Above all, be sure that your second home is located in a picturesque, isolated spot, preferably one you have seen only fleetingly in a realtor’s brochure. Mountain precipices and small spits of sand which shift with prevailing tides are generally ideal. For those on a fixed income, any location surrounded by quicksand can be made to serve quite nicely. One knows one has probably chosen the appropriate location when one is unable to find it again.

Definite rules of decorum govern acquisition of a second home. For example, one never asks the former owner why he is selling and moving to Secaucus, New Jersey. Also, one doesn’t ask the former owner why his wife walked out, bankruptcy petitions are piled upon his desk, his right leg is in a cast, his left arm is in a sling, and he keeps fingering the loaded revolver pointed at his temples.

One must refrain scrupulously from cross-examining the real estate agent. To care about accuracy and detail is not only bad form but demonstrates that one lacks the proper spirit to become the owner of a second home. If the real estate agent says vaguely, with all her bracelets clanking, that there are good tennis courts “somewhere over the hill,” believe it without question. Don’t even think to ask what hill. If the realtor maintains there are shops, restaurants and theaters, accept is as gospel. There must be some—somewhere. Finding them holds out the promise of a lifetime of adventure.

It is a serious faux pas ever to ask builders and construction people how much things cost. These are craftspeople, artisans, master builders. They are also moonlighting members of the local constabulary and are bigger and stronger than you are.

By the same token, before the actual closing:

• Make no effort to determine whether the dishwasher and garbage disposal are actually attached to anything.
• Never ask about the water supply. Who would build a house without adequate water, and after all, you didn’t exactly buy a house in the desert, did you?
  You didn’t, did you?
• Eschew the impulse to look down in the basement to see if there are torn screens, splintered doors or gnawed supporting beams.
• Eschew the impulse to believe your son when he wants to show you the footprints that match those of the bears, wolverines and Sasquatches in his Boy Scout handbook. Eschew the impulse to believe yourself when you see the Sasquatch, and he turns out to be the only furnace repairman within six hundred miles.
• Don’t ask if the long dirt driveway along the cliffside leading to the house is always this muddy and rocky or whether after every morning shower it has the same assortment of streams, tributaries, marshlands and estuaries running through it.

After acquiring the second home, keep the heat up to about 85 year-round. Keeping the heat in a balmy tropical range can’t cost more than several college tuitions and is definitely worth it for the seventy-two to one hundred twenty hours a year one may spend in the house.

Refrain from chopping, collecting or buying even a sliver of firewood at the end of the long, hot summer. The heat isn’t likely to go off for that long the few times you can use the house. After all, the house is attached by a slender cable which threads its way through treacherous, blizzard-prone mountain passes to an aged, nearly bankrupt electrical utility plant only four hundred miles away.

Always make a point of leaving all sorts of unworn garments for all sorts of occasions unlikely ever to arise. Then forget you have done so because of the infrequency of your visits and buy the same clothes all over again. Only in this manner can one be sure to maximize expense, nuisance and the sheer amount of time spent packing and unpacking.

Don’t even try to calculate what it all ends up costing per day. It must only be sheerest coincidence that, ever since the closing, you read about post-Impressionist paintings and Kentucky Derby winners being auctioned off at what suddenly seem such bargain basement prices.

Finally, remember the spirit of a second home. It is to serve as a refuge, a bastion of tranquility, a place to go on long walks, commune with nature, read great works and know thyself. So immediately install a computer, telephone beepers, Fax machines, voice mail, videotext and perhaps a telegraphy system or two. Give your address and telephone number willy-nilly to everyone. For good measure, throw in some insurance salesmen and a fund-raiser or two from the Metropolitan Opera.

Now one is ready. Get a cab, hop on the plane; change to the smaller plane, the helicopter, the seaplane; paddle ashore, rent a car, and drive in gas-guzzling four-wheel drive over icy roads for two hundred miles at one and a half times the legal speed limit—all to make sure you don’t miss anyone’s call. And of course, to be sure you will still have time to turn around, after you have gotten the call, to drive, fly, paddle and rent your way back home to deal with the inevitable emergency. For to know thyself many be admirable. But no one that wise would buy a second home.

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James B. Kobak, Jr. is a largely retired lawyer who has been writing humor pieces for years; these pieces have appeared in places varying from The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Travel & Leisure to regional magazines and newspapers, literary magazines, and sites such as Suddenly Senior and Humor Outcasts (where he is a contributor). He has also published a novel (Up Front From Behind), The Wimp’s Guide to Cross-Country Skiing, and, most recently, Tennis Anyone? The Wimp’s Guide to Tennis and Other Racquet Sports. He’s started a substack at jimkobak.substack.com