It was more than Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) when Intel announced yesterday the layoff of 1,000 workers in Hillsboro, OR. Other employers announced more layoffs today in the economic litany of the moment. What really strikes me is how deep and how fast this recession (or Depression or Banana, whatever you want to call it) descended up on the whole country. The whole world, really.

SADness notwithstanding, I started reflecting on some of my parents’ stories. They were born in the early part of the 20^th century and lived in what might be the best of times and the worst of times in the last 100 years.

Sometime in the late 1920’s, my maternal grandmother, recently divorced, moved from Snyder, Nebraska, to Reno, Nevada. She and her two daughters stayed in a small house near downtown. My mother recalled scampering out to the tracks after the train had passed through, when she and her sister would gather the coal that had fallen off to bring home to heat their house.

At least they weren’t dependent on foreign oil.

In 1921, my father rode from Lakeview to Corvallis on a horse-pulled wagon to attend Oregon State University.  A year-long bout with Scarlet Fever kept him out.

Not very good health care, if you ask me.

After a series of odd jobs and bouncing from town to town, he wound up as a salesman for Standard Oil in Elko, Nevada, in 1924.  With nowhere to live and no friends or family in town, he chained a Quonset hut from an abandoned World War I training site to his gasoline truck, dragged it into town and tied it down on a vacant lot no one seemed to know who owned.

A housing crisis of a different nature, I suppose. And Federal REO served a purpose.

They were out of money when they returned from a brief honeymoon in 1933. My father sold a set of used tires for five dollars and used it to pay the rent and buy a week’s worth of groceries

Definitely deflation. The Great Depression was a time when a loaf of bread only cost a nickel, but nobody had a nickel. If brother couldn’t spare you a dime, five cents would do.

In later years, my father revealed his favorite excuse he gave to his persistent creditors. He’d shrug and tell them all his money had been on deposit with the Wingfield Bank. They’d forgive him with pursed lips and a knowing and empathetic nod.

Now, that’s a real man’s bank failure.

So, what does all this have to do with the current real estate market? I’ll tell you: I don’t know. More on that below.

Sure, we give a couple of big banks a big bailout, and they give us the finger. Foreclosures are rising faster than the water level inside the Titanic.  The Big Three carmakers realized that the wind at their backs was actually a hemorrhoid. So it goes, and it’s not going away.

But it’s the way each of us responds to events, the way we adapt to bad news, that’s far more useful than p and m’ing over fate’s fickle finger.  Blaming the news media, for example, is a waste of time, if not intellectually dishonest.  The trick—and admittedly, I haven’t done it yet—is to not just erase useless files, but to reboot yourself in whatever way is necessary to get the job done. And you will probably have to face down your own objections.  To paraphrase Hemingway, you can go to Buenos Aires where everything might be nicer, but you will still be you.

Is this the best time to buy a house? It is if you need to, and if you do, give me a call, but otherwise, I don’t know. Sell one? Ditto.  We’re definitely in hard times. For real estate agents, home buyers and sellers, there are two markets out there--*the* market, and your market.

And as my parents did on the Nevada desert years ago,  each of us needs to do what he or she needs to do.