How the other 0.05% lives.

[rivka]

Saturday morning, 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.

Comments

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I've often felt torn about the "upper crust" thing. We're doing well for ourselves, don't get me wrong. Still, I look at our place, and I often think that we live largely "like students". Our place is smaller than we'd like, we don't have a yard, our "decorating" is haphazard at best, we have a functional, little car, our stuff ages as we re-use many things and as it becomes harder to justify buying new things. Some of these I really like, but others... I think I get the envy in me occasionally. When I bike around Toronto, there are so many neighbourhoods with so many amazing properties. I wonder how there can be *that many* people who live stratospherically better than we. And we have a good income, between us.