The Cook County Assessor's Office announced real estate values here have dropped to historic lows. Here's a question for the Assessor: You're the expert, so what's a workable formula for figuring the other values in these homes...?
I doubt crunching your numbers will ever get a grip on the value of the joys and memories which live in those houses. Or the value of the different marriages and families that flourished under these roofs. Or the value of the teaching and tears and chocolate chip cookies that took place in those rooms.
Or, say, what about the value of the education which saved paychecks paid for, or the holiday dinners and anniversary parties that once filled the air in there, or the tense nights spent awake with a sick child, or the jubilant mornings sharing the start of a new adventure?
Mr. Houlihan -- your work is limited to numbers, and we all understand that. But sometimes don't you look up from your cool antiseptic numbers, and wonder about the many lives and loves and legacies which took place inside those walls? I'll bet you do, and I'll bet it reminds you everytime that we'll never be able to fit the scope of our humanity into the size of a calculator!
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A much more important way of looking at the word "value."
ReplyDeleteGlad you see it that way too. Our homes -- our lives -- are certainly much more than can be simply added and multiplied. But in a bean- counters' culture, we can so easily begin to forget that. I'd like to believe there is as much mystery as math to us! But then, I like Norman Rockwell and Hallmark Cards....
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