The Pay-Off
by
Dick Prosapio © 2005
We have always managed to be "out of debt". At
least that's how I've described the fact that we pay off any credit
card charges every month so that we don't have any interest charges
on them. This hasn't always been true, when we've bought a newer car
or truck for example, but MOST of the time, we are unencumbered; no
car payments, no time payments on computers or TV's, etc. If I
mentioned this to anyone they would always say; "Except for the
mortgage though right?"
"Well, yeah, there's always that." I'd say until
now. I thought that this day would come oh, maybe ten years down the
road. And I hoped I'd be around to experience it. "it" being the
paying off of our mortgage.
Wow!
More of that in a minute.
I have always had this weird picture in my mind of
a kind of ceremony around this occurrence. I mean, early in my life
I heard about people paying off their homes and having this "burning
of the mortgage" celebration. In my child's mind, and this picture
remains, I saw a family dancing around a bonfire as the mortgage
paper was burned in it. This seemed to be a tribal thing, something
every family worked and prayed for all of their lives.
Freedom! Owing nobody anything. Having been raised
in the Great Depression, owing nobody anything was the equivalent of
winning the lottery.
Hmm, I guess it still is. Our "lottery" win was
actually the inheritance we received upon the death of my mother.
All in all it wasn't a huge windfall, but for us, living as we do on
several shoestrings, it was just enough to make it the sensible
thing to do. That is, to stop paying someone 7% a month on top of
what we owed them. After all, nobody was going to pay us 7% on any
investment we would risk taking. So, we did it, we took, what we
thought of as our "security money", and got out of debt REALLY out
of debt. In the climate we are living in now, there really aren't
many who actually ever get to this place in their lives. Not in our
trade-up-throw-away culture. Maybe few even aspire to it at all.
As for us, now we are living on Social Security
and whatever small rivers of income we can, out of our creative
imaginations and talents, conjure. And we are making it.
Right about here is where I, we, are supposed to
begin worrying about the "other shoe". But I really don't want to
fall into that morass. That road leads to all kinds of nightmare
scenarios. Now that things are going so right everything could go
horribly wrong. But the odds of that are the same as everything
going rather well. I'd prefer to put my imagination to work on the
latter. As to the event itself, the paying off the mortgage, I am
still in the planning stages about how to give that the kind of
celebratory oomph! it deserves. We've talked about having a
dinner with friends, about having a BIG dinner with friends, about
standing in a field, OUR field, and yelling joyously..I'm waiting to
see what the mortgage company sends me in the form of a piece of
paper to figure out what I want to do.
And, of course, there's the
dancing-around-the-fire thing.
I think, in consideration of the concept of
"closure", that's one ceremony that is a
must.
