Where You Been?
Posted: October 9th, 2009 | Filed under: Sketches in Time and Space
It’s been this long since I emerged on the other side of the silent season for Complex Fields. Long enough for the hammer-bruise to rise up from its place behind the cuticle of my left index finger, making the journey up to eventually attract H1N1 germs from the keyboards in the computer labs where I teach.
May through August was one of the more difficult seasons of life I’ve endured for awhile, a hard push of manual labor and psychic strife. Still, only one or two significant parts of it were a curse. For the most part, mine was a physical stretch earned as a privilege.
This summer we moved into a new house here in town, after getting ourselves into a tough spot. We needed more financial and spatial room with our recently-expanded family. And we had an impending loan knot to untangle, as we neared the end of an unorthodox loan, received on our first house back in 2003.
Last Winter, during a scary economic time for most everyone, we made the hard decision to sell our house and look for a new one, seeking a more sustainable economic situation. We sold the place in 24 hours, and found a new place within about 3 weeks. For the money we were looking at much smaller houses, which caused no small amount of anxiety. Then we found a larger place for cheap. The hitch was that the place would need a great deal of work to make it liveable - and so I set to it. We closed on the new house on May Day, and I immediately started into demolition and reconstruction - I knew how to do about half of what needed to be done, and could learn the rest or pay some people to help. The result was me spending around 10 hours a day for all of May, June and July, growing muscles in new places, and shrinking a bit into myself.
I remain humbled at the ways in which I was able to make this move, the ways in which we were able to make it out of a tough economic spot through a network of contingencies. The house we bought was a bank-owned foreclosure, or we’d have never got it so cheap. There already, we certainly benefited from another’s misfortune. I get paid for a 9-month job over 12 months, or I never would have been able to devote so much time to this project. Friends came and helped me for free, and brought food. I applied countless cartons of Chinese-made construction products to the walls of my new home, whole shipping containers of stuff made by low-wage hands. I also benefitted from help with child-care, since my partner was able to do that while I worked on the house for free. We even had help from family with that.
So all in all, I had a wretched time of sprinting through unpleasant labor, for which I am eternally grateful. The new house is working out well, as a structure for many things.
Looking back at all this, I think about the ways to mark time. Talk radio marked my hours and kept me company; I hammered, measured and sanded my way through a whole series of events and punditry:
- The nomination and interrogation of Supreme Court Justice Sotomayor.
- The death of Michael Jackson.
- The arrest of Illinois Governor Blagojevich.
- The hate-crime theft of a Edgar-Heap-of-Birds sculpture on campus, and requisite bungling by the County.
- The exposure of corrupt admissions processes within my University, and public grilling of administrators.
- The outing of South Carolina Governor Mark Sandford as skipping out on his duties to conduct an extra-marital affair.
- The subsequent rise of publicity for Sandford’s Christian base at “C Street,” and my slow realization that people in my extended family run that place.
- The protests in Iran around the Presidential Election, and the world’s support.
- Al Franken wins a Senate seat, at long last.
- Sarah Palin resigns.
- A doctor who performs abortions in Kansas City is brutally murdered in his own church.
- Chrysler gets sold.
Also though, there are artifacts to serve as a memory of this time. Here are some:
This is the back of an envelope I pulled out of the fireplace in my new house. I didn’t understand it at first. I’m told this is something Hannah Montana is fond of saying.
Looking at the front of the same envelope, I begin to imagine someone writing notes to another who’s on the telephone. Thus the repetition, emphasis.
This is the business card for the guy who patched my roof. Something about the typography and word choices here interests me. It reads like a poem.
I found this crazy flyer in a shopping cart at Lowe’s. I couldn’t make sense of it so I taped it up inside the kitchen cabinet where I stashed my wallet and keys each day when I arrived at the house. What is this “New Breed Wrestling Alliance?” Sounds like White Supremacy, and if so, then are the darker-skinned wrestlers part of it? What does a “4 Way Ladder Match” look like? And does the anarchist band play while the wrestling is going on?
About halfway through my summer, I found myself switching stores. I probably went every day twice to my local corner hardware store, with at least one run out to Big-Box-Store Drive for other stuff. I always preferred Lowe’s, which I understand is marketed more to women(?). Menards was confusing to me. But now I see, Menards is totally the place for me. I can’t describe the change or why, but it was a milestone of my summer which made me feel all pro. Sucker.
This is the window where I looked out as my friend Nathan told me on the phone that he had just come home to find his wife dead from suicide. It was around 5:00pm. I biked back to our old house to tell my partner, but she was busy making dinner, things were crazy with the twins, and her parents helping out. I could see that if I told her then, it would be very difficult to conclude the daily tasks. Deciding to wait until the boys were down and dinner served, I made the excuse of a visit to Menard’s for supplies, drove there, looked at lighting products in a daze. When I returned and asked her outside to tell her the sad news, I collapsed on the ground, barely able to say a word.
For the next two weeks, even as I fell behind on my renovation work, I was needed elsewhere. Chicago and Houston, funeral homes and the living rooms of strangers. Finally, as I watched the consequences play out of a woman who didn’t ask for help, I did ask for help, at least with the mundane things. Friends from all over, who didn’t know Nathan or Stephanie, came to help me push the house projects forward so I could help Nathan. Love in the ties, love in the conversations over paint about easy and tough subjects.
These were the shoes I wore all summer for working on the house. I bought them years ago to “work out in” and never used them. So out of the closet they came, and I sure learned why those contractors wear boots all the time. I can’t tell you how many times I went to kick or lift something in place and stubbed my toe.