Nutmeg in a Nutshell

Even though it’s now over three years old, my Kindle e-book, “I Would Rather Have Root Canal Once a Week forthe Rest of My Life than Ever Buy a House Again,” was purchased by several people recently on Amazon. And why not? I’m sure its lessons (couched though they are in sarcasm) are still useful.

My wife and I moved to Connecticut in 2010. We had both lived in New York for 30 years, in New Jersey for 20, and if the mathematical trend continues, we’ll leave Connecticut in 2020.

People still do ask why we left the Garden State for the Nutmeg State. To plagiarize myself from the e-book, we were looking forward to a fresh start. Simple as that. We had raised our three children in the small Northern New Jersey suburban community of Verona, a town whose three claims to fame were that David Letterman once taped a skit on its main thoroughfare, comedian Jay Mohr went to the high school, and portions of “The Sopranos” were filmed there. Other than that it was a typical down-to-earth town with sky-high property taxes, too many empty stores, and two-and-a-half-square-miles of bumper-to-bumper traffic. We were ready to begin the empty nest stage of our lives with a brand new set of social and professional ties somewhere in north-central Connecticut, about three hours away. Our daughter Celia lived up there with her husband, Dave, and we had the opportunity to do some exploring whenever we visited. We liked what we saw. The open spaces were bigger, the property taxes lower.

In no particular order, here are the five most egregious reasons we wanted to relocate:

1. New Jersey has more crooked politicians than it has towns in which to be crooked, and we were anxious to go through just one incumbency without an arraignment. Frankly, I don’t give a crap about married politicians making ‘the beast with two backs’ with people other than their spouses—as long as it is not my tax dollars paying for the hotel rooms where all those backs are being bestial.  

2. Suburban sprawl had invaded our part of New Jersey to such a degree that all the deer, squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs, chipmunks and wild turkeys that used to roam in nearby woods now roamed in our backyard. (I know that may sound quite pleasant, but deer crap is small and very hard to see when you’re doing yard work.)

3. Property taxes in our neighborhood were excessive. Annually it seemed to be enough to buy a year’s worth of toilet paper for every resident of the Garden State (population: 8.4 million)—an appropriate analogy since you can’t even wipe your ass in New Jersey without first getting permission, and a permit.

4. Our house, which was 84 years old, was starting to act as if it were a hundred and eighty four years old. I think Thomas Edison, who had his laboratory in the town next to ours, actually installed all the wiring. Plus, we never needed to tune in Al Roker because all we had to do was look at our shabbily constructed front door to see what was going on outside. It would all come in from a gap at the bottom: rain, snow, wind, locusts, pestilence, you name it. It was an almost biblical existence, but not in a spiritual sense.

5. Beginning earlier that year, all the magazines for which I had been writing cut back either on their use of freelancers or their rates. Similarly, all the small companies and organizations that had been using my writing services for marketing communications faced economic conditions that prompted them to eliminate outsource budgets. I was severely underemployed. But New Jersey wasn’t the only place with magazines and small companies. I was fairly certain Connecticut had a few. I wanted to give it a shot.

“The Sopranos” had nothing to do with our decision to leave New Jersey. At least they were a lot more entertaining than property taxes and pestilence. But none of it matters anymore, because here we are in Connecticut. And yes, it has its good points and its bad. No tolls, for one thing. But a capital city that's deader than Big Pussy. Less suburban sprawl. But at least one former governor and one former Hartford mayor have been either indicted, arrested or convicted for something or other.  

Anyway, that's the NJ to CT story in a rather large nutshell. I’ll report back in seventy-two months.