Commotion in the Pews

Twenty years ago (give or take) I moved into the first house I’ve called “ours” (my wife has an equal share). Our next door neighbor was a great fellow, also named Joe. A better neighbor you would not find. This is what’s left of his house at noon on Monday.

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So much has gone wrong in this situation, all of it eerily paralleling the course of the ship of state. This picture, and the story, should be a warning to all.

Joe took an early retirement in a wave of downsizing. He was not an old man, but like many blue-collar workers who were being swept out of the workforce in the post-industrial age, he was left adrift in an era when you didn’t need to be at work at 0500 to fire up the glue for the binding machine. All done digitally now, thank-you-very-much.

So Joe came home. He puttered around the house. He sat in his kitchen and drank coffee and read the paper. And he slowly lost interest in much of anything except God and his family.

A few years roll by, and Joe starts to have health issues. In specific, he’s got horrendous problems with balance and tinnitus. Walking his dog for miles is no longer an option to pass time. The dog died, and a new dog came into a house where walks were short and the master was frail. The dog, like most animals, took advantage of this and dragged Joe around.

Joe loved the dog, but didn’t discipline him very well. The dog bit people and grew fat and aggressive. Nobody would tell him not to behave that way.

A few more years pass by and the go-go days of the housing boom are upon us. An evil party (no names, it would get me sued) convinced Joe to take out a second mortgage and give them the money. They would pay the monthly installments, but their credit was bad and Joe’s was good. Sure enough, Joe was a helping guy. He did it for them out of kindness.

More time passes and the relative who persuaded him to do this dies. Unexpectedly. At a young age. The remaining member of that family left Joe holding the bag on the mortgage, refusing to help.

Joe, now short one beloved relative, and saddled with a giant mortgage on a meager retirement, fell into a depression and quit fixing things around the house. Life was pretty lousy: bad hearing, no balance, money gone, beloved relative dead.

But like many of his generation, Joe kept on ticking over, making it against the tide. Sorrow and poverty couldn’t take him down so easily.

Then one of his children died. A child who, like most adult children, simultaneously loved and bickered with her dad. But she was there when he needed support, and her passing left him leaning in the wind. Not much was supporting him at that point, but he was still on two feet.

But the dog died shortly afterward. The incorrigible, fat, obnoxious dog that was his best friend, needed to be put down due to an illness. The final nail was pulled out of the support system for Joe.

In just under two years he died. His family gathered around in the final days, but I had known it was coming. I visited Joe in the hospital and hospice. He’d thrown in the towel.

To recap:

Lost job due to change in production process.

Insurmountable debt due to go-go housing bubble.

Death in the family.

Pet deceased.

This is where the story turns to the really sad tale of what a socialist government and the crony capitalists push for more power in the progressive way.

The mortgage company that held the paper on Joe’s house wouldn’t talk to me. I told them several times that Joe had passed away, offered to send a copy of the death certificate. I told them I’d like to make an offer on the house. I hoped to rehab it and see a family move in next door. Nope, not interested. Seems that if you don’t know that the customer is deceased, and you just keep mounting up debt, you don’t have to move the paper to the loss column.

For the last four years I mowed the lawn, shoveled the snow, trimmed the hedges. I called the cops when house strippers tried to steal the copper. (The police dragged them out in cuffs. It was sweet). All to no avail.

The property was eventually declared abandoned. I don’t know if the mortgage company ever finished the problem out in an official foreclosure. I do know that the roof started to fray around the edges, creating the largest pigeon coop in Minnesota.  I also know that once that sign went on the door it was a sad day.

The usual suspects came in to play at this point. Mail kept being shoved through the slot (including mine when the postal carriers didn’t look closely) and newspapers littered the decaying concrete steps just below the abandoned building notice. Not their job to think, just to shove mail through the slot and toss papers on the lawn.

I went to the city council meetings where the property was discussed. I tried again to get the property but it was in legal limbo. You see, in Saint Paul, you have to bring a house up to the new code in order to rent/sell it once it is declared abandoned. Rather prohibitive. In any event, it was never put up for auction once it was declared abandoned.

Time went by, inspections regularly noted that it was decaying further. Finally it was slated for demolition. I found out by virtue of the fact that the electric utility cut the power lines and capped the gas. That backhoe is hard to miss.

Last week the giant machine appeared in the back yard. Scared Stormy to death.

This week we watched for two days as they crushed what was left of a 100 year old brick house with wood floors, stained glass, and plaster walls. A place where more than 1 family grew up and left the nest. A place, that with a little less obstinacy on the part of a greedy lender, a blind city council that tried to eliminate “flipping” with draconian measures, and a system that encouraged capitalism rather than drove it out of the city, this house might once again be a home.

As it is, there is merely some fresh dirt and grass seed where friends of mine once lived. An empty spot on my block. A metaphor for our country.

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