So my wife and I are looking for a new place in SUMA, and we’re telling our friends about it. Trying to get them excited, because we’d like to, you know, stay friends with them, and it would help if they were willing to, you know, visit us now and then.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re never going to see them again.
And I really don’t blame them, because I never visited my friends who left the city. Once they left, it was like the Morlocks got them. We cast them from our minds. Chris and Kate have left 83rd and Third and they’re now in Rye, and let us not speak of them again….
So I was just as bad when I was on the cool, Manhattan side of that equation. I was never taking a weekend night to schlep out to Scarsdale or Montclair or God-Forbid-Long-Island to go visit someone who had the effrontery to leave this great city. Almost as if their choice to leave, by itself, rendered them somewhat less interesting.
I guess I deserve nothing better. I’m sure I’ll find nice, umm, replacement friends.
Anyway, I do have one idea. When I’ve discussed the houses we’ve been looking out, I’ve detected a common thread in the questions I get. No one seems interested in bedrooms or bathrooms or location or square footage or the type of oven we’ll have, but they seem very interested in one feature of some of the homes we’ve seen.
Whether it has a pool.
The pool is the equalizer, maybe the one thing that elevates a suburban household in the eyes of the sneering Manhattanariat. A pool for those hot days in the summer when your Hamptons share is in an off-week, or you’re afraid to go back and face the friend-of-a-friend that you woke up next to LAST weekend. A pool to escape Manhattan’s summer heat, a place to eat barbecue.
After all, the Hamptons are really just a suburb. I hate to tell that to all of you who just plunked down a month’s salary for four weekends in a five bedroom house on a one-acre lot in a cul-de-sac, but doesn’t that description sound kinda like a typical suburban house? So you’re spending all that income to drive out 4 or 5 hours on a Friday night to sleep in a bunk bed like a 12 year old, in a house that has as much relationship to the beach as Woody Allen, and you’re too good to come visit me a half hour north? Did I, ummm, mention that we have a pool?
Great, see you then.
