Owning A Piece Of The Rock

That's what the Prudential Company wanted us to do, once upon a time. And now I have, for the past sixteen years. It was a step in my ongoing process of growing up. Buying property, a home, seemed like a very sound piece of grown-up activity. You might think that buying a car would prepare one for such an undertaking, especially since the price we paid for our house was still well below that of many of the cars my son aspires to own one day. Speaking of that young man, my wife and I signed the papers and moved all our possessions into our house before he was even born. My son came into a world where I was the proud owner of a mortgage.
Okay, I didn't own the mortgage. I still don't. As a matter of fact, neither does the bank that first gave us the loan, way back when. I have come to understand, as grown-ups will, that these are just pieces of paper that routinely get shuffled from one financial institution to another. Not that our home loan is in any way special or unique. It was moved as a chunk of paper, actually just the binary illusion of a document, along with hundreds of other loans that together created an amount of money that could be fully registered by a financial institution of any size. At this moment, without looking at our monthly statement, I cannot tell you which of these august institutions now holds the paper on our house.
It doesn't help that so many of them have ceased to be. That was in the dark times, before the Clone Wars and before the bursting of a housing bubble that I wasn't even aware of until I was comfortably ensconced inside of it. Add to this mix the seemingly endless stream of refinancing opportunities that have been lobbed our way, some of which we took advantage of, and we no longer know or care who once took pity on us first-time buyers and offered us the chance to put down roots. Into the rock. In the meantime, I have no idea where I am sending that monthly check, but I'm hoping that someday, maybe in another sixteen years I can stop. Then it will be all mine. Or at least the paper will be.