Ah, Life Goes On Amid Jackhammers and Junk

When I finally succumbed to my wife’s will and agreed to remodel our house, I promised never again to complain about it, even if things went badly wrong.

So far I have kept my word, and so far I have had no reason to complain. I have endured a great deal of hammering and sawing, but somehow those sounds don’t bother me. When I was a small boy in Bakersfield I used to hear those sounds in our neighborhood and I liked them. Men were at work. Something was being built. As long as men can hammer nails and saw wood the world has not gone over entirely to high tech.

Our contractor is on the ball. His crew is competent and hard-working. Our architect hovers over the job like a mother hen. We are friends. The other evening our contractor and his wife took the architect and his wife and me and my wife out to dinner. The contractor brought three bottles of white wine in a sack. He had bought it himself in the Napa valley. Our waitress poured it for us. Now a man with that kind of savoir-faire has got to be trustworthy.

However, I don’t think my vow of compliance denies me the right to make observations or philosophize about some of the facts of our life revealed by this major exertion.

I have already commented on the overwhelming amount of junk our garage yielded when we had to clean it out so the men could jackhammer the floor and pour new foundations for the rooms to be built above it.

It quickly filled the small shack the contractor had provided for it, and the surplus now lies all about our swimming pool. It is open to the elements, but so far we have had no elements but heat.

There must be an equation for the amount of space junk will fill when removed from a garage. I would guess that it is four to one. Maybe five.

Our small service porch, whose inadequacy was the rather modest cause of the entire project, yielded even more, per square foot, than the garage. At first, my wife merely wanted to enlarge the service porch, so she would have room for washing and drying machines. I’m not kidding. She wanted to go back to doing our laundry. I reluctantly agreed to that, and was ultimately euchred into agreeing to two rooms and a bath over the garage.

The articles removed from the service porch completely cover our patio table and also an 8-foot-long table that is kept in the front bedroom. I can’t begin to describe this debris, except to say that almost none of it has ever been used, and none of it is likely to be used in the future.

By the way, the 8-foot table was one we bought years ago to augment the seating capacity of our six-seat dining room table for dinner parties. Except for Easter, when my wife annually clears the dining room table of her magazines, catalogues, mail, work sheets, tax forms, bank statements, bills and mementoes such as valentine cards and teddy bears, so that our family can sit down together on that holiday, we haven’t had a dinner party in 15 years. The 8-foot table has never been used except as a catchall. The bedroom now also contains the eight metal and vinyl chairs we bought to go with it, but which had never before been taken out of the garage.

What prompts me to reflect on these facts is a letter from Carol Kearns of Downey, reporting on a phenomenon that makes me feel that things could be worse.

On a visit to the Museum of Man in San Diego, Kearns said, she saw an 800-year-old mummy of a young woman that, according to archeological experts, had come from Chihuahua, Mexico. The extraordinary thing about this mummy though, according to Kearns, was that it was found in Lemon Grove by a woman cleaning out her garage.

Kearns says she is not sure of her facts, and that I could call the Museum of Man, to verify her story. I am not moved by my usual reportorial zeal to do that. Kearns’ story is good enough for me.

You can imagine how lucky I feel that we did not find an 800-year-old mummy in our garage.

But what troubles me is that, if we had found one, my wife would have wanted to save it.

Oh, well, it would have been one more for that dinner we are someday going to give.