How the other 0.05% lives.
Sep. 15th, 2003 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivkaSaturday morning, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
curiousangel and I were invited to brunch at a neighbor's house, to welcome new families to the neighborhood. (No, we weren't on the list of new people to be welcomed, but at least we were invited to the brunch, right?)
I've posted pictures of our house before. It's a lovely, unassuming, down-at-heels, three-story brick rowhouse, and actually one of the smaller houses on the block. A lot of the larger houses, which were once mansions, have been broken up into apartments. We knew that some of them were still single-owner-occupied, but I think I sort of imagined that they were essentially larger versions of our own house.
Nope.
Our neighbors who hosted the brunch live in a mansion. An elaborately carved paneled, chandeliered, leaded-glassed, walk-in fireplaced, large walled courtyard and drivewayed, enormous added greatroom in the back with full-scale marble pillars and a vaulted roof-ed, mansion. Everything was exquisite and lovely and perfectly tasteful. Georgette Heyer characters would feel perfectly at home. John Jacob Astor would probably feel perfectly at home. And all of it four doors down from our comfortable shabby house.
We perched on oversized chairs in the greatroom and ate coffee cake and talked with our neighbors, mostly about houses and parking and neighborhood history and the car that drove up on the sidewalk and hit someone's house in a tragic parallel-parking accident. Everyone was very friendly. It felt a lot like talking with my parents' friends, except that it was taking place in something that looked, more than anything else, like a movie set.
I wonder whether, if we stay in the neighborhood, we'll become part of these people's social circle. It doesn't seem likely that we'd be close friends, but there certainly wasn't anything discordant about our presence at the brunch. We'd fit in all right as aquaintances... and that gives me the strangest sort of double-vision feeling. We fit in there, and we fit in at an alt.polycon, and at a gathering of Young Democrats, and at the Baltimore Folk Music Society, and that just feels a bit odd. The same people shouldn't know bothpixel and Mr. and Mrs. Neighbor.
It's clarified something for me: I don't want that. I thought their home was lovely, but I prefer ours. Oh, I'd like to make improvements to ours - one of the people at the brunch had a wonderful idea about opening up more windows at the back of our house and building a deck - but I don't want to live in an elaborate mansion. The things I want, we'll be able to afford as soon ascuriousangel is employed again. That's a nice thing to know.
curiousangel and I were invited to brunch at a neighbor's house, to welcome new families to the neighborhood. (No, we weren't on the list of new people to be welcomed, but at least we were invited to the brunch, right?)I've posted pictures of our house before. It's a lovely, unassuming, down-at-heels, three-story brick rowhouse, and actually one of the smaller houses on the block. A lot of the larger houses, which were once mansions, have been broken up into apartments. We knew that some of them were still single-owner-occupied, but I think I sort of imagined that they were essentially larger versions of our own house.
Nope.
Our neighbors who hosted the brunch live in a mansion. An elaborately carved paneled, chandeliered, leaded-glassed, walk-in fireplaced, large walled courtyard and drivewayed, enormous added greatroom in the back with full-scale marble pillars and a vaulted roof-ed, mansion. Everything was exquisite and lovely and perfectly tasteful. Georgette Heyer characters would feel perfectly at home. John Jacob Astor would probably feel perfectly at home. And all of it four doors down from our comfortable shabby house.
We perched on oversized chairs in the greatroom and ate coffee cake and talked with our neighbors, mostly about houses and parking and neighborhood history and the car that drove up on the sidewalk and hit someone's house in a tragic parallel-parking accident. Everyone was very friendly. It felt a lot like talking with my parents' friends, except that it was taking place in something that looked, more than anything else, like a movie set.
I wonder whether, if we stay in the neighborhood, we'll become part of these people's social circle. It doesn't seem likely that we'd be close friends, but there certainly wasn't anything discordant about our presence at the brunch. We'd fit in all right as aquaintances... and that gives me the strangest sort of double-vision feeling. We fit in there, and we fit in at an alt.polycon, and at a gathering of Young Democrats, and at the Baltimore Folk Music Society, and that just feels a bit odd. The same people shouldn't know both
pixel and Mr. and Mrs. Neighbor.It's clarified something for me: I don't want that. I thought their home was lovely, but I prefer ours. Oh, I'd like to make improvements to ours - one of the people at the brunch had a wonderful idea about opening up more windows at the back of our house and building a deck - but I don't want to live in an elaborate mansion. The things I want, we'll be able to afford as soon as
curiousangel is employed again. That's a nice thing to know.
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Date: 2003-09-15 08:25 am (UTC)About fitting in to such varied groups: It amuses me sometimes to note what different roles I/we seem to take in different groups. At alt.polycon we are more and more seen as the old stable boring ones with no drama in our lives. In my volunteer work (where I am not out) they see me as having an unusual liberated lifestyle because I live downtown with chosen family, don't have biological children, and didn't grow up here. At lunch I am one of the Cute Young Things