Jersey Tawk - by Ward Peck
Peck's piece of the Rock
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 farą 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 recentlyą 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 timbersą that could take up the whole paperą 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 intersectionsą 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.
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 farą 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 recentlyą 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 timbersą that could take up the whole paperą 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 intersectionsą 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.
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