5 Part Series: Real Estate Letter #3

This is a fictional five-part series containing real estate letters written by bidders and presented to the sellers of a local family's estate. Enjoy.

Hey there,

My name is Ray Taylor. I am twenty-two, single, and have never had to write a letter like this, because I have never bought a house before. 

Honestly, I’ve never bought much of anything before.

I never win anything either so whatever kind of contest this is, it makes me a little scared knowing that I have to tell you things about myself but probably won’t win the right to purchase your beautiful home, anyway.

Well, here goes.

My Nana died a few months ago and left me a lot of money, which is both sad and wonderful. It’s sad because my Nana was the biggest and best part of my life and now she's gone but it’s wonderful because, due to her generosity and what her lawyer called my "ability to benefit", I'm changing my life. In fact, I was just able to rescue a trio of old dogs from the pound. It felt great being able to hand over a couple hundred dollars and walk out with three lives saved. 

I’ve always wanted a dog of my own, ever since my Dad took Millie and dropped her off on a long country road when I was seven. My Mom wouldn’t let us kids go with him but we definitely knew what was happening. Millie did too, I could see it in her eyes when Dad's truck pulled away from our house. Those are the kinds of things a kid never forgets.

So, when Nana passed and left me everything in her will, the first thing I did (after giving her a proper burial) was go to the animal shelter and told them to give me all the dogs that were slated for the gas. The three they brought out were scared, worn out, and hang-dog depressed, and you could tell they thought they were walking their last walk but I bent down, put my arms around them and told them it was going to be all right. My goal is to make them a good home. We will prop each other up. I’ll let them know every day that they are loved and safe.

My apartment where I live now was where my Nana lived for the last sixty years so there is a lot of clearing out to be done. I recently started getting rid of junk and things that I won’t need. My Dad, who I hadn’t seen in over ten years, came and took a bedroom set, a few lamps, the record player and all the record albums, and, I suppose, anything else that he wanted. Oh, yeah, he took the refrigerator too, so I am living out of coolers, but that's ok for now. The good news is, even though he came by to claim pieces of Nana that he didn’t seem to care a whole lot about while she was alive, I still have furniture for every room of my home.

I mean your home.

Well, you know what I mean.

If you could see yourself helping a young person with literally no past worth mentioning, but, possibly, depending on a little luck and lots of hard work, a very bright future, then that young person is me, Ray Taylor. By the way, I am a female and Ray is a short for 'Fay Wray'. I know it's odd but you don't know my parents. The only thing they had in common was their love of old movies. 

Anyway, my job is within walking distance of Grant Avenue and maybe because no one else wants to work they are paying me a ton of money. My mortgage payment, which the realtor helped me figure out, would be less than Nana’s rent and I’d have more than enough for the taxes and maintenance, etc. All of this is very exciting. 

The first thing I will do is install a doggy door. The second thing I will do is call a locksmith. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, it’s just that the realtor seems to think it’s important to give you details. It's weird to share plans like these, really, because I have never had an opportunity to make something my own.

But, hey, as long as I'm dreaming, I can tell you I'd like to go to college someday. Buying this new home is the steppingstone on which everything else will depend. Thanks for maybe helping me in this way. 

Hope, Faith, Charity and I are looking forward to your reply. Yes, I changed their names, but they don't seem to mind. They're all in the backseat of my truck as I’m typing this on my laptop. I’ve never seen a dog smile, but I swear they all look really happy right now.

 

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5 Part Series: Real Estate Letter #2

This is a fictional five-part series containing real estate letters written by bidders and presented to the sellers of a local family's estate. Enjoy.

Dear Madam,

My real estate agent told me I had to write a letter to you explaining who I am and why I want your house, so here goes.

I am from Brooklyn, born and bred. My wife Rosalie, who grew up on the same block as the actor Vincent Schiavelli, recently sold our third-generation brownstone after tripping over a rat in the kitchen that outweighed our dog. So now, we live with my cousin Mickey. He and his wife Gina have been good to us but frankly, we can’t wait to get the hell out.

Congratulations to me. I survived 45 years in the sanitation industry and worked my last day two weeks ago. I started counting the days until retirement after falling off the garbage truck last year and breaking my collarbone in two places, clean through. Laying in front of St. Finbar’s Church waiting for the ambulance, I swore to God (and Deacon Hector Blanco, who put a scratchy wool blanket under my head and prayed over me) that as soon as I was out of the hospital I was (a). going to confession and (b). telling my boss I was quitting my job.  

My orthopedic doc suggested I get away while I was on worker’s comp recovering and Rosalie said let's go upstate for a bit. Both my wife’s family and mine used to vacation in Lake George when we were teenagers. Back then our fathers had to drive up route 9 because the Northway wasn’t even finished. Remember that? People had a lot more patience back then. People also had a lot less garbage, I gotta tell ya.

So, we vacationed a little and hired a realtor before returning to Brooklyn. He’s Italian, which Rosalie insisted on, and the one who sent me the listing for your house today.

I’ve become interested in what you might call ‘environmental matters’ over the years. I saw firsthand as a garbageman what too many people, too much crap, and nowhere to put it can do to a city. I’d like to ride out my glory years with free parking, a vegetable garden, and some mountains. I found a decent group to sit with at the cigar shop when we were there and my wife, a helluva performer, will probably end up spending all her time at that community theater downtown. The last thing she was part of in the Heights was the show ‘Gypsy’ and even though she’s 70, she’s still got legs like Bernadette Peters.

So, Rosalie and I ask for your consideration in this matter and hope you will give us Brooklynites a chance at your nice little house. We are driving up tomorrow to lay eyes on it and are prepared to make a full priced offer…with a little something on the side for your trouble.

A domani,

 

Angelo Canizzaro

 

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5 Part Series: Real Estate Letter #1

This is a fictional five-part series containing real estate letters written by bidders and presented to the sellers of a local family's estate. Enjoy. 

Dear Nelson Family, 

On Halloween, my brother and I walked to Grant Avenue.

We put on our Snow White and Woody Woodpecker masks and we ran from the Wrights to the Mountains, the Freeberns, the Endieveris, the Homkeys and the Shevlins.

Your house was always my favorite. Large and colonial (before I knew what a ‘classic’ city colonial was) and full of happy friendly faces. With a pretty little yard and side door off the driveway to what was probably the kitchen, just like the house I grew up in.

I was never scared of trick or treating there. Your mom gave out Milky Ways and it felt like home.

So, when the house came up for sale, I told my kids that we were going to try hard, so very hard, to get it. You see, we moved back here last year after too many years of trials and tribulations in a midwestern state where I’ve lived since college. I know Covid has hit everyone particularly hard but for me, it changed my life forever. I lost my husband and father of my two children. Looking for a fresh start, my kids and I returned to this town and we’ve been trying to secure a home ever since.

I wanted to get settled in time for the start of school, so we relocated in June, and Miles and Quintin have adapted well to the local schools even though we have been living in a small and dingy apartment where we thankfully only have two months left on our one-year lease. They know I am trying my best but sharing a room hasn’t been easy for them. One is sad, the other angry and since Covid took their Dad, they have become far savvier than kids should be in the ups and downs of life. Because they are little, they do not understand why we can’t just buy and move into whatever house pops up.

This one, though, is perfect for us. When I walked through your open house today, I pictured where I would put the Christmas tree and where Miles would store his football gear and where Quintin could work on his model airplanes and where our cat might lounge on a windowsill. I pictured where my husband’s urn of cold gray steel might be placed. I pictured blue delft china, a red strawberry cookie jar, coffee with neighbors and weekend walks to the farmer’s market.

I know it’s down to the wire and you are only accepting bids until 5:00 pm Sunday. I am desperately asking that you look at our bid as more than a number. Please see us. We are a family who you could save from potentially having to return to the Midwest. My mother, who gave the best years of her life and career to a local insurance office, lives a three minute drive away from this exact location and she is repeatedly ill and failing. I am sure you can understand my desire to be close to her as well.

Thank you for reading this. We are grateful for your time and consideration.

 

Carrie Miller

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Day 24/24: Things I ABSOLUTELY Won't Be Buying Today

Day 24/24: 

Honestly, Facebook.

What in holy hell did I click on to warrant this advertisement?

I ABSOLUTELY will NOT be buying these. 

(30 second pause.)

Then again...they could really spice up a snoozy class reunion or a Sunday afternoon at the local microbrewery.

... 🤣

If you know, you know.

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It's June 21, 1979

It's Thursday, June 21, 1979. School's finally out for the summer. I will miss my teacher but because we live in the same two-mile radius, I will probably see her, and the teacher I will have next year, here and there over summer vacation anyway. 

Today, I'm going to eat a bowl of Kaboom for breakfast; a small one because I have to fit into my terry cloth shorty shorts all summer. 

Next, I'm going to sneak some of Mom's blue eyeshadow, because it's so pretty. If I wear sunglasses she probably won't notice. 

I need to slather on a bunch of Sea & Ski because it's a really sunny upstate day. Don't want Mom to come at me with that awful pink Calamine lotion! I am usually covered in that junk all summer because of my bug bites and sunburn. It ruins my look. 

I just got the new Dr. Scholl exercise sandals; they're exactly like Mom's! Super fashionable, they go with all my outfits and I really think I will have the nicest calves on the block by the end of August with these babies. I just have to figure out how to run and ride my bike when I am wearing them. 

Walking out the door, these sandals are harder to walk in than I expected. I also tripped and stepped funny and now my heel hurts like crazy.  

Clip clop. I'm on my way over to my friend's. I will play a competitive round of Rock 'em Sock 'em robots with her brother while she feathers and sprays her hair. It takes her a while but that's ok. I kind of like her brother.

Now her little sister needs us to set up the clown sprinkler. I will have to do it because my friend's hair cannot possibly get wet. As I squat to attach it to the garden hose, I take a quick swig and remember how we ran through that sprinkler all summer last year. I guess we are too grown up for that now. 

I like how it's made by Wham-O. They make a ton of groovy things. I can't stop looking at my cousin's Magic Window, which I am definitely putting on my birthday list this year, and my favorite Wham-O item is my red Superball, which I'll bounce and chase for an hour on our front sidewalk tonight while my parents sit on the porch talking to the neighbors walking by. 

I'll probably put on my sneakers first. 

Can't imagine chasing that ball in these shoes. 

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Day 23/24: Things I Won't Be Buying Today

I took a little break from my* Things I Won't Be Buying Today exercise. I'd like you to think it was because I took a break from writing, but I did not. I just started buying everything in sight and couldn't think of a thing to write about not buying. 

But now, I am trying to learn, once again, to practice restraint and have something to write about not buying! 

It's this. 

I'm not buying this.

Just like pre-buzzcut Britney, Oops, Amazon did it again.

I was browsing the big A for a lifting and firming cream that might help the face which I received as a genetic gift from my mother's side of the family. 

Back in the old days, my Nana would've referred to fifty year old loose skin as "jowls". Now, in 2023 when we call serious economic hardship "stagflation" and pedophiles "minor attracted persons", I will also singsongingly refer to the unpleasantness that is my falling face as my "bonus chin". 

Yay! Bonus chin!

Anyway, as a direct result of my nighttime browsing, chin down on my chest (hmm), neck bent at an angle typically reserved for navel gazing (hmm hmm), bathing in the blue light of the best and worst invention ever (hmm hmm hmm), the big A figured out just what I needed to fix that jacked wattle and started showing me a variety of electric face zappers. 

Ack! No thanks. I'd rather wear turtlenecks in July than willingly play shock the monkey with my own epidermis. But when I didn't take that click bait, it began offering me other things. 

Terry cloth face lift things. 

"Chin Bandage."

What?

Now...I'm trying to understand. 

First, the girl in the advertisement is about eighteen. Hey, don't argue with me. I've seen eighteen year olds online this past week and this girl actually looks overdressed compared to them. 

"But she's only wearing a skimpy towel and some sort of head squishing device", you say.

 "Exactly", I say.

Second, I've only seen a product like this one other time, and that was in the movie "Mommie Dearest". Faye Dunaway, as Joan Crawford, cleansed her face by undergoing a fairly lengthy and kind of psycho skin care routine involving steam and ice cubes (I have to rewatch this to be sure I am getting it right) and some sort of milky cream followed by a tight chin-sculpting head contraption. 

Then she proceeded to beat her kid senseless with Bab-O and a hanger, so I'm not sure this chin strap is a great idea. 

Would this purchase automatically send an alert to DSS? Maybe it should.

And finally, the pink factor. 

It's this sickeningly sweet candied pink color. 

Carnation pink. 

Beach pedicure pink. 

Barbie pink. 

Can you picture the product development team sitting around their huge rectangular black granite table in China? 

"How do we sell a torture device that makes a lady look like a dead ringer for Jacob Marley's ghost while she's wearing it? Also, there will be no eating, drinking or speaking when it's positioned correctly, but, hell, it might temporarily flatten out the fatty underchins of those ridiculous Americans?"

"Hmm."

Small guy in the back says, "Make it...PINK?"

And there you have it. 

Ka-ching!

Add to cart. 

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*inspired by John Magee - check out his blog on Blogger, too. 

Cream Cheese and Olives

In elementary school, we ate lunch in the beige school cafeteria grouped by grade. 

First, second, and third graders ate together during one lunch period, and then fourth, fifth, and sixth graders ate together the following period. In hindsight, I see that keeping the potty-mouthed hormonal sixth graders away from the innocent-as-baby lambs first graders was a magnificent strategy. 

You could smell the cafeteria before you saw it; that murky, steaming hot water the galvanized tins of food sat in in order to stay warm, the perfumed sweat of the lunch ladies and the tang of the lemony floor wax, applied in thin layers nightly so that when we spilled, it beaded up and stayed in one place until Mr. Ovitt was dispatched to come mop it up. 

Responsible sixth graders were chosen to sit at the tops of the long cafeteria tables and maintain order. During my fourth-grade year, the sixth grader who sat in this regal position at my table made everyone in her orbit exceedingly uncomfortable, but this was during a time when children just took their lumps and didn't squeal on one another. This was my childhood; and we all have stories like what I'm about to tell you. 

I was (and still am) a talker and I used to dawdle to lunch, yapping nonstop with my friends, my teachers, and the lunch aide, Mrs. Herlihy, who stood paramount over us with her clipboard, strolling around the cafeteria keeping watch. By the time I made it to my table each day, the only seat available was next to the top banana sixth grader, to whom I will refer as "The Wasp". I would, for the sake of this piece, call her "The Queen Bee", due to her top of the table stature, but that would be an insult to the fluffy, gentle pollinators. 

Wasps will sting unprovoked and so did she. When I opened my carton of milk, unwrapped my sandwich or brought out my fat little blue and white fruit thermos each day, she'd peer over, uninvited, with her probiscis and ask me with hardened, dark eyes if my mother hated me. Swallowing anxiously, I'd eat in uncharacteristic silence for a chatty kid, and just stare at the pictures on my Krofft Superstar lunchbox. When she got no reaction from me, she'd move down the line, prodding and criticizing other lunches, haircuts, sneakers, intellectual capacities; whatever she deemed as fair game for her nasty brand of perpetual insults. 

One day I brought my favorite sandwich, cream cheese and olives on rye bread. At home, my mom and I used to eat it together on the weekends, but I rarely got it in my lunchbox, for it took some extra preparation and Mom usually packed extra grainy "Branola" bread in my lunches during the week. 

Unpeeling the waxed paper, I saw that it was a half sandwich. I expected this, as Mom had just told me I needed to lose some weight. I remember distinctly that I weighed 54 pounds and for a fourth grader, that was a little too much. I hadn't had a growth spurt where height was concerned and my older cousin Christopher's hand me down Toughskins were too tight in the thighs and rear, so, half sandwich it was. 

Well, The Wasp noticed immediately that I had half of my usual sandwich and started chiding me. 

"What's with the half sandwich? Are you poor?"

"Are your parents starving you?"

"What is that anyway? Cream cheese and what? Ick, so gross!"

And she proceeded to crow to everyone at our table to take a gander at the disgusting food I was eating. I remember leaning into my lunch, shielding it from the prying eyes of my tablemates. Then, I sat up straight and said directly to The Wasp, 

"I know. Gross. I don't really like it, but I'll eat it."

And that was my first betrayal of my family, my heritage, my home life, for the sake of being a cool kid. A kid who conformed to societal expectations about lunch. A kid who didn't eat cream cheese and olives. 

The Wasp couldn't have been happier to see me squirm and bend to her way of seeing the world. From that day forward, she spent less time picking on me and more time focusing on other weak and quiet children in her midst. She verbally speared them, mocking their lunches brought from home. I remember insincerely chuckling quietly alongside her, knowing I was wrong, watching her ebony eyes narrow and her skinny fingers point at someone's gelatinous ham sandwich or off-brand store-bought dessert. What I felt most was an overwhelming sense of relief that it wasn't me in her crosshairs, underscored by a filthy soul-crushing grime of having sold out for this safety.

Contemplating this scene 45 years later, I cannot recall what The Wasp ever ate. I don't remember her having a lunchbox (and I remember my classmates' Snoopy, Bionic Woman and Herbie the Love Bug lunch boxes with absolute clarity) so it's possible that she bought a hot lunch via the lunch line every day. Her parents, who owned a newer built, beautiful split-level home, certainly could have afforded to buy school-prepared lunches every day and her mom didn't appear to be the Betty Crocker homemaker type, so maybe that was why The Wasp felt the need to be so nosy about what others were bringing in, and why she felt so entitled to heckle us. Maybe her Mom didn't have time, or want to make time, to thoughtfully pack a Superstar Barbie lunch box with a salami sandwich and a small pink note wishing her good luck on field day. 

The Wasp is still around and she is still deriding others. I see her posts on Facebook because she is friends with a few of my friends and she still points out what everyone is doing that falls below her prickly standards. She is still publicly snickering at people's choices. She is still sticking her stinger where it doesn't belong.

I steer clear, though I would love to someday drive by her house, cream cheese and olive sandwich held aloft through my sunroof and tell her to fuck off. 

My mother loved me. 

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