The Observer, April 18, 2008
Volume XL, Issue 25
Taxes…
I live in an apartment building filled with many different types of people. All around me are hints of diversity. Upstairs lives a cellist and a composer, whose friends are often musically-inclined as well. Every day I live my life to the soundtrack of their rehearsal. Even now, as I type, the haunting tones of a trilling soprano are floating through the heater vents and making me feel like the star of an artsy foreign film.
Then there are the neighbors who moved upstairs a few months ago. I see them all the time – we're good friends, especially now that their former apartment remains unlocked while it's being renovated. The list of my neighbors and their lives could go on for a while – my building houses young families, couples, bitter single people, and everything in between. There are artists, musicians, students, professionals, parents, and even an alleged pothead thrown in here and there. We could probably survive as an independent colony here in this building.
On any given day here at the apartment, there are a couple dozen people working, playing, studying, and cleaning. Some are happy, some are sad. As long as the rent money keeps flowing in to the landlord, it could stay like this forever! Except on tax day – the Ides of April. On tax day, the music stops, the couples start quarrelling, and even the potheads start to get a little less mellow. In January and February tax day seems so far away. Even up to last week it didn't seem like it would ever arrive. But Tuesday, the tax man came.
As I ferociously tore into my taxes, working hard but accomplishing little, I thought about that blissful time when I didn't have to do my own taxes. When I lived at home, my mother would goad, cajole, bribe, and employ excessive force to try to get me to do my taxes. But something about all those forms and numbers, and the tension that grows and grows as you plug in number after number into obscure wage schedules, never knowing whether you'll come out with a refund or a paralyzing blow to the wallet, always inspired a deep need to be so difficult throughout the process that she would end up doing it for me. Last year, adult that I was, I decided that there would be no more juvenile shirking of my civic duties. I was a grown up, and if I couldn't have my own washer and dryer to solidify this status, by golly, I was going to do my own taxes!
Looking back, I don't think I fared too well. I ended up paying a lot more to my erstwhile home state than to Ohio and the federal government combined. Oh well, you live and learn – and go without food for two months trying to recoup your losses. This year, I swore to do my taxes early. And I did – they were in the mail by noon on the very last possible day to turn them in. Oh well. Be that as it may, I still feel startlingly adult about the whole thing and I found myself happily looking forward to the 16th – except then there was only be 364 days until the tax man works his way back again…
