“Art is not the privilege of a class; it is essentially human and is both individual and universal.” – George Ward Nicols, 1877
The morning radio host had to tell me “If You Leave” by Orchestral Maneuvers in the Dark from the Pretty in Pink soundtrack turned 40 today. There’s a moment here where I’m supposed to say “ouch” and wax nostalgic for a few beats. And I suppose I did. It’s good to remember that I was 12 years old when I went in search of the arcane knowledge about high school and adulthood in the movies. Being gifted and cursed with an active and strong imagination, I tended to live like I was living the layers of a life. I was a spy with a cover story. I was a crash-landed alien stuck and waiting to be rescued, turning it into a research mission to occupy my time until the mothership arrived.
I didn’t figure out what I’d done to myself until I heard it in the David Cronenberg’s movie of William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. “It’s like an agent who’s come to believe his own cover story,” Benway told William Lee, mixing the cure in with the bug powder. “But who’s in there, hiding, in a larval state. Just waiting for a time to hatch out.” Later, when Lee was trading the mugmump machine back for Clarknova, the enemy (?) handler tried to convince Lee not to believe his own cover story by warning about an agent in Anexia who had come to believe her cover story. It took some years to work myself back out, I suppose.
Struggling a little to focus this morning. Yesterday was a day with too little sleep. Today is a day after having slept maybe too well. We are fully enveloped in winter, which is to say it feels a little early in comparison to the last few years. A hard cold winter will make for a good spring, though, or so I tell myself. It lets the earth rest right and proper. Let’s hope the earth wakes up focused and ready to work. There will be plenty of it to do. So goes into the report, anyway.
sl ee p sl ee p sl ee p dear lo ve the work wa its
I realized that Porch Bee hadn’t really had any warning; how does one give a demolition notice to a carpenter bee? Should I have pinned a notice to the porch? Should I have tried to find an email address? Certified mail?
The old steps, unearthed. I’d forgotten they were painted blue.
Sometimes Porch Bee would be the first to greet me when I got home from work. Little bug would just hang by the front door, waiting. I knew a cat like that once; as a kitten it got caught up in a car engine and as a result lived with a permanent splint on one of her front paws. That cat lived with my first ex-wife and her parents when we were both in (separate) high schools. They lived in the country, in a small trailer, and my then girlfriend was highly allergic to cats. Country cats have hard lives, and that cat was no exception; but she would wait for me to come back (I was told) when I left and was always happy to see me when I showed up. While it’s difficult to tell precisely what the emotional state of a carpenter bee is, clearly it wasn’t disturbed by our comings and goings.
The front porch was added on in 2012; this was before I moved in. The hand rail on the cement steps had gotten increasingly theoretical and dangerous, and Amanda’s dad offered to have a new porch built. The idea was to let the wood season for a year and then treat it. After I moved in, I should have made sure we did that. I didn’t, and it got away from us. I’d replace a wood screw from time to time, keep them clear. Salt during winter snow didn’t help. Over the last eight or ten months, severe weather and time made the steps increasingly unsafe.
If it were just a matter of one board, I could probably manage that. I say probably because while I’ve gotten pretty decent at plumbing and I’m more comfortable with electrical work than I used to be. Wood work is… complicated. Or maybe not.
My grandpa, my mom’s dad, was a carpenter. His name was Clay Dunn. When he and my grandma moved from the house on S. Charity Street to Bantam, outside of Bethel, Ohio, he built his wood shop off the back of the garage. The other grandchildren — my brother and my three cousins — were allowed in the wood shop. I wasn’t. Sickly with weak lungs, the prevailing wisdom dictated that wood dust would kill me, as would the second hand smoke from the menthol cigarettes he smoked. Sometimes I would sneak into the wood shop when he wasn’t working. It was an organized space that smelled of wood shavings, cigarettes, with a hint of oil from the equipment. He had a wood burning stove that he would light to keep warm in the winter. But the prohibition to participate in projects, to learn anything about his world except to see the end result of his labors, was a hard line that no one crossed.
Porch Bee stopped by while I was taking down one side of the banister. He landed on a baluster I was removing a wood screw from. I realized that Porch Bee hadn’t really had any warning; how does one give a demolition notice to a carpenter bee? Should I have pinned a notice to the porch? Should I have tried to find an email address? Certified mail? Porch Bee lingered several seconds, then flew off. I thought I detected some sadness in the flight pattern.
I’d decided to try and salvage some of the wood, which meant this wasn’t just a crowbar and hammer job. I also decided to try and save the wood screws that could be saved. I started out making two piles of wood… one with pieces too far gone to keep, the other wood that could potentially be salvaged. This added to the amount of time I’d allowed to tear down the porch, but the price of lumber isn’t much improved and you never know when you will need a wood screw, right?
Getting down to the wood stair frame made me think about Grandpa. He’d once built a staircase in the home of a girl I went to school with, Nancy Hauserman. This was my 7th grade year, and once she found out the guy working on her house was my grandpa, we had something to talk about. It did and didn’t help that she was the prettiest girl in our grade, and basically a nice person. Of course, I couldn’t count on Grandpa NOT to share embarrassing stories about me, in particular the one about my not being allowed in the wood shop. I was about as mortified as a 7th grader can get, which for me meant I was unable to look her in the eye or maintain even a passable conversation. Ah, teenage hormones. What a motherfucker.
The last part of the deck frame ended up being cut with a reciprocating saw. The builder had screwed the back board into the posts before setting them, and it was almost 5 o’clock. I’d been working on deconstructing the deck since around 10 in the morning. I found myself enjoying the process. The decision to salvage the some of the wood and screws meant having to take it apart in a particular way — trying to work what I imagine was almost backwards. Amanda and I decided to leave the box around the cement stairs and use them as planters — for a season or two, anyway. And I left part of one of the rails up to work as a temporary banister until I sink a more permanent one or until we build, or have built, another porch. I also need to either trim down or dig up the unnecessary posts.
I’m probably going to go ahead and paint the steps before winter, just to brighten them up and to help protect the cement. Interestingly enough, the cement steps you see in the pictures were built on top of another set of older cements steps. I showed this to Amanda and she shrugged. “And someday, there’ll be a ziggurat here.”
Porch Bee stopped by one more time, clearly displeased with this turn of events. I was working on getting that last bit of deck framing loose. Porch Bee buzzed in a far less friendly manner. But I simply apologized, said it couldn’t be helped. One bee’s condo is another city code enforcement stooge’s code violation. Gentrifying assholes.
Now, to get rid of the wood. Sorry again, Porch Bee. I really am.
I watched the couple. They were maybe 200 yards away along River Rd under the river overlook next to the Galt House. From the 2nd Deck of the Mary M. Miller, inside, and at that distance they didn’t see me. Passing headlights didn’t keep them from embracing and I wondered casually if she’d go on her knees.
She didn’t before I lost interest and kept on with my rounds.
