I’m thankful for acorns that fall on the road where I can smash them with the heel of my shoe. I love the sound of the cracking and the feel of the crunch that ever so slightly vibrates into my foot. It requires careful calibration of the length of my steps during the approach in order to land the heel directly on top of the nut and apply the full weight of my body thereby achieving maximum explosive effect.
It is something like the pleasure I get from popping bubble wrap but not quite. There is something more deeply satisfying about this act of destruction. Breaking something could be a way to relieve stress or experience a joyful sense of power that probably goes back to childhood. On our recent trip to the beach, my 4 year old son wasn’t as interested in building sand castles as he was destroying them. But I wonder if stepping on acorns doesn’t touch a particular core memory of mine.
I don’t have many memories, core or otherwise, of my early childhood but this is one that has stuck with me if only as one of the few fables of my youth that I have repeated to myself over the years. It was not a pleasant memory. Simply told, I accidentally stepped on what was either a water bug or a cockroach and it must have been a good-sized one because it created an audible crunch. It was one of those sounds that imprinted itself on my soul like the first time I heard an electric guitar live but, unlike the pure spine-tingling ecstasy of the electric guitar, the squashing of the bug was a disgusting wound to my psyche.
If crunching acorns with my shoe is something I enjoy doing, in part, because it echoes a childhood memory, am I cracking open a wormhole to my youth or am I embracing the wound and fondling the scab?
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Wednesday, August 5, 2015
Slipping Away
Lolo, our new kitten, came to us when she was just a couple weeks old, having been rescued from the mulch pile at Lowe’s by my wife who was working there. Lolo was heartbreakingly tiny then and had to be fed with a miniature baby bottle which she attacked with amazing ferocity bordering on insanity. I would have to straightjacket her legs with one hand while forcing the bottle into her mouth with the other. Our persistence prevailed and she grew like a weed. The cute little ball of fur that had previously preferred to sleep in the crook of my neck and shoulder now bounded though the house like a small weightless cheetah, flashing from room to room, skittering across the floors, leaping on and bouncing off the furniture, flying up drapes, dresses and pant legs. She is fast, determined and relentless in her pursuit of human flesh to capture and gnaw on. It is an amazing sensation to walk across the floor in sandals and feel her sharp biting and scratching seamlessly alternate step by step, back and forth from one ankle to the other as if you are walking through a quicksand of teeth and claws.
Our cats have always lived the indoor, outdoor life style and I made the mistake of letting this feline cub get a taste of the suburban jungle a little too soon which probably resulted in her acquiring a case of fleas. Even supervised visitation with Mother Nature is now forbidden until she can get spayed. However, she remains undeterred in her quest for adventure al fresco. She sees her big brother exercise his freedom of movement and follows him right up to the door before being forcibly detained. When we open our front door from the outside, it is like triggering the lid on a jack-in-the-box. She has obviously learned the embarrassing sound of our SUV’s rumbling muffler allowing her to lie in wait and spring out into the porch at the first crack of light. It is hard to maintain constant vigilance for an unrepentant, recidivist escape artist during our normally unconscious habit of exercising ingress and egress.
Inevitably, I let my guard down and release the Kraken. Usually, her escape is short-lived as I bend down to confront her under the chaise lounge, grasp the closest portion of furry anatomy and gather her up in my arms, apologetically assuring her of my love while scratching her under the chin to soothe the savage beast. It shouldn’t be a surprise that when she finally did successfully elude immediate and easy recapture, it would be under cover of darkness. I came in from lounging on the porch one evening for just a moment to retrieve a book and my reading glasses. When I returned I realized I had thoughtlessly left the door to the porch open. After a cursory search of the house determined that the prisoner was missing, I grabbed a flashlight and headed out into the dark world of unlimited possibilities that must have stretched out before her.
I was aware of every second ticking by as I fell through the trap door of fear and self-loathing. I’ve been down there before. My first son eluded my supervision when he was three and there were a few minutes of sheer terror and imagination run amok before I found him tagging along with our golden retriever as they blithely explored the neighborhood. Obviously, searching for a cat wasn’t as terrifying an experience but it does play the same accompaniment of regret and self-criticism to the mental melody of the search protocol. In between my observations of the way the street lamp lit the hilly contours of the neighborhood lawns with an empty yellow-green smoothness and the way my flashlight would cause bush leaves to project shadows moving in reverse toward me, momentarily looking like my dark little escapee, I thought about how I had let so much in my life slip away. Girlfriends, my mother, my first son, my career. I had lived for the moment and lost the strength of memory. I just never had a strong grip on the steering wheel of my life whether through carelessness, laziness or just reveling in my imagination. When your head is in the clouds, the world slips through your fingers.
After having circled the house for the third time, I decided to take a closer look at the area underneath the van in the driveway where I had shined the flashlight from a standing position earlier. That extra effort to get down on my knees yielded the result I had been searching for.
Our cats have always lived the indoor, outdoor life style and I made the mistake of letting this feline cub get a taste of the suburban jungle a little too soon which probably resulted in her acquiring a case of fleas. Even supervised visitation with Mother Nature is now forbidden until she can get spayed. However, she remains undeterred in her quest for adventure al fresco. She sees her big brother exercise his freedom of movement and follows him right up to the door before being forcibly detained. When we open our front door from the outside, it is like triggering the lid on a jack-in-the-box. She has obviously learned the embarrassing sound of our SUV’s rumbling muffler allowing her to lie in wait and spring out into the porch at the first crack of light. It is hard to maintain constant vigilance for an unrepentant, recidivist escape artist during our normally unconscious habit of exercising ingress and egress.
Inevitably, I let my guard down and release the Kraken. Usually, her escape is short-lived as I bend down to confront her under the chaise lounge, grasp the closest portion of furry anatomy and gather her up in my arms, apologetically assuring her of my love while scratching her under the chin to soothe the savage beast. It shouldn’t be a surprise that when she finally did successfully elude immediate and easy recapture, it would be under cover of darkness. I came in from lounging on the porch one evening for just a moment to retrieve a book and my reading glasses. When I returned I realized I had thoughtlessly left the door to the porch open. After a cursory search of the house determined that the prisoner was missing, I grabbed a flashlight and headed out into the dark world of unlimited possibilities that must have stretched out before her.
I was aware of every second ticking by as I fell through the trap door of fear and self-loathing. I’ve been down there before. My first son eluded my supervision when he was three and there were a few minutes of sheer terror and imagination run amok before I found him tagging along with our golden retriever as they blithely explored the neighborhood. Obviously, searching for a cat wasn’t as terrifying an experience but it does play the same accompaniment of regret and self-criticism to the mental melody of the search protocol. In between my observations of the way the street lamp lit the hilly contours of the neighborhood lawns with an empty yellow-green smoothness and the way my flashlight would cause bush leaves to project shadows moving in reverse toward me, momentarily looking like my dark little escapee, I thought about how I had let so much in my life slip away. Girlfriends, my mother, my first son, my career. I had lived for the moment and lost the strength of memory. I just never had a strong grip on the steering wheel of my life whether through carelessness, laziness or just reveling in my imagination. When your head is in the clouds, the world slips through your fingers.
After having circled the house for the third time, I decided to take a closer look at the area underneath the van in the driveway where I had shined the flashlight from a standing position earlier. That extra effort to get down on my knees yielded the result I had been searching for.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
Crying
Naturally, the first thing I thought of was the iconic scene where Marlon Brando, in a torn shirt, cries out “Stella” from the street and pretty quickly, I morphed “Stella” into “Momma”. In trying to justify that segue, it occurred to me that Stanley was crying out to his wife in the apartment above much in the same way a child might cry out to his mother if they were separated and he needed her love. Using that tenuous connection and my limited artistic abilities, I created a pretty scary looking Marlon Brando crying out for his Momma in a big word balloon. I added a poem for the inside of the card to help explain the thought behind the image that I worried looked a little strange for a Mothers Day card.
Later that June, Mom died in her sleep. Despite the fact that she was 90 years old, her death was shockingly unexpected. Up until the last time she laid her head on her pillow, Mom was apparently healthy, happy, active and mentally sharp. It was hard to believe that anything had gotten the better of her because she was so strong. I often told her that I thought she would outlive me. When the family gathered at her home that day, we said the good-byes she could no longer hear and kissed the face that could no longer respond with her sweet smile. I had brief fits of crying and shed a few tears but mostly I remember just shaking my head in disbelief.
As with my father and my son before him, it fell on me to prepare and deliver the eulogy at the burial of Mom’s ashes. I didn’t write about how her death effected me or anecdotes about experiences we shared. I focused on her, how she lived, what she accomplished and what was important to her. The morning of the ceremony I rehearsed it a few times on my porch hoping that it would help me develop the strength or emotional callous I needed to get through it without breaking down and losing the ability to speak. I needed that because I knew I was a crier.
I’ve always considered myself a stoic personality. I know how to take things in stride and keep my emotional equilibrium. When it comes to the death of a loved one, I focus on being thankful for the time we shared. I don’t have much use for dwelling on the negative. Wallowing in grief and regret for what might have been don’t seem to be “productive”. It doesn’t help me get to the happiness I’m always trying to reach. Mom’s favorite story about me was how, at a very young age, I came up to her and complained “I’m not having any fun.” It was a simple story but it seemed to encapsulate the search for happiness that drove me throughout my life.
On the other hand, I know how easily I can cry. For instance, it happens with regularity when I watch CBS Sunday Morning whether it is a sad story or, more often, just something beautiful. Not beautiful in the visual sense, something that is aesthetically pleasing, but the beauty of the human spirit that resonates with my beliefs and values, something that touches my heart by way of my brain. It could be a speech that stirs my pride in my country or seeing the sacrifice someone put in to help other people. It could be the lyric of a song that uncovers a salient truth or the music that takes me back to the purity and freshness with which I experienced it in my youth. Just now, I welled up at the precision solemnity of uniformed South Carolina State Troopers taking down the Confederate battle flag.
The ceremony was at the grave site with a small group of family and friends. Despite the rehearsals, I had a tough time getting through the eulogy. My halting voice would occasionally crack into the high-pitched range that forecasts a downpour. At times, I had to stop and gather myself with a deep, cleansing breath. There were tears but no storm. After struggling to make it to the finish, I felt like much of it had been unintelligible but my family assured me they’d heard it all. It was a beautiful, mild summer day and the sunshine seemed to dry me out. I walked around to hug my brothers and sisters and felt composed again.
Then the attendant directed us to the polished wooden cube that held Mom’s ashes and suggested we might want to touch it, thereby leaving something of ourselves with it, before burial. I hadn’t envisioned this part of the ceremony but, feeling a bit dazed, I followed the line to say a final good bye. When I got there, an involuntary impulse directed me to fall to my knees. My mind was no longer in control of my actions. My body bent over and my head and hands fell on the box. The dam inside me broke and the tears fell in a torrent. I was flooded with a grief I had never experienced before and did not know I was capable of feeling. An anguished cry of “Momma” burst from my throat.
Monday, May 25, 2015
My Habit
I call it my ‘retirement beard”. As the days of court appearances dwindled down to a trickle, mornings without the shaving ritual accumulated, allowing a force of wispy soldiers to occupy the pristine beaches of my face. I’ve dabbled in a few tonsorial adventures in my life. The most memorable were the copper-red muttonchops that I allowed to grow wild and referred to as my ‘lobster claws’ because one was longer than the other. I was young and I believe the look I was going for was weird or just plain rebellious repulsive. As I aged, an occasional extended vacation period presented the opportunity to dispense with the daily shave and flirt with the stranger in the mirror. But these dalliances never lasted long for one basic reason. I couldn’t stop playing with it.
Now, I am not someone who is prone to any sort of obsessive compulsive behavior or addictions. I never developed cigarette smoking or coffee drinking habits in large part because I was too cheap to be anchored to any financially draining pastimes. Fortunately drugs like caffeine and nicotine didn’t do enough for me to justify the expenditure when compared to the drugs and alcohol I did enjoy. Even those worthwhile drugs and drink were relegated to functions of social events, or what I generally referred to as “partying”. Other than elevating my consciousness to watch an occasional ballgame on television, I’ve never been one to sit around by myself and drink or get high. I don’t hang out at bars to drink unless there is some live music I’ve gone there to hear. My self-analysis has always been a diagnosis of a non-addictive personality. Playing with my facial hair appears to be my Achilles heel.
If I’m not using my fingers to tug, twist or twirl it, I’m using my lips to mash it or to be brushed by it. Consequently, I often look like either a dastardly villain plotting someone’s cruel demise or an excited old toothless prospector. It’s one thing to indulge this pleasure in my private moments but when I’m with other people its embarrassing to constantly succumb to this telling lack of self-control. On the other hand, I’ve known women whose hair-fingering obsessions wove an hypnotic spell on me that enhanced their attractiveness. Maybe their habit says more about their weaknesses than I may suspect but I just don’t think there is an equivalency of acceptability between playing with the hair growing from one’s scalp and the crop growing on one’s face.
Unlike most addictive substances or amusements, my facial hair is always there in perfect unlimited propinquity to my lips and hands. Indulging my habit costs nothing, usage doesn’t result in any material depletion and it’s harmless except for the damage to one’s social esteem, much like nose picking or chewing the inside of the cheek. Its pleasures are manifold. The face is one of the most sensuous organs and erogenous zones on the human dermal landscape and when combined with the sensitivity of the fingertips, its hard to resist bringing them together. Twirling a tuft of beard between the forefinger and thumb slaps it against the shaved cheek with the soft propulsion of the pad of a kitten’s playful paw. It pinpricks the skin with the slightest shock, like that of one electron. Plucking short strands of mustache, I bend and release them so that they bristle against the top of my upper lip. The sides of two fingers pull a row of beard, twist it like a curling iron and sculpt it into a bouncy ringlet to be pinched and preened. All these fine motor calisthenics are done repeatedly, pulling and pricking the skin with just the slightest amount of stimulation, relieving stress, anchoring me to the corporeal and allowing my imagination to roam.
An addiction is a means of filling a hole with something other than what’s missing. What subconscious need compels me to engage in such constant self-fiddlement? Am I merely seeking physical pleasure and stimulation or is it just another temporarily satisfying but ultimately futile attempt to find the connection between my mind and my body that I’ve been searching for since I was a little boy coming home with a stolen Playboy?
Now, I am not someone who is prone to any sort of obsessive compulsive behavior or addictions. I never developed cigarette smoking or coffee drinking habits in large part because I was too cheap to be anchored to any financially draining pastimes. Fortunately drugs like caffeine and nicotine didn’t do enough for me to justify the expenditure when compared to the drugs and alcohol I did enjoy. Even those worthwhile drugs and drink were relegated to functions of social events, or what I generally referred to as “partying”. Other than elevating my consciousness to watch an occasional ballgame on television, I’ve never been one to sit around by myself and drink or get high. I don’t hang out at bars to drink unless there is some live music I’ve gone there to hear. My self-analysis has always been a diagnosis of a non-addictive personality. Playing with my facial hair appears to be my Achilles heel.
If I’m not using my fingers to tug, twist or twirl it, I’m using my lips to mash it or to be brushed by it. Consequently, I often look like either a dastardly villain plotting someone’s cruel demise or an excited old toothless prospector. It’s one thing to indulge this pleasure in my private moments but when I’m with other people its embarrassing to constantly succumb to this telling lack of self-control. On the other hand, I’ve known women whose hair-fingering obsessions wove an hypnotic spell on me that enhanced their attractiveness. Maybe their habit says more about their weaknesses than I may suspect but I just don’t think there is an equivalency of acceptability between playing with the hair growing from one’s scalp and the crop growing on one’s face.
Unlike most addictive substances or amusements, my facial hair is always there in perfect unlimited propinquity to my lips and hands. Indulging my habit costs nothing, usage doesn’t result in any material depletion and it’s harmless except for the damage to one’s social esteem, much like nose picking or chewing the inside of the cheek. Its pleasures are manifold. The face is one of the most sensuous organs and erogenous zones on the human dermal landscape and when combined with the sensitivity of the fingertips, its hard to resist bringing them together. Twirling a tuft of beard between the forefinger and thumb slaps it against the shaved cheek with the soft propulsion of the pad of a kitten’s playful paw. It pinpricks the skin with the slightest shock, like that of one electron. Plucking short strands of mustache, I bend and release them so that they bristle against the top of my upper lip. The sides of two fingers pull a row of beard, twist it like a curling iron and sculpt it into a bouncy ringlet to be pinched and preened. All these fine motor calisthenics are done repeatedly, pulling and pricking the skin with just the slightest amount of stimulation, relieving stress, anchoring me to the corporeal and allowing my imagination to roam.
An addiction is a means of filling a hole with something other than what’s missing. What subconscious need compels me to engage in such constant self-fiddlement? Am I merely seeking physical pleasure and stimulation or is it just another temporarily satisfying but ultimately futile attempt to find the connection between my mind and my body that I’ve been searching for since I was a little boy coming home with a stolen Playboy?
Saturday, April 18, 2015
Resumption
After a winter suspension
my morning walks resume
and the ravine is just waking up
Tree limbs are still just black webs against the sky
Broken and sawed off trunks are scattered like dinosaur bones
Newborn bush petals float in pale green and yellow clouds
of mist across the slopes
Bleached brown survivors who refused to fall
hang like abandoned laundry on branches
bravely standing out until they are overwhelmed
by the coming Spring clothing
Discrete spiked explosions of green
shoot through the blanket of dead leaves
Recent rains have the creek
loudly rushing over shale steps
falling into pools of bubbly froth
A lone emerald head white collar duck
sits in the swamp
Waiting at the end of my walk
is an orphaned kitten
I will begin to love
my morning walks resume
and the ravine is just waking up
Tree limbs are still just black webs against the sky
Broken and sawed off trunks are scattered like dinosaur bones
Newborn bush petals float in pale green and yellow clouds
of mist across the slopes
Bleached brown survivors who refused to fall
hang like abandoned laundry on branches
bravely standing out until they are overwhelmed
by the coming Spring clothing
Discrete spiked explosions of green
shoot through the blanket of dead leaves
Recent rains have the creek
loudly rushing over shale steps
falling into pools of bubbly froth
A lone emerald head white collar duck
sits in the swamp
Waiting at the end of my walk
is an orphaned kitten
I will begin to love
Thursday, October 25, 2012
The Value of One Vote
Today I helped one person cast one vote. When I talked to him on the phone yesterday to make arrangements, I thought he might be elderly. Unless being 8 years younger than me makes him elderly, he wasn’t. It turned out he was disabled in ways that made him sound old. He had a beautiful smooth face, twinkling eyes and a big toothy smile but he had extreme trouble stepping off a curb or getting in and out of my car. Once he got going, he could shuffle along at a good pace with his cane but getting up out of a seat had me counting down to three with him to coordinate our efforts in the slow motion lift off, at times freezing in midair on the way up.
He explained to me during our car trip from his apartment on the West side that his arm had been mauled by rottweilers and his neck snapped after being hit by a 102 year old Florida driver. It caused him to retire from his 37 year career as a male nurse, the only one in his graduating class at OSU. He had been a scrawny, effeminate, black kid who was never treated respectfully by family or friends but who never let it bother him. He just laughed it off, held his head high and led a happy, successful life. He recounted the pain he felt about losing a brother who never listened to him about his partying life style and died a horrible slow death from diabetes. His brother would call him hurtful, disrespectful names but he would give anything just to hear his brother’s voice just one more time.
This physically broken man had a resilient spirit that kept him smiling and wisecracking. He flirted with all the ladies at the voting center and when he noticed the Romney wagon in the parking lot, I held him back as he played like he was going to go over there and kick some ass. Instead he was satisfied yelling “Racist” and “KKK” through the car window. He was fiercely independent, refusing the wheelchair inside the voting center when it was offered to him but he allowed me to help him through the process. Because his address had changed since last voting, he had to apply for and use a paper ballot. I knew to let him fill out all the paperwork and ballot with some helpful direction. After taking an excruciatingly long time filling in the small dot beside Obama’s name, he asked me what all the other names were about. I explained but resisted suggesting he consider giving Obama some help by at least voting for Senator Brown. Voting for president was enough for him which was something of a relief to me when I thought about how long it would have taken him to fill out the entire ballot.
After spending two hours and driving forty miles with him, I completed the task of helping one man cast one vote for one candidate. I felt enriched by having made the acquaintance of a man who was so positive and joyful despite all the trouble in his life. It was an honor to assist him in doing something that he felt compelled to do. While one vote may not make any more difference to the night than one star in the sky, the value of it is measured in the light it shines just for you.
Friday, July 27, 2012
Best When Used By...
I am not much of a do-it-yourselfer when it comes to home maintenance. In fact, I’m generally one of those do-as-little-as-possiblers when it comes to maintaining my environment. My desk at the office is a farrago of files, messages, stray documents, bills and small clerical devices. Often, my daily approach to getting work done is working on whichever file I see first on the surface and attacking the layers like a mountain top removal excavation. Finding the calculator, correction tape applicator or the letter opener often requires vertical mining methods punctuated by expletive blasts of frustration.
At home, when I was living alone, the kitchen sink could go as long as a week before either shame, disgust or the inability to prepare a meal would motivate me to do the dishes. I rationalized that it was more efficient and economical to allow the unstable stacks to fully ripen before harvesting the entire crop. Now that there are two and half of us, including one helluva cook, the speed at which the dirty dishes, bottles, pots and pans reach critical mass accelerates to daily velocity. Floors also require regular dredging but other domestic surfaces don’t clamor as loudly for attention. If there is no immediate need to navigate through an empty space, piles of flotsam and jetsam quickly accumulate and harden into dauntingly impenetrable geologic formations, archeological time capsules filled with the fossilized daily effluent of stuff draining into my possession.
I’m a decent groundskeeper as far as mowing the grass, watering plants and chopping up branches. When it comes to unskilled labor, I’m willing to give it a go. However, if the job requires expertise in plumbing, electrical or carpentry skills, I wisely restrict myself to the level of plunging toilets, changing lightbulbs and hanging pictures. The bathroom is one area of the house into which I have boldly ventured where no incompetent should go. My efforts at fixing the flushing mechanism of the toilet by stringing thin wire around a rusty lever and trying to attach it to a floating plug were based more on desperate hope than skill and met with only fleeting success.
Caulking the tub is a recurring bit of maintenance in the lavatory that seems more suited to my talents. The Battle of the Mold in the shower is one of those grueling struggles in which I can only bring myself to engage at the point that the science project threatens to escalate into a biological weapon of mass destruction. Scrubbing the discolored tiles and grout exercises areas of my musculature and patience that don’t normally get much use. However, ripping out the spotted, rubbery ribbon of caulk and replacing it with a glistening white stream of creamy sealant is an aesthetic challenge I relish. Creating a thin uniform line out of viscous silicon requires the same steady hand-eye coordination I use when I paint my watercolors as I sculpt a delicately rounded surface between wall and tub by gliding through the cool wet lava with the tip of my finger.
As I prepared for my latest adventure in caulking, I knew that a number of home repair materials used for projects over the past decade or so lay buried in the concrete graveyard of once-useful items hoping for an after-life that is my basement. This museum of my past, filled with randomly piled relics from my life with the Girlfriend, remained virtually untouched over the years of her absence like the bedroom shrine of a child who had disappeared. I decided to sift through the timeless chaos for what I needed to do today’s job instead of shopping for it. I found an applicator gun and virgin tubes of caulk which I hoped would be filled with the stuff that would return the seal around my tub to its once-gleaming glory. I vaguely remembered that an angled cut needed to be made on the plastic nozzle. When I squeezed the trigger on the gun loaded with the circumcised tube, nothing happened. Even after poking it with a nail to puncture what I hoped was the hardened crust topping a gooey center, nothing oozed forth. I pulled the tube out and looked at the part of the label that read “Best when used by 4/08”. It hadn’t occurred to me that the fresh, pure white impregnant, never exposed to the world outside it’s cardboard chamber, would petrify into an unusable memory.
At home, when I was living alone, the kitchen sink could go as long as a week before either shame, disgust or the inability to prepare a meal would motivate me to do the dishes. I rationalized that it was more efficient and economical to allow the unstable stacks to fully ripen before harvesting the entire crop. Now that there are two and half of us, including one helluva cook, the speed at which the dirty dishes, bottles, pots and pans reach critical mass accelerates to daily velocity. Floors also require regular dredging but other domestic surfaces don’t clamor as loudly for attention. If there is no immediate need to navigate through an empty space, piles of flotsam and jetsam quickly accumulate and harden into dauntingly impenetrable geologic formations, archeological time capsules filled with the fossilized daily effluent of stuff draining into my possession.
I’m a decent groundskeeper as far as mowing the grass, watering plants and chopping up branches. When it comes to unskilled labor, I’m willing to give it a go. However, if the job requires expertise in plumbing, electrical or carpentry skills, I wisely restrict myself to the level of plunging toilets, changing lightbulbs and hanging pictures. The bathroom is one area of the house into which I have boldly ventured where no incompetent should go. My efforts at fixing the flushing mechanism of the toilet by stringing thin wire around a rusty lever and trying to attach it to a floating plug were based more on desperate hope than skill and met with only fleeting success.
Caulking the tub is a recurring bit of maintenance in the lavatory that seems more suited to my talents. The Battle of the Mold in the shower is one of those grueling struggles in which I can only bring myself to engage at the point that the science project threatens to escalate into a biological weapon of mass destruction. Scrubbing the discolored tiles and grout exercises areas of my musculature and patience that don’t normally get much use. However, ripping out the spotted, rubbery ribbon of caulk and replacing it with a glistening white stream of creamy sealant is an aesthetic challenge I relish. Creating a thin uniform line out of viscous silicon requires the same steady hand-eye coordination I use when I paint my watercolors as I sculpt a delicately rounded surface between wall and tub by gliding through the cool wet lava with the tip of my finger.
As I prepared for my latest adventure in caulking, I knew that a number of home repair materials used for projects over the past decade or so lay buried in the concrete graveyard of once-useful items hoping for an after-life that is my basement. This museum of my past, filled with randomly piled relics from my life with the Girlfriend, remained virtually untouched over the years of her absence like the bedroom shrine of a child who had disappeared. I decided to sift through the timeless chaos for what I needed to do today’s job instead of shopping for it. I found an applicator gun and virgin tubes of caulk which I hoped would be filled with the stuff that would return the seal around my tub to its once-gleaming glory. I vaguely remembered that an angled cut needed to be made on the plastic nozzle. When I squeezed the trigger on the gun loaded with the circumcised tube, nothing happened. Even after poking it with a nail to puncture what I hoped was the hardened crust topping a gooey center, nothing oozed forth. I pulled the tube out and looked at the part of the label that read “Best when used by 4/08”. It hadn’t occurred to me that the fresh, pure white impregnant, never exposed to the world outside it’s cardboard chamber, would petrify into an unusable memory.
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