Englewood Story

Link: http://www.EnglewoodStory.com

There's a quirk in the American dream. It doesn't include death. It's all about pursuing happiness,relationships of your own choosing, buying what makes you happy, pursuing what makes for good life, living with a fair amount of peace and prosperity and owning a home.

We turn the phrase to mean the American goal, but after these last two years, I'm back to the fact that everyone's dreams can cower like a scared cat and evaporate from starvation. Nihilism is ruling the country. It's just taken possession of my home.

Today I'm grieving the loss of a two year friend. He shared our home, our kitchen and back yard patio. He shared his ruddy, political sized humor and positive attitude throughout the foreclosure crises and a loss of his job. He had already grieved the most important losses to him, so I guess it may have been only a secondary blow for him to be forced out of his home and into a transient RV.

Lauren fled after the first Christmas, Danielle had found a place with a roommate last month, Jeon had also found a more welcoming neighborhood, but Greg hung on to the very end.

For me, the idealist, it is the grief of an agonizing death. "Death?" you say? "How's that?"

Yes, well, I admit, my counter tops are cleaner today. Rooms are clean and sterile. My refrigerator has more space. His dog isn't barking at the door needing to be restrained from enthusiastic curiosity.

These curious silences are like the lifting of a balloon on a crisp Autumn morning, similar to the routine of others leaving our home in route to their destinations.

But this is not that. We don't experience the stillness out of our own choosing. The final parting came after many tosses of the wedge and hammer. My idealism lies in splinters.

Rattling around in our big house was not our plan. It has been superimposed on our household, on Greg, Lauren, Danielle and Jeon.

We were found guilty of the crime of being unrelated in our own home. In Englewood's municipal code,this is a crime of morality found under the same section of penalties as public masturbation, voyeurism, prostitution. What individual upstanding family can fight the machine of nasty neighbors' slander and an incestuous city?

I wonder what owning a home means if that contract doesn't warrant peaceable entry and enjoyment of what you pay for and insure? Why don't we all resort to living as transients without roots, in high rise apartments, easily packed up and shoveled out the door when someone decides they don't like us? It's much less expensive that way, and no less insecure.

The wedge has found its mark, struck through my core and split us apart. I am not an island. A person isn't meant to survive in isolation or in a corner trapped. Having done nothing wrong, having breached no contract, Greg, Lauren, Danielle and Jeon were not meant to be accosted until they were forced to leave their home.

Is this still America? Or has the age of Home Rule finally displaced the dream.