Two events, which I hope coalesce at the end of this piece, caught my attention only this week, reinforcing my fear that we’re going to run out of space.
    The two things are the go-ahead for a Gucci guru to build the biggest house in Christendom, and watching a real neighborhood game of keep-away near the house where I grew up.
    Let’s begin with Tom Ford, who got approval to erect a 15,862 square-foot house-plus on a mountaintop in Santa Fe. This construction, buildings alone, is the size of our double lot in Camp Luna, but if the Gucci guy were to plunk down the house where we planted our double-wide, he’d be trespassing just by leaving the front door.

    It’s not just a house, of abut 8,358 square feet. He plans a guest cottage of 1,500 square feet and a multi-car garage, all of which are bigger than the houses most of us grew up in.
    Let’s now visit my childhood house, on Railroad Avenue. It cost $1,000 in 1938, and with its original 24×24 dimensions, had only two bedrooms.
    Mom and Dad’s room was off-limits except to them. My three older sisters slept in the second bedroom, and by older brother and me, well, we folded down a cot near the coal-burning kitchen stove. When our uncle came to live with us, after the death of our grandmother, that forced a re-arrangement of sleeping quarters.
    Because the eight of us each owned on average 70 square feet of space, home became a place only for dining and sleeping. Our family room was the Great Outdoors. And that’s why I was so impressed by people tossing a football in the Great Outdoors lot where all of us Trujillos and most of the neighborhood of the ‘40s and ‘50s played. My guess as to why kids were slimmer and more active in the good ol’ days is because we had no choice. There wasn’t room to play indoors.
    We had a game, whose objective I can’t remember, called “New Orleans,” in which two sides teamed up and chanted something like “Here we come.” “Where you from?” “New Orleans.” “What’s your trade?”
    “Lemonade.”
    Most of the games, such as “Red Light, Green Light,” “Red Rover” or something called “Andy Over,” invariably resulted in someone being “it” and having to chase others. I enjoyed it when it was my turn to chase the girls and make them cry.
    Every neighborhood, it seemed, teemed with children, when not involved in vigorous co-educational activity, girls playing hopscotch, jacks or jumping rope, the boys playing tag or marbles.
    I had a paper route in my early teens and believed I had the distinction of having been inside of every house on my route. Some of them lacked electricity and plumbing. Our house, with those conveniences (barely), was no bigger than the others, but it seemed luxurious by comparison.
    Building permits apparently hadn’t been invented yet, and as a result, people showed creativity that today could well be the envy of that Gucci Guy. If cinder blocks were abundant one year, people would build additions accordingly. Same with lumber, adobe or brick. And some were held together with cardboard, spit, glue and … luck.
    Today’s average new house runs a stunning 2,400 square feet. In the 1970s, an average three-bedroom, modest house in Las Vegas was 1,200 square feet. Each year we want more and we use more electricity, water, gas and pour heated air into the atmosphere with no thought for the future. Is global warming just another name for greed?
    The fashion designer Gucci Guy got his way because the city council couldn’t find a reason to sustain the concerns of neighbors, who complained a multi-million-dollar mansion of that size simply didn’t fit in to the neighborhood.
    Alas that we ever had such worries in our youth. Our preoccupations might have been whether the horizontal chimney in a neighbor’s house was spewing too much smoke in our direction, or being privy to the fear that some of our neighbors were downwind of a nearby privy.
    And as for space, most of us are guilty of wanting bigger rooms and more of them. Friends still ask us why we chose a house with almost double the area of our previous house, especially after being afflicted with the empty nest syndrome.
    And our three sons who created the empty next? Well, unless they choose to live in a yurt, they too are part of the American quest for bigger houses, more rooms and more conveniences.
    But they’re not all doomed to sedentary lifestyles. In fact, I’m happy to say, the vigorous game being played in my childhood haunt featured my two sons, three grandchildren, and me.
    By the way, I need to settle with the wiseguy who said, “Don’t worry, Dad, in just a couple of days your muscles won’t be sore anymore.”
    Yeah, right. That was five days ago.