March 7, 2005:

Her real estate agent told her, at age 50, that if she'd bought a house twenty years earlier she'd have half a million dollars in equity by then.

She'd never researched the possibility, because she'd believed in advance it didn't exist.

This is so much the story of her life. Nothing is possible: there's no point asking the question.

Yet nevertheless in some passive way these dreams will arrive one day. As if someone someday is going to give her a house. Presumably me. While she sits in her chair, waiting.

Fear that this is my future. That I'll become like this. Fear which probably drives me into foolish risks, sometimes, because that foolhardiness is at least less passive.