A house of one's own

By TAD BARTIMUS

I am craving a permanent home not subject to a landlord's whim or a stranger's rules. I want to be able to drive nails in the wall, paint the bathroom chartreuse, bury the ashes of a beloved dog under a lilac bush. I need to know the Christmas tree will stand in the same corner every year. My craving is normal; even the Paleolithic cave dwellers of Lascaux felt the urge to draw on their walls.

Alan Greenspan's worries, Bill Clinton's sleaze and the fiscal crisis in Brazil (as well as just about everywhere else) all have contributed to the lowest fixed-rate mortgage in 30 years. But for millions of us, 6.75 percent borrowed money is irrelevant. Maybe there isn't enough food to last the month, or downsizing has taken away credit, or nothing's available where we want to be (home is a state of mind as well as an address).

Every gardener who lives without grass, every amateur mechanic tinkering without a garage, every fledgling basketball player shooting without a hoop dreams of the freedom of home ownership.

I've been living out of a suitcase for six years, my stuff gathering dust in a storage locker that costs a small fortune thousands of miles away. My temporary home is a just-sold rental in a beautiful place I can neither afford to live in nor bear to leave (it's that state of mind thing). Soon, I will have to choose between moving to something I can afford or ... what? It's the constant dilemma of the dispossessed.

We all have a profound need for shelter, to be sheltered, to place a barrier between us and wolves, real and imagined. Every parent raising a child in the Projects knows this. Newlyweds working three jobs to keep a leased roof over their heads know this. Single parents trying to further their education, work and raise their kids at the same time know this. Our worst nightmare is the sleeping man on the steam grate, the bag lady on the park bench. Why else turn away and pretend they aren't really there?

Every gardener who lives without grass, every amateur mechanic tinkering without a garage, every fledgling basketball player shooting without a hoop dreams of the freedom of home ownership. Transients mostly wish they weren't, no matter how comfy their temporary circumstance. It's the books and our other stuff, you see, that go with us. The records/tapes/CDs. The violets collected over decades. What to do with all the photo albums? Oh, to be able to put down roots, stay awhile, unpack.

Home owners forget the initial joy of possession, see only the leaky faucets, a dead furnace in January, a higher property tax bill. My parents always owned houses. Each had a sameness about it: sturdy kitchen, cozy bedrooms with eaves, a porch big enough for a swing. Place is as much a part of memory as people. When I became a gypsy reporter I gave fellow wanderers the 111 Hawthorne Drive address because I knew somehow I'd always get the message. I took my family home for granted, it was the place where, if I went there, they'd have to take me in. That house is gone now. I haven't replaced it with one to fill the void.

So I think a lot about what my "permanent" home will be when I can find it and afford it. Big windows and a huge bathtub. No trophy gewgaws like gold shower heads or granite countertops, no egomaniacal statements via 20-foot ceilings or five-car garages. Just simple wood floors, a round kitchen table big enough to fit everybody for spaghetti. A quiet cubbyhole in which to write columns, a forever view. Add a full moon and it's perfect.

All dreams are.

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