Retroverload

This past weekend, or Sunday specifically, was quite the timewarp. The main objective of the day was getting out of the house on time to meet with our realtor by 10 a.m. at the old townhouse, which has been officially vacant since the last day of November and was going to be put on the market this week. All of those things (he cut to the chase) were successfully managed, somehow, and there was an undeniable nostalgia in heading back to the town that I called home for a solid seven years. We managed to bookend the property walkthrough with meals at a couple of our old haunts, the Dunkin Donuts in the shopping center behind our old neighborhood (where we used to obtain many a weekend breakfast), and a local deli in the same center. As we cut through the vast parking lot from the DD to the back approach to the townhouses, I made an offhand joke about how cutting through the shopping center was the route MapQuest used to default to when giving people directions to our place, which was absolutely true, and got a good belly laugh out of my wife via combination of the inherent humor and not having thought about it in ages.

The townhouse was where I lived when my wife and I got together and where we lived jointly when things got serious enough for a shared address. Its back patio was the spot where I proposed; its second bedroom was the little guy’s nursery when we brought him home from the hospital. There were a lot of sweet memories there, but those same recollections are in our hearts forever so it’s not all that difficult to let go of physical ownership (or heavily mortgaged claim) of their collective backdrop.

And the backdrop has seen better days, as you might expect after renting the place out for three years. Fortunately we didn’t find any gruesome surprises, just an above-average (if we do say so our-fastidious-selves) amount of ground-in grime and wear and tear. Not to mention the little guy’s old room repainted an in-your-face shade of puce. Ah well, the whole plan at this point is to short sell the townhouse as-is. It’s a solid piece of property in a reasonably good location listed below market value on one hand, and a bit of a fixer-upper that has to have any offer on it approved by the mortgaging bank (which could take any number of months) on the other. Hopefully it will all work out, and soon, and we’ll be left with just the pleasant mental associations, minus the monthly bleed of a superfluous house payment out of our budget. Fingers crossed!

Meanwhile, speaking of sites like MapQuest that almost nobody uses anymore, on Sunday night my wife and I put together an Evite for a holiday open house. We’ve hosted mainly intimate, informal gatherings for the past couple-few years, but we’re feeling like we’re in a good place now to handle more of a large-scale mingle once again. The funny part for me was opening up my Evite-specific address book and just kind of marveling at a snapshot of my social life circa I’m gonna say 2005 to 2007 or so. Some of the e-mail addresses belonged to boon companions with whom I still keep in touch regularly, and others were people whom I have drifted away from due to typical entropy and neglect on one or (usually) both sides. It was a lot like reading through the more heartful signatories of your senior yearbook, five or six years after you’ve graduated high school, gone to college, and more or less moved on with life; the strange part was having that experience in my late 30’s as opposed to my early 20’s. At any rate, I skipped inviting the people who had moved far away, but for a lot of the others who (I assume) still live in the area I figured there was no harm in clicking the Add icon. Sure, they may think it’s totally random to get an open house Evite from me after multiple years where I was incommunicado, but aren’t the holidays the best time for warm sentiments’ rekindling? Auld lang syne and all that? We shall see!