I’m still loving life with my CDs in the office.

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I received two calls yesterday from the Landlady from Hell. In the first, she acknowledged receipt of our notice and told us what good tenants we are and that she’s going to miss us. (Excuse me while I dry my eyes...) Then she asked about the repairs I had mentioned in my note, sounding all surprised that there was anything wrong, as if I hadn’t written and called about these things before. Faithful readers know about the bathroom floor and the (un)handyman who never showed up to fix it. And then there’s the Return of the Termites feature that is being filmed in widescreen Termitevision in the walls of our house. They’ve been hollowing out a few production studios at various locations, the most popular being the shower and adjoining wall, and the back kitchen wall (which was "repaired" in fall 1999). She said that she had another fix-it guy lined up, and he would be calling me, and that she already had a potential renter who would like to see the place this weekend. And then she mentioned as an aside that her uncle (the man who actually owns the house) was in a coma and wasn’t expected to make it, and that as soon as he died, she and her brother would be putting the house up for sale.

In the second call, she grilled me about the downstairs neighbors and said she’d rather not show the house to potential renters quite yet. Then she told me that her uncle had died. It was his 90th birthday.

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Sammy always seemed so much older than that, maybe because he was so far along the path to being completely blind and deaf, and had such a hard time getting around. I didn’t know him very well at all, although we lived above him for just over a year before he went into a nursing home in California.

I know that he used to work in the music industry. He had thousands of 78 and 33 records, a lot of them jazz. When they cleaned out the house after he went away, the LfH and her brother tried to sell them, but they didn’t have the patience for it or the foresight to donate them to Hawaii Public Radio for their fundraising sale, and they dumped them in the trash. We rescued a few Hawaiian records.

He was a packrat. In addition to the records, we rescued from the trash quite a few old tools and pieces of hardware, including the glass doorknobs that used to be throughout the house. The side and back "gardens" are bordered with a hundred or so old whiskey bottles buried upside-down in the soil. There were piles and piles and piles of other stuff they pulled out of there, too.

He and Mr. Miyahara next door would sit out on the lanai and smoke cigars in the evenings. The smell would waft up into our place, and it would remind me of Papa. Mr. Miyahara was a good friend to Sammy, and would check on him every day and do little things around the house for him, although they are about the same age. Sammy would go over there to visit, too, a good 20-minute operation involving shuffling slowly along the fence.

The last time I saw Sammy was when we were called outside by our neighbors across the street right before the second Christmas we were there. Sammy had become disoriented, lost hold of the fence, and ended up most of the way across the street. It was dark and he couldn’t see much of anything anyway, and apparently he tripped on the opposite curb. Fortunately he wasn’t badly hurt, just minor scrapes on his forehead and hands. He was very fortunate that there weren’t any cars right then -- our street is quite busy for a residential street. Kevin and I got him (slowly) back across the street between us and settled him in his chair. His niece was called and told about it (until that point, she hadn’t been in the picture at all). I left to be in my sister’s wedding in Cleveland, and when I came back, he was gone.

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These recent developments with the current place just confirm that it’s a good time to move. I can’t imagine the LfH spending much money or effort or time fixing what needs to be fixed, knowing that a buyer will just knock it down anyway. And I’d much rather not have to scramble to find an acceptable place to live when a new buyer tells us to leave. And who knows what might happen to the house itself, now that the rental income isn’t needed to cover the nursing home bills anymore -- this is the same LfH who last year strongly encouraged us several times to get renter’s insurance to cover our things in case there was "a fire or something" after the downstairs apartment was vacant for almost a year. (We already had insurance.) It’s not too much of a stretch for me to imagine the downstairs lease not being renewed, the house being burned, the insurance being collected, and a nicely cleared lot being sold. But this is complete and total speculation on my part.
- posted by Lori @ 5:56:00 PM | permanent link | |