As of today I’m homeless.

    It is strange that I still call 99 Oxford Place,
Glen Rock, New Jersey home. After all, I haven’t lived in Glen Rock for
more than five years. Kari and I are married now and we’ve made a home
together in Portland even before our wedding. But sometimes I slip and
say I’m heading home when I really mean visiting the house where I grew
up.

    I have some good reasons for calling it home. It’s
the address on my birth announcement. It’s wall held the roof over my
head for the vast majority of my life (longer than advisable,
actually).

    It’s where my family gathered for holidays and where
I’ve watched my niece and nephew grow these last couple years. Its
hosted countless pets and parties, milestones and memories I’d rather
forget.

    In short, it’s the Peck family homestead and right
about now after some 35 years, the keys are being handed over to a new
family.

    It was the family home, but until today the only
person living there was my mother. My father moved out after my folks
split up quite a while back. He didn’t go far– never more than a mile
or so. He and his wife Nancy now live three blocks away. My sister was
the next to leave. She went off to college and has been on her own ever
since. I lingered well into my 20s in between bouts of school and my
Brother Andrew just flew the coop recently– also well into his 20’s.

    I share all this, not as some weepy “if these walls
could talk,” homage to some bricks, mortar and timbers– that could take
up the whole paper– but as some background on why I take some of the
positions I espouse on this page.

    Glen Rock is a town that, when described accurately,
sounds like an exaggeration. Smack in the middle of one of the most
densely populated parts of the most densely populated state, the words
“leafy” and “quiet” come to mind. It’s a place where cops are coaches.
The downtown is one street bracketed by two parallel sets of railroad
tracks where commuter trains ingest and disgorge workers and revelers
with business in “the city” (there’s only one city, the greatest city,
New York City).

    When I hear residents of Cape Elizabeth insist that
the only “defensible neighborhoods” are those with a cul-d-sac, I
scoff, thinking of my own street with three intersections– one
connected to a busy road leading to (gasp) working-class Hawthorne and
(horror) majority-minority Paterson. In more than 30 years we never
bothered locking our back door without repercussion. A stranger and
their car could not idle long before being noticed.

    I can’t help but feel disparaged when, at planning
board meetings, people object to quarter-acre lots as “high density”
development, as that is the scale that occupies my frame of reference.
It rarely felt constrictive and hardly felt “urban.”

    Perhaps the most relevant part of my experience to
readers of the Sentry is property taxes.  As budgets are debated
and the percentage of property tax increases are parsed, I’ll be
thinking of home, where my mother leaves a home I’m sure she would have
like to have lived in a while longer and maybe even leave to one of her
children, but could no longer justify heating, lighting and maintaining
an aging, four bedroom colonial while paying a five-digit property tax
bill.

    It’s too bad it has to be, but if cutting the taxes
means destroying the hometown I remember, that’s a change I wouldn’t be
able to bear.