Have Your Porch and Eat it Too...

I coined this phrase back in heady days of 1995. It made less sense then than it does now, but back then things didn’t have to make sense. The stock market was on its way up, up, up. I could buy a soda for 50 cents. I listened to Pearl Jam. The Braves won their first series. Tom Hanks won his second best actor Oscar in a row. A lot of other stuff happened too, but it has nothing to do with the porch.

My girlfriend and I were strolling through a small Iowa town. We remarked to one another about what we would like in a house someday if we were to get married. I said that it was important that our house have a deck off the back where we could get away from the fast paced world and relax. We could sit on our deck and read, grill burgers, have parties, nap, watch the grass grow, and the trees change color. It would be just like being inside the house only we would get more fresh air. I could sit on my deck and drink my lemonade and relax. I would have a space for deck chairs. Oh yes, they would be mine.

She had other ideas. Her ideas were contrary and mutually exclusive. She pointed to a house and said she would like one similar to that! I was shocked. There was no hint that there was a deck at all, not even on the side, or even a back step on which to put a grill. I was aghast. She explained that we need a big front porch. It will have a porch swing and face the street. We could sit and relax and watch people go by on their evening walks. We could wave and talk to the neighbors. We could invite people up on our porch for pleasant conversation, and lemonade and cookies. I countered, that even though I had not mentioned it, that the cookies would fit and taste perfectly good on the deck in the back of our house. She smiled and said that the point was that the front porch would welcome people to our home and make us part of the community.

I was heartbroken, and she quickly stated the compromise that lead to the eventual title of this post. We could have a front porch and a deck in back. I knew it would never work, at least in hindsight, I know now that it never would have worked. In my despondent state of denial I said, “Eh, everybody wants to have their porch and eat it too.” It didn’t make any sense and she knew it. That’s the way conversations go. Every once in a while I say something that doesn’t make any sense.

The old saying, “Have your cake and eat it too,” never made much sense to me until I realized that it was actually backwards. You have to have the cake to eat it. What people want is to eat the cake and still have it. I propose we change the cliché to, “Eat your cake and have it too.”

Standing there in front of that porch clad house I knew that it was over, and yet I didn’t. For one thing I was three hours from home and she had driven so it was a bad time to start down the “breakup” line of discussion. Yet it was the beginning of the end. For all that my idea was the greatest I had ever conceived during my short but mentally prolific life, I was brought low by a woman who wanted a front porch for the very reason that I did not. (If you’re thinking, “Really? A deck? That’s the greatest idea you have ever had?” Then you don’t fully appreciate how awesome this deck was. Imagine the perfect deck. Everything you could want, and then every time you remembered you forgot something else that you really wanted, it’s there too! If you can imagine that then you’re still not even close to how awesome this deck was.) She was a front porch girl, and I was a guy with the dream of one day having a really big deck. That could sum up our outlook on life. That was the problem. She enjoyed people. She wanted to spend her leisure immersing herself in the community and for the most part I wanted to spend my leisure escaping from it.

So it didn’t work. It took a year for us to realize that.

Now I wonder if it’s a metaphor for our society. People say they used to know their neighbors and everyone else in town, and now they don’t recognize anybody. Maybe somewhere along the way we stopped building big front porches and when we did the community became less interactive. Or maybe I shouldn’t ramble so much…