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Raising mortgages
is life’s work

The Star-Bulletin's week-long in-depth look at the Hawaii housing boom, along with today being my wife and my 26th wedding anniversary, caused me to reflect on how relatively easy it is in America for two people to literally go from food stamps to supporting a mortgage that would choke some Third World countries.

In a way, we are living the American dream, a dream that at times seems like an Edvard Munch painting where, grabbing our heads and screaming, we flee from both the Grim Reaper and the Equally Grim Mortgage Banker. One tries to put us 6 feet under, the other six figures.

Before we were married, Margie and I lived on the Oregon coast. Shortly before graduating from college, I had signed up for the Peace Corps and was scheduled to go to Yemen as an English teacher. It's kind of hazy why that deal fell through, but I suspect it was because I thought Yemen was an Asian noodle restaurant.

So we ended up on the coast, a move exquisitely timed to put us unemployed in a place where there were no jobs. I showed up at the state employment agency every morning to be sent out on day jobs, moving pianos, clearing lots or doing the kind of jobs generally reserved for members of a chain gang. But eventually, there was no work at all and no money, and we ended up throwing ourselves on the mercy of the state and were given $50 each in food stamps.

Depressed in that enthusiastic way that only an unemployed college graduate can be, I was prepared to launch a career as a semiprofessional wino, but learned that food stamps could not be used to buy alcohol. Sensing the Oregon Legislature was not going to remedy that oversight any time soon, Margie and I decamped Oregon and found jobs elsewhere.

A few years later we were married, and that was when we discovered that if you are making even a little money, there were businesses in large brick buildings that wanted to give you more.

Before long we had our first bouncing baby mortgage, which we nurtured lovingly with a whip and a chair. An actual human baby came along, and the mortgage got jealous.

So we moved to our second house, setting up one room for our darling daughter and conceding the rest of the property to our rapidly growing firstborn, a mortgage that had gone from being able to choke a horse to being able to choke an entire herd of Clydesdales.

The more money we made, the more money banks wanted to give us, and soon we were in our third house and getting personal phone calls late at night from Alan Greenspan asking if we were all right.

Now here we are in Edvard Munch-land after 26 years of marriage, up to our eyebrows in debt, yet I still get three calls a day from lenders begging to give me more money.

The interesting thing, according to the Star-Bulletin housing reports, is that Margie and I ARE COMPLETELY NORMAL! This is what homeownership in Hawaii is all about.

Sometimes, in weak moments, I think that if only I had studied a map of the Gulf states, perhaps Margie and I would be celebrating our 26th anniversary in a little two-bedroom tent in Yemen with a goat in the back yard and few rials in our pockets.