Why

If you know me by way of this profession of mine, there’s a very good chance you don’t know my dad.  My dad isn’t from here. He wasn’t the commodore of the yacht club or a member of the country club. Which club? It doesn’t matter, he’s not a member. He didn’t belly up to Champs and he’s never been to Chucks. He didn’t sail scows and he didn’t fish and he didn’t play cards with his buddies and he didn’t golf anywhere aside from George Williams College, where he once had a hole in one that no one else saw. He sailed Lasers with my uncle and his sisters, and had a fixed keel sailboat that was, I assume, his pride and joy. The boat was called Praise The Lord, which, if you know my dad,  won’t be a surprise to read.  He was born in Chicago, grew up in Niles, then moved to Arlington Heights for high school when his milk man father and Avon selling mother bought a small house on the corner of White Oak and Vail.  He went to college at Illinois State where he met my Princeton, Illinois raised mother before they both finished up with their Masters in Education at the University of Illinois.  He didn’t work at the Board of Trade or the CME, and he didn’t drive a Mercedes. He just taught fifth grade and painted wicker and mowed lawns and grew tomatoes and in the summer of 1977 he decided that he’d try his hand at selling real estate.  The company name he chose? A decidedly presumptuous moniker: Geneva Lakefront Realty. 

Throughout my childhood, my dad spent his time doing one of three things. Teaching the 5th graders of Williams Bay. Trying to sell real estate. Or doing anything else anyone wanted him to do that would lead to a little extra money. All of those things he did were the same—work.  My dad taught school with what appeared to be, at least to me, a remarkable ease. He didn’t stay up at night grading papers, in the way my mother did, and does. He didn’t get to class particularly early to work before the kids arrived. He didn’t stay over on his lunch break to work. He showed up for class when it was required, he left on his lunch break and drove the third of a mile home to eat, or to swim, or to return calls from one of his other jobs, and then when the day was done he left just as soon as he could. He wrote his weight on the chalk board every morning and dissected cow hearts that he’d pick up every year from Lake Geneva Country Meats. He was a great teacher, but my opinion of the supposed stress of teaching school was forged by watching my father not outwardly stress about it, not one bit. 

What did cause him stress was the rest of the work, and later, me. He hurried and hurried, stressed and stressed. He possessed an unrelenting work ethic, or rather it possessed him. Christmas morning? He’d be back to open presents once he finished shoveling snow at one of many homes he looked after.  As a point of fact, my father could never stay in one place for very long. Perhaps that’s why I’m so annoyed when I see him now sitting in his chair most of the day. The visual just doesn’t fit with what I knew. Easter Sunday and my mom wanted a rare Curry family photo? My dad was driving a load of leaves that he raked from the springtime shrubs up to his barn where he could later burn them. He was in constant motion, leaving and working, no matter the day, the occasion, or the season. How did I have any choice but to absorb this work ethic and make it my own? I think about this on Saturday and Sunday mornings when I feel uniquely compelled to leave my house and do some work. Any sort of work. 

I think about the life I’ve spent selling real estate in this little town. I think about the choices I made and the decisions that preceded where I am right now. Where am I? I’m where I’ve always been, and that grates at me just a bit, which you know if you know me. My son moved to Manhattan earlier this month, to work on the 52nd floor of a glass tower overlooking the Statue of Liberty. I can barely wonder what it could have been like to embark on such an adventure. My adventure has found me never living more than 3 miles from the house where I grew up. The one my mom and dad bought in 1971 for what was then 10 times his annual teaching salary. The one at the end of that skinny lane with a beautiful dutch colonial gambrel roof on the original part of the house, and the mismatched gable roof on the north side, an addition whose  piece-mealed construction consumed what felt like most of my adolescent years. I think about where I am today and I wonder why. I regret many things, including the things that have led to my modest hyper localized success. But I keep coming back to the question of why. Why am I still here, still in this town, doing this silly job? Why did I start doing this in the first place? In the face of a never ending supply of options, I chose the easiest default, and that irritates me. 

And then I remind myself that I know why. I sell real estate because one day 40 or so years ago I was driving with my dad on Congress Street, just to the west of Collie where the road runs in front of the old grade school. I can’t remember how old I was, and writing this I’m trying desperately to remember what car we were in which might give me a clue. But alas, I can’t remember the car or the day, but I recall sitting in the passenger seat and looking at a small house on the corner of those two streets. I asked my dad what the house was worth. I don’t remember what he told me. It might have been $50,000 or $85,000 or $99,000. But he looked at the house and looked at the road and he thought for a bit and gave me a number and in that moment it seemed like a super power. To know the value of something felt important and rare, and from then until now I guess I like knowing what something is worth. So that’s why I’m here and that’s why I’ve spent 29 years doing what I do. Because my dad did it too, and that still feels like enough of a reason for me.