By: Revanche

The castle on the hill

February 23, 2012

A jaunt

Driving through Los Gatos, the hilly, ridgey, close roads and tall trees parts of town, bursting with real fall colors last November, PiC and our friends and I got to admiring homes and the lands they sat on. Estates, practically, the big houses set back into the cliffs, with horse property, a barn and proper lands set round it.

Nothing at all like what we’d acclimated to near the city with our city streets and dirty little suburbs. No clean suburbs for us, you have to make a lot more before you can afford those. We roved by loads of homes, peering through the trees and vines. Good job it was broad daylight or we’d have looked awfully suspicious.

And then we drove past the castle. An honest to goodness castle thing, twenty rooms it must have had, another structure on the side of the property, a well-into-the-double-digit-millions price tag.

It tumbled me back, way back, to those wonder years, when the future was jostling full of sheer and opaque possibilities, unfettered by realism, untempered by failures.

I could remember when a $200,000 house might well have been a $3M house for all that I had any money and that meant I could dream of anything at all.

Anything at all ….

I dreamt of buying not one, but two houses. One for me, one for my parents. Right on the main boulevard of the town, whatever town I lived in, so I could use the walking trail I imagined would be there with my half a dozen well trained dogs.  Or ride my horse, the one that stabled in my back barn. I’d definitely have the best library with a sliding ladder ever.

My parents would be neighbors, of course, they’d never wanted to be far from me.  Well, Mom didn’t. If I had married and had children, she wanted to be Right There. They had to be downwind of the barn though, I didn’t want to hear any complaints about my critters. 🙂

I’d have two degrees, graduate and professional, and would be working and saving half that income; I’d be volunteering in my spare time, and setting up a charitable foundation, eventually.

Clearly, an unimaginative kid. A secure home base (note I bought two homes outright, I wasn’t dreaming of any mortgages), to take care of my family, to continue the volunteering I was already doing and be surrounded by pets and books. Basically I wanted to be a kid in adult form. Or something like that.

Twenty years later

I never dreamt I’d have spent this much time dinking around on the Internet when formulating Ye Grand Planne. Or any of the other things I ended up doing instead. But when I look at houses now, it’s a little less aspirationally now that I can attach a price tag of salary and hours to each thing.  (Mortgages, interest rates, take home pay, egads!)

I still want the 6 dogs, but will settle for three. I shouldn’t get a horse. But the library is absolutely still on the list. Sometimes, things make me happy.

One house. My dad wouldn’t want to own or live in a whole house alone even if I could afford it.

As for the degrees … As much as it feels like being a failure not to have three degrees in total, I’m not yet willing to pay for another degree that won’t pay for itself several times over or that isn’t paid for by an employer at this point in my career. Things may change but the career trajectory is doing well enough to focus on making substantial strides there rather than taking time off to go to school.

Add:
More travel to see interesting things, eat delicious things, talk to interesting people.
More quality time with the people I don’t see enough.
That charitable foundation, yes. And I still want to be a billionaire to make that work. Don’t care if it’s not strictly necessary. Want.
And the things I can’t have: perfect health. My family intact. So instead, peace. Better health. Happiness. Contentment. And yes, ambition.

:: Do you remember your old dreams? Do you know what happened to them? Have you replaced them with new ones or are you still making them come true?

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