Making Do

Four of the six years that we lived in Charlottesville while my ex-Y was in graduate school, we lived in a grand (for me) home that had been converted into 5 apartments. In our first year (our third in town), we rented a two-bedroom, upstairs apartment, and in years two through four, we rented the first-floor apartment directly beneath that. (See right half of the home via a link to the Charlottesville Then and Now blog.) We moved downstairs because the seemingly well to do owners sold out to a business that owned and operated apartments around Charlottesville.

The original owners were often absentee landlords who got very testy, long distance from some corner of the world in their travels, when we had to have people in to take care of necessary plumbing or heating repairs, a common occurrence because the home was in serious disrepair. Many of our friends were in similar circumstances: In graduate school and too poor to afford rent from reputable apartment management companies. And so we sometimes found ourselves renting from upper-crusty, cranky inattentive landlords who let their one or two investment properties fall into disrepair because they thought their only responsibility should be to collect rents, unaccustomed as they were to the inconveniences of real life. (Hey, I've been a landlord since then and had my share of tenants who abused my patience as well as my properties, and so I don't say that lightly.)

Not only were the rents high in C'ville, as it is affectionately called, but the job market was terrible.  Rents high, wages generally low.  In fact, the year we left town the only area in the Commonwealth of Virginia with a higher cost of living was Northern Virginia, which was notorious for being a high-cost bedroom community of Washington, D.C.  

AND as luck would have it, a recession gripped the nation the year I graduated from college and businesses who had once hired liberal arts majors were suddenly only hiring business majors. (When I graduated from law school 15 years later, for the first time in American history law firms around the country were laying off attorneys. If you see a trend here in my life, so do I. The universe has a very quirky sense of humor or perhaps, I have exceptionally bad timing.) However, what complicated an already difficult country-wide job market was the fact that people move to C'ville for college or grad school and then they decide to stay. It's beautiful. So what's not to like? Duh! The job market. 

During the time we lived in C'ville the average salary for an attorney, a typically well-paying job for someone with a professional degree, was exceptionally, laughably low. Jobs I might have had a shot at anywhere else in the country with a bachelor's degree, I couldn't even get an interview for. When I'd call to ask why (after all, I had narrowed my search to my field given that the business world had slammed the door)--figuring I might get some clue how to improve my chances--, the person hiring would laugh and tell me that people with master's degrees and Ph.D.'s had applied for the position. Attorneys were applying for entry-level psych, social, and community service type jobs. Indeed, at the a psychiatric hospital where I worked for a year, on a PRN bases between waiting tables, some of my fellow psych technicians had Ph.D.'s. Once when I was explaining the job market to a visiting friend as we shopped in a small, family-owned pharmacy, the fellow sweeping the floor interrupted to tell us that he had a Ph.D.

When Wade Apartments purchased our apartment house, I was skeptical and the building's tenants were understandably disgruntled because rents went up. Prior to the sale, an unusually wide and deep hallway, one that opened onto the 2nd floor porch--a shared delight--, greeted us as we stepped outside our apartment door. Wade converted that hallway into a third bedroom, substantially expanding the square footage of our apartment and making it far beyond our financial reach. Our downstairs neighbor, who had become accustomed to living alone, found she could no longer afford her one bedroom. So we switched apartments, and she got herself two roommates.

While our upstairs neighbor became a fixture in our home and we in hers, we rarely saw neighbors in two of the apartments, even though we shared the place for four years. One, an interior designer, had a back entrance making it unlikely that we'd run into her.  And the two tenants who lived in the other upstairs apartment were totally self focused and decidedly unfriendly, keeping their heads down as they entered and exited the building and barely eking out a greeting when others in the building hailed them. The studio apartment directly across from us on the first floor saw a revolving door of quiet singletons, people who typically stayed one year. I vaguely remember one guy who lived there and fondly remember a not so quiet and funny, happy-go-lucky waitress and part-time student named Julie who gladly joined in our house parties that we threw, along with our upstairs' neighbor, at the beginning of each semester.

Wade Apartments proved themselves to be a very responsible management company. They made good on their promises, making some rather ugly, but welcome, improvements. But despite the improvements, our ground floor apartment was quirky.

Even with a tacky, office-type drop ceiling, the living and bedroom ceilings were 10 feet high. The kitchen and bathroom ceilings were taller. To access the ceiling light in our kitchen, my 6'1" ex-Y had to stand on a very sturdy kitchen table and I had to sit on his shoulders and fully extend my reach. In the tiny bathroom, lying in the tub and looking at the ceiling often put me in mind of the carnival act where someone jumps off of a tall platform into a tiny tub of water. We had no bedroom closet, but we made do with a small wardrobe that we bought at an estate sale, which miraculously matched a 1930's era headboard that I'd been given years before. Our bedroom contained a door to the Apartment building's front entry, and so we moved a massive clothes-filled bookcase in front of it to create a bit of a sound barrier. I could go on, but you get my drift. 

Despite the quirks, the bones of the building were beautiful. The place itself was located on Wertland Street, a mixture of large historically significant homes, some converted into apartment buildings and some still operating as single family dwellings. Our apartment house was part of a 50 acre area that was later listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Given that Wertland Street was situated in a densely populated part of town with many students living to the west of us, a commercial area to the south, and a poor neighborhood to the north and east, we lived in one of the higher crime areas of Charlottesville. However, as you can see from the photograph, much of our property was bordered by a waist-high stone wall, and for whatever reason people seemed to respect that border and generally left us untouched by the high crime and undisturbed by the violence that sometimes erupted around us.

Then, early one summer morning we were disturbed from our sleep by screaming. Screaming loud enough to pierce the whirr of our window air conditioning unit. Our happy-go-lucky neighbor, accustomed as she was to late nights, had called out for a pizza.  Because of the late hour, Julie decided to take a wooden chair into the hall to wait at the front door for the arrival of the Dominoe's Pizza delivery person on the off chance he decided to knock on the front door, waking other tenants.  It's weird how things turn out.  Julie, nor anyone else who lived there, ever felt the need to take that sort of precaution, though on an odd occasion someone knocked on the front door not realizing the apartment house was not a single family dwelling. For whatever reason, on that night, Julie, remembered both the odd occasional knock and the hour, and so she graciously waited.

As fate would have it, just as the pizza delivery guy made it to the home's sidewalk a man wielding a knife dashed across the lawn and physically accosted him in a robbery attempt. Because this delivery was his last for the night, the pizza delivery guy had made sure Julie would have exact change and had no money on him. His wife, having picked him up from work at the end of his shift, was waiting for him in their family car with their newborn, watching the armed robbery unfold.

Quickly taking in the grave situation before her, Julie, someone who was about 5'3" tall and probably weighed no more than 120 pounds wet, took the chair she'd been sitting on by a leg and charged the would-be robber, screaming and waving it high above her head like a weapon, effectively scaring him off. Who wouldn't be scared of a tiny woman waving a large chair above her head? Other than the fact that Julie was used to carrying large trays of food, she was unable to demonstrate how she hoisted that chair like a club. Regardless, that night, with an adrenaline high, Julie was Superwoman for one young family, and she had the pizza delivery guy and his wife as witnesses.

When my ex-Y and I moved to Charlottesville, I had had no reason to expect that my liberal arts degree would be virtually worthless. I mean, I had been advised just three years before that employers were less interested in the particular degree and far more interested in whether people were educable. It also came as a surprise to us that C'ville would have such a high cost of living and that the job market in C'ville would be particularly tight (statistics were not so easily available back then). When we finally secured cheap digs by moving into that apartment house on Wertland, we didn't expect to have to move the very next year. 

Yet, life is full of the unexpected. Circumstances seem to conspire against us at times. And even if our timing is bad, if we have a bit of fortune on our side and a serving of determination when confronted by life's circumstances, we are able to make do. We rise to the occasion. 

For that lucky young family, Julie rose to the occasion and made do.

I'm not comparing our struggle to survive in a difficult economy and tight job and costly housing markets with Julie's willingness to put her life on the line for that of another. Still, I detect a lesson of some sort in this. If you decode it, you know where to find me.

P.S. While I fondly remember Julie and her act of heroism, Julie may not be her name.  Unfortunately, I don't have a head for names. Julie or not Julie, if you are out there, this essay is dedicated to you.