Home Guru: All the World’s a Stage and Our Homes Head the Bill
When I was a young man, I thought that staying home was being “no place” and that the high points of my life were to be played out on the stage of the world, away from where I slept at night. But as I look back, I find that my homes have been principal players in the script of my life story.
If art imitates life, one might ponder where great literature and the other arts would be without the background exposition provided by the home.
In literature, the home helps develop the plot under varied roofs, from “This is the House Jack Built,” the clever nursery rhyme that is a cumulative tale of how one event affects another, to “The House of the Seven Gables” by Nathaniel Hawthorne with its suggestions of the supernatural and witchcraft, to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” that President Lincoln said started the Civil War.
And in that war, the power of the background score was demonstrated by the tale that “Home, Sweet Home” was banned from being played in Union camps for fear that it was so redolent of hearth and home that it might incite desertion.
In movies, how could Scarlett O’Hara’s character be defined without her unwavering devotion to Tara? In “Miracle on 34th Street,” isn’t a Cape Cod home the object of a little girl’s vision of a perfect life? The home also has supported the plots for great drama, even horror. Consider “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Amityville Horror” and “Home Alone.”
While some homes set the stage with visions of great power and influence–Versailles, Buckingham Palace, The White House–even humble abodes can be named to project their characters.
Bill Wilson, co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, named his Westchester residence Stepping Stones; actress Helen Hayes called her Nyack home Pretty Penny to convey its price; and I live in The Ebenezer White House, named for a Revolutionary War physician and early state senator.
Homes and even their rooms remain indelibly attached to the major scenes of our lives. I remember exactly where I was at home when I learned that JFK was assassinated, as well as where I stood transfixed in my bedroom as the first plane hit the World Trade Center’s north tower, realizing that I was to have been in that building at that very moment had it not been for a late postponement of a meeting.
Sometimes homes share a double bill. For instance, I am hoping for the restoration of a property I have listed called the Adams-Bernstein House, and I know the history of those two owners from different centuries, each quite different. The first was a simple farmer from the early 1800s, the second a sophisticated New York City physician who bought it in the 1930s.
A home can also play into the ancestral bearings of our life’s drama. My wife sometimes likes to remind me that she comes from Lithuanian royalty on her mother’s side. When she and her mother visited their native land after the fall of the Iron Curtain, it was very important to them to visit the castle bearing their family name–Masalkis.
At the time, perhaps because of the lack of incentive caused by the former Communist regime, schedules meant very little. Upon arrival, my wife found that the custodian arbitrarily was closing the castle early. Not one to be so easily dispatched, she protested in perfect Lithuanian, “Hey, we’re the Masalkis family!” and shamed the caretaker into staying longer while they toured the castle.
My side of the family, while far from royal, has an interesting ancestral home as well. My dear Aunt Helen, now 95, tells me that during World War II the Nazis occupied the Primavera villa in Chieti, Italy because it was the grandest residence in town. When I learned that, I felt that my character development was kicked up a notch.
Today, most of us live in modern housing, which serves more as a bare stage in which we dress the set with our fixtures, colors, fabrics and furnishings, and the wealthier among us can do that grandly.
But whether our homes are manorial or ever so humble, they occupy center stage in our life stories, confirmed by Dorothy Gale’s testimonial, after her excursion over the rainbow and back, that “there’s no place like home.”
Bill Primavera is a licensed Realtor® affiliated with Coldwell Banker and a lifestyles journalist who writes regularly as The Home Guru. Visit his website at www.PrimaveraRealEstate.com and, if you would like to consult with him about buying or selling a home, contact him directly at 914-522-2076.
