I’m still getting used to the North American life and the prices of goods and services over here. I asked my parents how much their new nice cabinets cost back at my childhood home in Puerto Rico around 2012 before they sold the house, and they said it cost them $3,000 for a carpenter to come out, measure the kitchen, build custom cabinets and countertops, and install everything (including an island, and all the bells and whistles). Even more so, for PVC cabinets, it cost them only $700 to build cabinets for the downstairs part of house (they turned the house into a duplex).
Back there, there was always a “guy” that you could hire for pretty much anything, whereas here you are always stuck with hiring the lesser of evils among a handful of predatory companies.
My wife and I moved to Austin in 2017, and it is the first time I have lived in the US as an adult. It was a shock to pay $25+ for a haircut, when I used to pay $8, or looking at $10,000+ cabinets, when I could maybe purchase a piece of land or a small house for a bit more back there.
After a few years, it has normalized. The $3,000 a year home insurance policy only causes a slight stomach cramp, as opposed to night terrors. The electric and water bills make a dent rather than a tear. I saw it in my father as well, who moved to the US after retirement and jumped at a $1,000 bill when a guy came to my house quoting me for new rain gutters, but recently didn’t bat an eye paying the same price for the same service at his own house. By will or by force, you assimilate.
I was told that I was paying premium prices for a premium quality of life. But I barely know my neighbors. Year after year, a new service appears in the zeitgeist that makes human interaction optional.
Every time I travel to PR and back, there’s one thing I do notice: the silence. Back home, with no air conditioning, open windows, and a tradition of open doors, it feels like you’re–for better or worse–always ON.Always plugged in. Always part of whatever is going on outside in 360 degrees. You hear the neighbor’s radio, their arguments, their cars pulling in and out of their tiny driveways. On New Year’s Eve the entire neighborhood explodes in a combination of music, family gatherings, and pyrotechnics. Everything is alive. It makes for the worse environment for anyone trying to be productive, though. Silence is necessary to really dig deep into whatever you’re supposed to be doing in this Earth. Noise keeps you in a state of pleasant amusement. Distracted.
But is writing about life more important than living it? Is hiding in a home office making up stories more valuable than accumulating real memories? I think I inadvertently managed to get the best of both worlds. I have a noisy, crowded place to go back to and absorb life for a few weeks, then come back to a (mostly) quiet place to recount my experiences in the confines of a fictional story.
Maybe that’s the balance required to walk the tightrope of life.
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