Starting Over
The gods of the universe are ironic as hell and love messing with you.
It’s been three years since I was last involved in architectural design. Now it seems I’ll get another crack at it. Retirement can wait!
I’ve written a number of blogs on the art of architecture, mainly to relieve the shock of going cold turkey from an all-consuming career. Writing about architecture is all well and good, but it’s not the same.
Sick person that I am, I’ve missed negotiating with intractable librarians, while designing their libraries and molding them to urban spaces — the buildings, not the librarians. Perhaps I don’t miss the yelling, like at landscape contractors: ‘green side up!’ No one’s perfect.
They asked me in the ninth grade what I wanted to do for a living, and I took a wild guess though didn’t hit stride until nearly 40. Architecture is like writing, only with lots of liability insurance. As the joke goes, where else can you have this much fun for so little money?
In 1989, four of us borrowed against our houses to start the business. Thirty mostly profitable years later, we sold to another firm. While I was happy to be getting my money out of the business, it wasn’t a merger made in heaven — more like the other place. After two years, our buyers’ CEO informed me —via email — he didn’t plan to renew my contract.
Truth be told, I didn’t like him either. Being sixty-nine at the time, I’m sure had nothing to do with it, perish the thought. Unlike many put in that same position, I had options beyond suing for age discrimination. Besides, who’d want to work for a scumbag who can’t even tell you to your face?
I had a decision to make — search for a position in another architectural firm to finish out a career — or fall back on my original passion for writing fulltime. Time to finish the novel!
When you’re twenty, time is an enormous canvas you can paint without ever running out of room. When you’re seventy, the space is more finite; in fact, you can count the years ahead and hope nothing gets to you first. So now I write daily. Novel, short stories, blogs, and essays on Medium. The end goal is to go out in a roar.
It’s been 3 years since I last took up sketch pen and paper, or opened a Revit (CAD) model. I still get architectural journals, but it’s too depressing to follow what other architects are doing — and being honest, I’m too dismissive. Bitter? Nah… So that’s the background.
We sold our old beach house a year ago — despite the pandemic and the best efforts of a local closing attorney to sabotage the deal — and I thought ‘well, that’s that,’ and turned the page, like the philosopher, Bob Seger, advised. I had to break the news to Layla the husky.
As long as the pandemic still raged, I had zero interest in returning to the Outer Banks until everyone was vaccinated; it never occurred to me that more than a few pockets of cranks and crazies would decline the shots. D and I got ours, bitch Donald was sent south to Florida where he belongs, and life appeared to be on the uptake again. Until it wasn’t. What I failed to appreciate was just how many cranks and crazies were around — and this after the Capital riot, so I should have known better than being so wildly optimistic.
Through the long weeks of the pandemic, I worked at the blog and the novel and began to write more for Medium, where to my amazement I was slowly gaining readers. Medium, being a product of the internet, refers to them as ‘followers,’ which sounds more like disciples than readers. Though these readers are also writers — and that’s what hooked me.
Meanwhile, D stayed busy selling software from her loft office with a 360 degree view. Unbeknownst to me, she was also studying Outer Banks real estate. She’s always had an itch for the beach greater than my own. I like it well enough, but she was born beside the Mediterranean Sea and ate fresh seafood daily until she was six — that’s more than genetics at work.
She found a time share for a place on the beach — but the other owners wouldn’t accept dogs, even after we offered $10K more against our very well behaved husky damaging the house — yes, every six months a ton of dog hair, but who doesn’t have that problem?
Then D discovered a house for sale close to where we used to vacation years back. The sellers had bought it a few months earlier, paying $100,000 more than its asking price, buying into a bidding war. The story goes, they were planning to knock the house down and rebuild; it was a perfectly nice place, but some people are just crazy. Subsequently, they had bought another property and were dumping the first one. We made an offer but the owners wouldn’t budge off their self-inflated price. Someone else paid their asking price — the perfect sign of an overheated real estate market.
Late last week, out of the blue, D saw an undeveloped property become available in the town of Southern Shores. Not too many lots left on the Outer Banks, unless you churn up to four-wheel-drive country and live with the wild ponies.
At the heart of Southern Shores lies Dogwood Trail, known by cyclists for the shade of the near continuous live oaks you cruise beneath — in the summer it’s four miles of cool bliss. Our site is a half mile north, with a fringe of shrub sized live oaks. A clean site sitting high enough for views of Currituck Sound and the Atlantic on a quiet cul-de-sac away from the summer mobs. Yes, with hurricanes and rising sea levels on one of the most fragile sandbars on the East Coast, but nothing’s perfect.
Google street views can only tell you so much.
Though we’re familiar with the area, we haven’t planted feet on the lane, squinting uphill, trying to picture views from the top of the site. We made an offer, sight unseen, like the most irrational real estate buyers, and it was accepted, meaning we paid too much.
But I haven’t lost the instinct to visualize 3D from 2D sketches; it’s a necessary skill for an architect. The property sits thirty feet above sea level, but we’ll still build it on piers, and spend lots on wind-proofing the structure. I have dreams of a sundeck facing the Sound for the winter months, and a screen porch for the insect months. Doesn’t need to be the largest house — we’re not the largest family. Layla loves sitting on a beach deck nearly as much as we do.
Most folks think of beaches only in the summer, but walking a cold, drizzly shore on New Year’s Day is instructive for any who choose to be there. That time of year, you won’t come across women in small bikinis, but one can dream. Besides, the local oysters are to die for, and Roadside makes a mean tequila martini.
If I could describe the intangibles of living by the sea… the distances you may recognize but never measure… the oriental passage of time… the primitive, the foreign and the raging fury of the planet laid out like a spectacle to witness… just before it cows you with its indifference or swallows you whole… I might could write about it. I should probably just stick to architecture.
