Rant #3,225: Colours

I remain in Facebook jail for the foreseeable future as I put together today’s Rant, and actually, the social networking platform has deemed my posts so shocking that I won’t be back to my normal posting until a few days after my family and I are in our new environs.

So several weeks into house selling, how is the process actually going?

I have told you about every other aspect of this journey—with its multiple potholes--so what about how the process is actually proceeding?

It is doing as well as it could be going, I guess.

We have had a handful if people show great interest in the house, and all told, we probably have had at least 60 to 70 groups of people come into the house with the hope of purchasing what we are offering.

A couple of those groups have gone the next step, which is to bring in an inspector to check over the house and look for any problems within the home’s structure, its wiring, its heating and ventilation systems.

Some have pulled out of the competition for one reason or another, and some are still in it.

That is about all I am going to say about it, and as you can imagine, things change almost on a daily basis with this house.

There are some interesting things beyond the numbers to talk about here.

Just who is going to actually be triumphant in the “house-stakes” is even more interesting than the pursuit.

I am going to preface the next part of today’s Rant by stating, and stating emphatically that I am just seeing the color “green” as we are selling this house.

I am looking for the biggest bang for the buck here, and what with the reverse mortgage still in place—and the interest rate growing each day while we try to unload this house—my sister and I aren’t going to be getting that much money from the eventual sale, but at least it will be something.

Something is better than nothing, but our something isn’t going to be too much.

So we are looking at the “green,” and nothing else here, as we sell the house.

Of all those who have seen the house, I would say about 50 percent are Caucasian.

The other 50 percent are a mix of Indian, Middle Eastern, Hispanic and Black, and it appears that the non-Whites are the ones with the deepest pockets, so I would bet that the eventual buyer will be non-White, which is just such an interesting development in this entire situation.

You have to understand that when my family and I moved into the house in 1971, our environs were as lily White as they could possibly be.

Buyers who were leaving New York City for Long Island were generally looking for that during this “Great White Flight” period, and realtors knew that, and steered us and thousands of other families to areas that satisfied our needs.

You can call that racist, you can call it unfair, you can call it contrary to what “The American Dream” signifies, but that is a fact that I think no one involved in the process back than would, or could, deny.

We were White, so we fit right into those environs, but we were also Jewish, and on our block, we were the first—and to my knowledge, still the only—Jewish homeowners.

And once certain people found that out, they made it very uncomfortable for us.

The first holiday season we spent there, our Hanukkah menorah went up as it always did, this time right in our front window, and I think that is when people realized that we were not what out last name might have signified to them, that we were Jewish.

We had a brick thrown through our window that first Hanukkah in our new home, shattering the window and knocking the menorah over—which we put right up in its spot among all of the broken glass.

There were other incidents during our first five or six years living in this house.

In fact, our very neighbors called us anti-Semitic names from the safety of their own homes … that is how bad it got here in those early days … and the police did nothing about it.

(And it wasn’t just on our street.

The very day we moved into our home, on July 28, 1971, on the other side of town, a home that was sold to a Black family was set on fire and burned to the ground. The family got the message, and moved elsewhere.

We also got the message, but we held our ground.)

Today, the incidents my family and I went through would be labeled as “anti-Semitic” and would be vehemently investigated by the police, but back then, the police listed such incidents as “childish pranks” and wouldn’t do much of anything to stop them and bring the perpetrators to justice.

Moving ahead to the present time, the likelihood that a non-White family will buy this house is not guaranteed, but is still great.

Times have changed, laws have changed, and even with all the change, I wonder if whoever buys this house will still have to go through similar incidents to what my family went through 50 years ago as we held our ground in an area that did not want us there once they found out that we were Jewish.

I have to wonder about that as I ponder about the “green,” which to me, is so much more important at this moment in time.