Emily: When I was younger, my soul too was inflamed with politics. Somewhere I decided from reasoning and experience that people change if and only if they want to, and suddenly the greater part of the discipline was no longer interesting to me. For the same reason, while I still hate injustice, I've become resigned to the necessity of living with it. People are people. My personal politics is to occasionally lament the fact, and then continue to collect good ones.
It was always true. This is just another personal reminder that taxes suck. (Apparently my mom is pictured on the front page of the Chicago Tribune's Metro section, accompanying the printed article.) The house in question is the one in which my sister and I grew up.
My parents, when prodded, speak a few words of their college days. My mother followed a chain of schools, going wherever the money was. She eventually found herself at the same one as my father, who had come to this country to study architecture. They laugh sheepishly as they explain how they settled on peanut butter as the staple of their diet: it was cheap, nutritive, and filling, if eaten in small spoonfuls here and there.
The habits they formed in these peanut butter days have lasted: my mother still worries too much about how money gets spent, and my father still worries too much about eating small portions of food slowly in small pieces. Once upon a time, in a less comfortable existence, these were survival skills. But my parents are entitled to their quirks, because they worked their way up to this cozy house on the ravine. They raised their kids there, which is something, as well as a funny-looking orange dog of dubious origin who loved classical music and had a marvelous clean gentle velvet lick.
My father will retire in a few years. My mother already mostly has.
I can understand why these tax officials are defensive. Their job is to make seemingly plausible but essentially arbitrary calculations that profoundly change the lives of people they don't know, in the name of the law and with its full force.