When I was growing up in Ft. Lauderdale, on occasion Dad would have to hire someone to perform some task that was beyond his physical abilities if not beyond his ken, which was seldom. One guy said he’d arrive after he picked up some “works”—meaning some of the fellows who waited on this or that street corner downtown waiting to get chosen to work for the day.
It seemed to me then and now a tough way to live; I couldn’t have lived with the uncertainty and anxiety. I’m glad I got so lucky: privileged, white and educated.
I used to regard those folks with a mixture of apprehension and ignorance, but as I’ve grown older, as with everything else, my perspective has changed.
I regret my growing inability in anything having to do with what the “works” could do. They easily perform the tasks that I cannot.
Viz. and to wit: electricity (no damn idea), plumbing (very minimal competency), carpentry (fuck and just no), and auto mechanics (less competency in direct proportion to the growing bewildering nature of automobiles). All I can do is write, teach, edit, cook, manage money, and those not all that well.
In utter honesty here are the few tasks of which I once was capable:
(a) Auto maintenance. I could change the oil and air filter in my car. I could change a tire. I could wash the car (I have to count everything I can. I haven’t washed a car in decades.)
(b) Gardening. I used to raise and nurture roses! You try that, especially in the hot South. I mowed the lawn and maintained that bitch of an internal combustion engine known as a lawnmower. I planted various annuals and fertilized them and made them pretty. I planted and fertilized azaleas and rhododendrons. I pruned our apple and plum trees out here. OK, move along, nothing to see here.
(c) House renovation. At our house in Greensboro, NC, Nancy and I ripped out 60’s era shag rug (the dust raising her allergies to an unbearable level) and then drove stealthily around the city depositing the shards into dumpsters. I assume that the statute of limitations has run out on whatever that crime was. Then I actually bought and installed and lacquered moulding along the floors. That required the mastery of certain tools of measurement. And nails, lots of tiny nails, many of which ended up uselessly bent.
(d) Painting. Before arthritis turned my wrists and fingers into whipped cream, I painted our houses. In Auburn, I even climbed ladders to paint the outside walls that contained my cathedral ceilings. I was sloppy but it got done. To a point.
(e) Wallpapering. (Hey, I just realized that if you try to put a lower case “e” into parentheses, Word (evil, overwhelmed by its own features) assumes you’re trying to type the symbol for “euro”. This is going to be useful in Portugal!) Nancy and I nearly divorced over replacing the wallpaper in one of our homes—Honey, which was it, Wilmington or Durham? I’ve blocked it out. Once again, my sloppiness clashed with Nancy’s perfectionism. OK, with wallpapering, I’m truly reaching.
In the meantime, out here on Bainbridge we’ve made the acquaintance of a neighbor, an Irishman named Seamus McGee. He can do anything at all. He has replaced our microwave, repainted our trim, installed crown molding and then painted it; so many other things I can’t recall.
I bought a recumbent bike and, with my arthritic hands, knew I wouldn’t be able to assemble it even if I could read the directions. Seamus came over and didn’t bother with the directions. He just fucking looked at the parts and put them together. Yeah, a recumbent bike. That Seamus guy.
Rodents chewed away a door to an outside shed that attaches to our house (great idea, builder) and then chewed into our crawl space. Rats and mice rule Washington State. Seamus rebuilt what amounted to the entire back corner of our house, and you’d never know that anything had happened back there.
He installed ceiling fans, which is not as easy as it looks. He installed a new faucet in the kitchen. I merely tried to repair one in Durham, and there was water all over the place.
When I tripped and fell back in August and fractured four ribs, I also put either my head or a knee through the wall and made a hole. I illustrated an earlier blog with a picture of it.
Seamus came over and repaired it so that it looks like it never happened. See illustration below. If you’re on the island and need a genius and a wonderful guy with a charming Irish accent , let me know.
Speaking of sheetrock, or drywall, or whatever you call it in your neighborhood, have I got a story for those of you who, like me, are utterly without skills.
Our house on Bainbridge was dungeon-like when we bought it. We’re not exactly in the woods, but it’s a very green area, so the sun has limited space and time to make it in. The sun moves past the back of the house, where we had sliding glass doors, but still, not much light.
First, we added recessed lighting to the living room, but that brightened things up only slightly, and, if only by their existence, emphasized how dark the room was. We shrugged and tried to live with it.
Then, on a trip to the south of the Olympic peninsula one summer, we encountered “Allyn Days.” Allyn is a little town with a highly unlikely port occasioned by an inlet of Puget Sound.
A lot of the towns on the peninsula have summer “days”: Bremerton, Silverdale, and our favorite is Suquamish, but it’s so cool that it doesn’t advertise so that not too many people show up and ruin it for everyone else. Allyn Days is a poor cousin. Nevertheless we stopped in and encountered an unlikely fellow named Tim who had set himself up as a franchisee (or something similar) of a company that made sunroom kits.
Tim was not an especially astute or charming salesman, but we ended up buying one, intending to have it installed in the back, where the sun crossed the yard. After the contractor broke through the main water line on the first day, work went, uh, swimmingly. They had to knock out a piece of the wall and move the entrance to the sunroom over a few feet, but that was work of just a moment.
The last task was to create a new piece of wall where there hadn’t been one before. Who could do it? These guys were all expert at tiling, fitting the wood pieces together, etc.
I remain astounded that they managed to match up the new floor of the sunroom with the living room. They had a lot of layers to take into account: the foundation, the sub-flooring, the tiling, you name it. Leave it to me, and there would have been a step of a few tilted inches necessitating a sign like in the London Tube, “Mind the gap.” But no, somehow these guys lined up the floors exactly. How do you do that?
Anyway, one of the guys was known as a “finisher”—meaning he performed the fine work needed to make everything look completed. Someone designated him to create that new piece of wall. It required drywall. He’d never done it before.
The others described the work to him. He listened very carefully, nodded, and then went to work. And then created a new wall where one had never been before, but no one would ever have known it. Those of you who know how drywall goes in will be astounded by this. I can scarcely describe it, but it starts with really rough work and finished with spraying a finish that, once dried, you can paint.
(I will say that I repaired the hole in the wall I punched in Chapel Hill when Roger Mudd’s son played music too late. Please see https://www.doingdishesinthedark.com/post/jonathan-mudd-finds-his-way. I didn’t get dinged on my security deposit, either.)
This finisher’s work was flawless. You’d have no idea that work like that had had to be done. Thanks to the work that a different handyman did, we have personal evidence that installing drywall can be disastrous. Yet this damn guy got it done right the first time he’d ever attempted it.
Guys like Seamus and this finisher—I don’t recall his name—really inspire me not to do anything. Why should I when they are so much better than I am?
My dad could do anything, but he never taught me the skills. He just made me follow him around, and then I got bored and paid no attention and resented the lost time.
One of Kate’s soccer coaches, one of those guys who can do anything, came and rebuilt our deck. He brought his little boy over and taught him how to do the work and let him do some of it. I praised Craig for letting his little boy try his hand at the work.
If my dad had done that, would I have turned out differently? I doubt it. I simply don’t have an engineer’s vision, the eyes that see a problem in the physical world and can solve it and then put it into action.
I can do that with concepts, words, sentences, but who cares? I’d far rather be able to rebuild a deck. Oops, but with my arthritis making my hands useless, we end up at the same place. Isn’t life a hoot? Thank the universe that there are people like Seamus McGee and the finisher.
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