I am not my FICO score

When I started buying real estate in 2003, I developed an unusual compulsion. I was a FICOmaniac. I joined one of those services that keeps track of your credit scores from the three major bureaus, and checked it nearly daily. I charted the ups and downs like a stock broker, kept spreadsheets, and analyzed every tick. Yes, not unlike today’s fascination with Facebook, I was addicted to FICOisGod.com and happily paid $6.95 a month for the privilege.

Of tornadoes & hurricanes & the uniquely qualified

Just last weekend, many of us recognized Easter and Passover, and meditated on the blessings of cleansing, renewal, and rebirth or freedom from the past, both literal and metaphoric. Some of us considered the practical application in our modern lives, and the idea that sometimes we make deliberate choices to separate from what has gone before, and sometimes those choices are foisted upon us.

Bolivar Peninsula after Ike - Sept. 2008

Tuscaloosa after the tornado - April 2011

In the days that followed those holiest of remembrances, tornadoes unexpectedly ravished the Southeast — leveling towns and neighborhoods and taking over three hundred lives. I was riveted to the television and computer, much as I had been thirty-one months ago as the sun came up on what had been my home in Galveston, Texas, the morning after Hurricane Ike roared ashore.

NEXT!

Most of us weren’t born to live and die in the same spot, doing the same thing day in and day out, following the tail of the tiger in front of us until we churn to butter under a tree.

But sometimes we get comfortable in our lives, in our boxes, in our cages. Sometimes we become convinced that how things are is how they must always be. And sometimes the Universe jumps out from behind that tree and hollers, “NEXT!”

In some languages, that sounds remarkably like, “Gotcha!”

And some of us say, “Great! Bring it on!” and others say, “Do I have to?” And sometimes people say, “No, I won’t.” That’s when it gets messy.

And she was grateful

A storm was coming, but it passed, and she was grateful.

A second storm was coming, but it too passed, and she was grateful still.

A third storm was coming and she thought, it won’t come here. But it did, and she had fallen ill and was sorry to be a burden and grateful to have good friends to help her evacuate and offer her shelter at the last minute.

The office.

The storm came, and her office was among its first reported casualties, including all the computers and desks and files, and she was grateful that all her team had been out of the building when the waves took it.

She began to write and to send messages to her friends and neighbors so that they might share news as it emerged, and her messages went viral. And she was grateful to have the outlet.

My dream home is high above the ground, she said, where the storm surge can’t reach it. When I return, I will provide shelter and a meeting place for those who lost their homes. And she was grateful to have bought her dream home so that she could offer this safe place.

You used to be so nice. What happened?

My deeply Southern mother, the love-child of Edith Bunker and Scarlett O’Hara, with a little Lucy Ricardo thrown in for time and place, taught me that the worst adjectives anybody could ever use to describe a person were cute and nice. As a result, I have lived a life surrounded by interesting people, rarely cute and occasionally nice.

What nice in the venacular doesn’t require, though, is polite. And polite is something we all are, being from the South, even when casting the darkest aspersions. You know what I mean, “She eats with a fork even though she’s from The North, bless her heart…” or “Sure he reads! He takes the same newspapers as Sarah Palin, bless his heart.”

The business of foreclosures… Say what?

February 19, 2009, I wrote a piece called Face it, Galveston’s been Raped about my friend Alex’s Ike experience. It was awful — he lost his business and ultimately his home because the lender wouldn’t defer three months of payments during the Ike months, and wouldn’t restructure the loan because Alex was self-employed in a business that didn’t bounce right back. In March 2009, the bank foreclosed and Alex lost his dream home.

He moved on and found a new place and made peace with the fact that he’d probably be a renter for a long time, if not forever.

Today the Texas Attorney General called for a moratorium on foreclosures and sales of foreclosed properties, so Alex looked up his loft to see if it had closed yet. Turns out it closed a month ago.

Here’s the kicker. Alex owed $307,000 on the loft, and was happy to continue paying on it at that price, but the lender refused all attempts at compromise. But a month ago they sold it for $92,500.

If anybody has any insight into what’s fair, smart, or even decent business about that, please comment below.

Meanwhile, Alex is throwing up in the bathroom and asked me to send his apologies.

For good

It’s not an affair; it’s a relationship. September 13th is our 2-year anniversary, and we’re in it for the long-haul. We were instantly and irrevocably enmeshed the moment we met. He swept into my life unannounced and immediately changed its course. I dropped absolutely everything for him. He touched me emotionally, psychologically, financially, socially, and physically. All my senses were aroused, and for most of the past two years, I’ve thought of him almost constantly. Because of him, I have felt my highest highs and my lowest lows. He has changed the way my friends see me and the choices I make about how I spend my time and who I spend it with. I have altered my job, moved my home, taken on new activities, rewritten my future, given him all my money and time. Some people have said I spend too much time on the things he’s introduced me to, but I don’t have a choice. In fact, he has in many ways shown me who my real friends are. He has put his handprint on my life and changed me… for good. I’m grateful to him, and in spite of it all and whatever happens, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Happy Anniversary, Ike. You sonofabitch.

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Copyright © 2010 Alice Melott

Face it, Galveston’s been raped

First published on February 19, 2009, five months after Hurricane Ike.

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It’s taken me a while to figure out how to talk about this. I didn’t want to distract from the impact of the actual event…but now that the storm is pretty much behind us, we all need to face a really big problem that it uncovered. There are as many stories as there are people on the island, but I’ve picked one to serve as metaphor for all of us. Once you hear it, I trust you’ll share your own here. If we put in a little effort, maybe we can make some changes for the next victims.

Hurricane planning: What not to do

This piece originally ran as a New Year’s story 100 days after Ike, but on the occasion of the First Day of Hurricane Season 2010 (625 days after Ike) as we all begin commiserating over evacuation plans, it seems worth a rerun. It’s good to have a plan.

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December 28, 2008

I haven’t told this story before.

My loft the week before Ike

On Wednesday, September 10, 2008, I decided to cash in my birthday massage coupon – it being six months old already and all – and since we thought the third storm in a month was headed south of Galveston, I thought what the heck? And if it decided to come closer to us, we still had ‘til Friday to get out. We’re well rehearsed at this stuff, and I deserved an afternoon off.

About twenty minutes into some pretty intense deep tissue acupressure on my neck – a luxury strangely akin to putting your head in a meat press, I’m guessing – the room started spinning. I mean SPINNING like I was a pencil let loose beneath a twisted rubber band. I stopped my guy and truly thought I was having a stroke. He kept working on me gently for another half hour or so, but the room kept going and before long, it was clear I was sicker than I had ever been in my life, and in no condition to transport myself to the bathroom, let alone home.