if the account of the relationship between father and son in âWalk Like a Manâ is rooted directly in Springsteenâs personal experience. But we do know about the fraught-at-times
Thomas Chatterton Williams