Having a few decades under your belt gives you some perspective. I’ve noticed that, at each decade, I’ve thought I knew it all. When I turned 20, I knew it. When I turned 30, I thought back, with a grin, how naive I was at 20, but now I knew everything. Same thing at 40. I was having a great time and felt that that decade would be when I would come into my own. Rule the world. There were challenges as my 40’s were waning, lessons learned, and in my 50’s I see things differently.
From my early 20’s on, my plan was to acquire a house, live there a while, sell it and move up to a larger one. That was the rule of the times. I remember the real estate boom in Houston in the late 70’s. I read a newspaper article that compared someone, without a house, and a person running after a bus that was pulling away. Get a house before it’s too late or you can never have one.
We started out in a little two bedroom, one bath frame house in Pasadena, Texas (home of many refineries and a KKK book store – I’m not kidding). It was where my maternal grandparents had lived and where my parents had lived during my time in elementary and junior high school. It was where I was a drum major and kissed my first girl.
There was a levee down the street from my parent’s home where dredgings from the Houston ship channel were deposited. We would go up there with our BB guns. We’d shoot cola cans, explore the sandy expanse and jump on bubbles of oil, encased in clay and sand. These were like a water bed, until your leg pierced the shell and slipped into the gunk underneath and came back coated in black goo. For a 12 year-old boy it was heaven. For a young, newlywed couple, it was the best we could afford. During our first year there, we had our first daughter, in October. On October 31st, during the day, I was standing in the front yard watching as a white pickup drove down the street. The driver was decked out in full KKK regalia and I did not know if it was a Halloween costume or if it was for real. I knew it was time to move on.
We bought our first new home, a two bedroom, two bath tract home, in the pine woods of Northeast Houston and welcomed our second daughter. We had lived there five years when the oil market collapsed, devastating the Houston economy. In just a few months, half the homes in our subdivision were abandoned. One night, we went to bed with neighbors next door. The next morning, when we got up, their house was empty. Even the mini blinds had been taken. A two story home at the end of our street was sold at auction for a price so low that the buyer paid for it with a credit card. With a great deal of trepidation, we pulled up roots, left my birthplace and moved to Arlington, in the Dallas / Fort Worth metroplex.
Arlington was a nice place. We lived on a cul-de-sac surrounded by other families with kids the same age as ours. In the Summer, the kids would go from house to house, playing. It was a good time for our family. I moved into a new career while living there. I became the technical person on a software sales team. At first daunting, I came to love giving presentations, demonstrations and teaching classes. I had found a career I truly enjoyed and that I was very good at. My income soared. I traveled a lot and felt I was quite the jet-setter. But not everything was going so well. My marriage ended and I was a single dad with two daughters who lived with me most of the time. They stayed with me because they had wanted to remain in the neighborhood, surrounded by their friends. Their mother went back to college and completed her degree and eventually remarried. I dated around for a few years before I met Bonnie. We fell for each other pretty quickly. One evening she was visiting as an ice storm swept through the area. I asked my daughters if it would be okay with them if Bonnie stayed at our house, rather than risk driving home in the ice. They were fine with the idea, and it wasn’t long before she moved in with us. We got married a few years later.
In the late 90’s, with my career going very well, we built a large, custom home in the DFW suburb of Grapevine. We had designed the house ourselves and it was beautiful. It was the first home I’d owned that had a swimming pool. We were surrounded by friendly, successful neighbors and had a wonderful time. Two years after moving in, we added another daughter to the family. My oldest was 20 at this point and off to college in New Mexico. My second daughter was just starting college in Denton, Texas.
I was watching the news one morning, about to get up and get ready for work, when a newsflash came on about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. As I watched the live broadcast, I saw the second plane hit the towers. I went into the master bath where Bonnie was showering for work and told her, “We’re under attack.” I called in to work and told them I was taking the day off and watched the coverage. Over the following months, the economy faltered. The software company I was working for began to struggle and one day I got a call from my manager in California telling me that all the field engineers, of which I was one, were being laid off. I was out of work for nine months. We decided to sell the home we’d designed and downsize.
One of my software customers heard I was looking for work and asked me to come visit him. I went to work at his company, back into a manufacturing career, managing a design group as well as CNC programmers and machinists. It was a very demanding job and my usual work week was 6 days, 60 hours. Quite often we worked Sundays as well. On a personal note, we had sold our home and were actively looking for a smaller place. We put contracts in on six different properties before we finally succeeded in buying the one we live in now, in Colleyville (I call it Lassietown). Unfortunately, we had not downsized, but actually purchased a slightly larger and slightly more expensive home than the one we just sold. I was still following the original plan, buying up.
At work, my employer turned out to be a not very nice (or ethical) person and proved to be a micro-managing tyrant. But I had never made as much money as I was making there. I continued to drag myself to work on Monday although each week I became more depressed. He eventually fired me and after five years working there and making lots of money, I sat back a took a good look at where I was. I came to see our beautiful, large home as something that made me compromise myself.
I went to work for Apple, as a Business Manager. I worked in a retail store, leading a team of people selling to businesses. Once again, I was very happy in my career. I had always owned Apple equipment and never owned a Windows PC. I was the biggest fanboy out there. My income was a fraction of what it had been, but Bonnie was so pleased to see me happy again that she didn’t care about the income level. I learned that selling something I truly believed in was something that made me happy and made me more fun to be around. I worked at the Apple Store for about two and a half years. One of my business customers had been trying to recruit me because he had heard of my manufacturing engineering background and had a new manufacturing business he wanted to start.
It was during my time there that I got my Volt and started blogging about it. If you’ve been reading the blog, you know I moved on from the manufacturing gig into wind-generated electricity sales, again trying to follow my passion. Eventually, I found my way to my Volt dealer and started selling Chevrolets, specializing in Volts (and hopefully, before too much longer, Spark EVs). My title on my business cards is EVangelist. 😉
During the last six months, we’ve built a home that is considerably smaller (and more efficient) than the one we have in Colleyville. Our last night in the largest, fanciest home we’ll ever own, is tonight. Colleyville has been a great place to live and we’ve made lots of friends here, but we want to reduce our impact on the environment. We don’t need such a large house. What our Volts did was make us start really thinking about our planet, about living a more simple, cleaner way. We want to have our mortgage payment not be such a large percentage of our income. Next year, we plan to add solar panels to the new home and reduce our impact on the environment ever further.
At 55, it occurs to me I may have been following the wrong plan all along. But there’s still time to change. I hope, when I turn 60, I don’t look back at this change as folly…
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