Now we are all hanging around Rics Cafe waiting for the next plain to Lisbon or at least for the values of our homes to come back. Home sales may be surging but the foreclosures and short sales are depressing the market even further. Add to that the restriction of credit and every homeowner knows then he has really only two options–walk from your home and let the bank have it or wait, wait, wait. That restless American spirit has been grounded for the foreseeable future.
We now have to learn to live without change. We may have made a mistake before the crash and can’t stand our new homes but we are stuck. We are stuck with our decisions and this is a new reality for Americans. We experiment. We try things out and then we move on. It is that restless spirit that settled the country and makes us such an industrious people. But now we cannot move. We cannot sell our homes.
So we sit in our Casablanca. We pass the time with nightly discussion of possibly selling. Riding Zillow to see how far homes values have fallen. Hearing about so and so who did a short sale and got out and we are envious. But for most of use foreclosure or a shortsale is not a reality. We have too much in our homes or it goes against our idea of what owning a home means. So we sit and watch the television, we surf the sites, we listen for any sign of a market rebound. Mostly we wait, and wait….wait…looking for that next plane to Lisbon.
William Hazelgrove’s latest novel is Rocket Man. His highly praised first three novels Ripples,(Pantonne) LJ highly recommended, ALA Editors Choice, Tobacco Sticks, (Bantam, Best Novels of the Nineties Doris Lesher, Starred Review PW, LJ highly recommended) and Mica Highways, (Bantam,) covered the scope of a coming of age, a courtroom drama set in Virginia in the forties, and a mystery set in the South. Rocket Man is a satire about a man struggling to keep his home. William Hazelgrove is the Hemingway writer in residence for the Ernest Hemingway Foundation of Oak Park. He has written reviews and features for USA TODAY and been the subject of stories in the NY Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, and NPR’S All Things Considered.. More information can be gathered at http://www.billhazelgrove.com
