Cleveland Real Estate News

It’s amazing how a reflection about one thing can lead to another reflection, seemingly unrelated but still attached to the first thread. Tonight it happened to me when I was reading an article written by Tom Shales, the Washington Post’s  TV critic. It was ostensibly about the death of the soap opera Guiding Light. It was really about death in general. The death of a soap opera and how baby boomers have handled the seemingly unending final days of famous people this summer. Believe it or not, my final reflections wound up back at my profession: real estate. How does it all tie in?

 

I’ll start with one quote from Tom Shales‘ article. “….For baby boomers, members of what might be called the Near-Great Generation, death is becoming an unwelcome but ever-present companion. Losing friends, contemporaries, has been a bitter shock for boomers, who were brought up on television and became accustomed to its intimations of immortality….” His arguments are thoughtful and well defined, but I still find myself disagreeing with him in some ways.

 

I’m most definitely a baby boomer. In sixth grade, a note was brought into my classroom. We were all sent home after my teacher, Mrs. Gibson, read a note stating that someone had killed the President of the United States.  She had tears streaming from her face.  It was somber, and like everyone else, it was all my family concentrated on for days afterwards. But it didn’t end there. We had dinner every evening accompanied by the evening news. For most of my childhood, that meant eating to visions of bombs and napalm and scared Vietnamese children running in fear. Every few years, when I thought things had calmed down or improved, or at least hoped they had, something else happened.  Two more assassinations.  I remember going into my favorite high school teacher’s office (Mr. Phillips) and somberly declaring that Bobby Kennedy was dead, Martin Luther King had been shot, and the World just wasn’t very stable. I don’t have to go into the entire deluge of things that happened.  And it wasn’t just limited to major world events. We had deaths in the family, we attended wakes, we treated them as sad events but as normal parts of life — at least that is how it was handled in my family.  You mourn, and then you pick yourself up and go on. 

 

So I would say, while we had plenty of escapism television, we also had real reality shows like the evening news. The instability or fragility of the World Order was on display every year, in one form or another. But every day my Dad got up and went to work.  For 30 years.  He planted a garden every year.  My mother kept a spotless house.  Every year.  No matter what else was going on, people conducted their daily lives. The media would have us believe that baby boomers were the Me Generation and in some ways I totally agree.  Debt, no matter what the consequences. My focus on myself and less on the community. But I also think we were steeled to accept that nothing is really perfect, that death happens, but we go on.

 

How does this relate to real estate? It hit me while reading the Shales‘ article.  In spite of the economic roller coaster, the fraud at banks, the foreclosures, the civil wars in places like Sudan, we go on. People still care mostly about building a life with their families, no matter what shape that ‘family’ takes.  A person who has a dog and wants a house to move into for years and wants a nice yard for the dog as well.  Gay partners; a family of college friends who bought their first house together; men and women hoping to have babies in a new house. All families, all going on, and feeling good when I turn over the keys to their homes, a sign to them that in this chaotic world, they are moving on.  I’ve gotten the same feeling from people who get the keys to a rental from me.  Just last month, a terrific woman and her young daughter were ecstatic to be moving from a noisy apartment complex to a single family house with a yard, a garage.  They don’t own it, but to them it’s home.

 

Kudos to Tom Shales for taking me from the end of Guiding Light, to how coddled baby boomers are or are not, to how happy I am to be in a profession that allows me to help people keep putting one foot in front of another and having the best life possible, regardless of what else is going on in the World.

 

Peace Out – 3C