Pressdog.com

Welcome to the 'Burbs

By Bill Zahren
(Posted 08/01/00)

So it's come to this: I live in the suburbs. On a street that's one step up from a cul-de-sac, next to a house that's the mirror image of mine.

Two-car attached garage, three bathrooms, park at the end of the block, the buzz of Interstate 35 just one block away -- striking.

The large men and their moving truck came on July 26 to move our 7100 pounds of stuff into a 1992 model West Des Moines house. We're a suburb of the Iowa capital, Des Moines.

I was so emotional over not having to tote anything that I started throwing $20-bills at the moving men. Guilt money. I considered it just an extension of the financial carnage known as "closing." That's where the bank closes your bank account after sucking it dry.

I'm kidding. I love the banking community. No, what you have to do is write a huge check for the down payment, plus this fee, that fee, the extra fee, and a fee for having so many fees. Then you go ahead and sign 35 documents, including a document certifying that I had, in fact, signed another document.

Then I wrote checks to anyone in the bank branch whose last name started with S and then sent my third-grade teacher a check for $412 as required by the Uniform House-Buying Cash Squandering Law. All in all, I've had better fiscal days.

So after dropping thousands of dollars at the bank, I just wadded up $20s and threw them at the men who carried all our stuff in. That left my wife, Rhonda, daughters Hurricane Haley and Jena the Destroyer and me home alone with our 239 boxes. We sold our furniture at the rummage/moving sale back in Sioux City (didn't go with the new décor!) so we've got one non-kitchen-table chair to our name right now.

My sister, Teresa, and wife went furniture shopping Sunday night. In one hour they came up with a list of stuff totaling about three grand.

I focused myself on becoming excited over the house's satellite dish. Men dig dishes because they combine technology (big) with a digital signal from space (bigger) and asserts our independence from the Cable Man.

And cable is way to easy for us. You call the cable company, they turn it on, you plug in all the TVs and bang, you're done. Where's the challenge in that? Besides, with a dish you can get billions and billions of useless channels rather than just the 50 or so that cable offers. And, this new house comes with a kick-ass security system that looks like it was built into the house during construction. This isn't a Radio Shack home install job. I can isolate zones, set delays, call in gunships and launch rockets with this bad boy. Pop in my code and this is Fortress Zahren. I like to scream "Shields UP!" as I activate the system.

Activated it last night and went up to bed, right before my sister went out on the deck, activating the Wake-the-Dead internal siren. I sat bolt upright on the toilet and started screaming the disarm code as I finished my business and flew down the steps to the control pad before the artillery started.

Three members of the West Des Moines police came to our house five minutes later. Leather belts, big white cars, 9mm heat -- striking. Apparently the alarm monitoring company called the law after my sister breached the security perimeter. Rhonda told the police, I swear, "It's nice to know we have such a good police department." She's as smooth as silk on a fall day. Jena informed the officer, "We're watching policemans on TV. They're chasing the bad guys." He'll need that for his report, no doubt. "Subjects reported watching policemans on TV, pursuing bad guys."

In another disturbing event, I've located the nearest Home Depot. These are not places new homeowners should go unsupervised. We become a fiscal danger to ourselves and others. Just Sunday I went to the grocery store for a light bulb and ended up at Home Depot buying super energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs at $10 a pop. They'll pay for themselves in under eight years. I'm about to go down and put the new water heater blanket on.

This is my first Home Depot experience. The place is a barn. Testosterone flows like wine. I caught myself looking at an air compressor and mentally calculating if it would fit in my two-car garage. And when I got to the nail gun display, I almost had a bodily function event.

The first order of business upon moving into a new 'hood is meeting the neighbors. Since everyone lives on top of everyone in suburbia, I feel compelled to overcome my hermit-like Midwestern stoicism and get out there and meet people. We're all about COMMUNITY here.

Here's where my youngest, Jena the Destroyer, came in handy. She's the family extrovert. She just rides her bike up and down the sidewalk, kid-locating radar sweeping the area until someone under 10 comes out of their house. You can almost see the afterburner flame shoot out of her butt and hear the Top Gun theme play as she does a wing-over with her bike and jets directly for the kid.

The first two days in the hood she used this opening line: "My name's Jena and I'm 5." Subtext: "Bring to me your children so I may play with them until they pass out from exhaustion or injuries or such time that they cease to amuse me. Then I will move on to fresh prey down the block."

She literally chased down a girl on a bike at the park on our second day. Opening line: "You want to be my friend?" Jena cuts to the chase. As subtle as a two-by-four between the eyes. (Currently laying naked in the family room as I type this, resisting our instructions to put on some clothes. As a father, I'm very afraid right now.)

Hey, don't look at me. I'm the family hermit. The guy who gets up at 6 to write this kind of spew alone in the partially furnished family room. With Jena breaking the ice, I've been actually meeting the folks up and down the block. Met a few on the first day here. I'm coming out of my shell in the 'burbs - as soon as I turn off the security system.

Printer-friendly version

-- end --