Penetrating Oil and the Occasional Beauty of Loneliness

Last week I told you about that stupid stuck bolt I stripped, right? And so my big step forward this weekend – or so I’d hoped – was to buy some penetrating oil and get that thing unstuck. 

I stopped at Home Depot on the way home from A’s. I could have asked the first person I saw in an orange apron to point me in the right direction, but it feels so good to stroll down the aisles shooting sly, knowing glances at the newly familiar tools and supplies: the drill bits, the pump sprayers, the random orbital sanders. Things I’ve purchased recently and have at home now; objects with which I’m developing – somewhat clumsily, sure, and somewhat clandestinely – a relationship. So I took my time. 

And yeah, maybe even winked at a jumbo tin of Thompson’s Water Seal Cleaner & Brightener.

 

I know you, Thompson’s.  

Eventually I came to an end cap with three shelves of penetrating oils. I was looking for Kroil because of reviews I’d read online, but they didn’t have that so I picked up a can of this stuff called PB Penetrating Catalyst. The can was crowded with grandiose claims in about a dozen different fonts, but that didn’t stop me from holding it up and squinting at it the way I squint at a glass of wine when called upon to taste it before committing to a whole bottle.

It was “revolutionary,” said the can, and “fabulous,” and “powerful.” Who was I to doubt it? So in the end – just like I do with the wine – I gave a single nod of acceptance and headed for the checkout.

 

~~~

When I got home the sun was shining. The rain is coming soon, right? I know I’m supposed to want that, I know the whole state needs it so badly. But oh, damn, the sun on my back deck is just so fucking fantastic.

This sun, I thought. This sun and this blue sky and this aerosol can of oil that may or may not bust that bolt free.

But fuck. I knew it wouldn’t/couldn’t.

I just knew it, and so I thought of a few things to do before trying. Changed into shorts and a tank top. Leaned on the deck railing and looked out over the ‘hood for five minutes. Turned on some music. Did some dishes.

But I only had a few hours to work on the chairs and so eventually I popped the top off the can, aimed the nozzle at the bolt head, and hit that motherfucker with two short, sharp bursts of oil. It pooled, yellow and foaming, and then started to sink in.

The instructions on the can said to let it penetrate for five minutes. I decided to give it 20.

I knew it wouldn’t work.

It wasn’t quite noon, but those 20 minutes and the knowing it wasn’t going to work, plus the warm sun on my skin…I needed a beer. It’s near-enough-noon, I decided, and I cracked open a Lagunitas Czech Pilsner.

And then I sat outside in the sun. I could have sat in Chair #1, all re-glued and solid now, but I sat in Chair #3 instead. Rocked at the hips to feel the wobble, as if the chairs-needing-fixing justified sitting out there drinking a beer at not-quite-noon. As if the instability of the chair proved this project needed doing, a belief that might sustain me if and when I still couldn’t budge that goddamn bolt. I sat there, limbs splayed, soaking up the sun and sipping my beer. Considering the tendrils of bougainvillea that wend their way up from my downstairs neighbor’s back porch, reaching for greater heights and trying to get a firm hold on something.

Then I caught the heady whiff of penetrating oil on the barely-there breeze, and it sent a shiver through me. And it wasn’t just on the air, it was on me, on my fingers. I brought my hand up to my nostrils and inhaled (I couldn’t help it, even though it says “VAPOR HARMFUL” and “EXCESSIVE INHALATION MAY BE FATAL” right on the can), and suddenly I was awash in – awash in what?

In waves of missing. In longing for my father. In a gaping but somehow inviting loneliness.

I missed my dad and wished with all my heart to just feel him in the world.

I closed my eyes and tilted my face toward the sun and inhaled the scent of penetrating oil – and then I did feel him.

Did our garage/his workshop smell like this? I don’t know. There was no specific scene called up, just this achy yearning and a montage of images: a workbench, a red metal toolbox, a sawhorse made of 2x4s, tools organized on pegboard. I don’t know if I was seeing things from one garage or many – we moved a lot and I have a shitty memory. And I don’t know if my father’s work spaces smelled of penetrating oil, or something similar, or neither. Hell, maybe my brain was just fucking with me entirely, the way it does when the sky’s so blue or the grass so green.

But he was less far away from me somehow. Eyes still closed, I suddenly found myself remembering how my father taught me to punch a speed bag in some garage in whatever suburb we lived in when I was small. And that achy breaky lonely feeling hurt so good.

By which I mean, it was not despairing, it was warm. And every few minutes I put my fingers up to my nose again, inhaled again. Alone, lone, lone, lonely – but I didn’t wish anyone else there right then, not A or my kids or even #1.

See, Jim, I said – telepathically – to my hiking buddy and fellow human-figuring-shit-out-at-middle-age. See? Some kinds of lonely are beautiful. Some kinds are sustaining.

The 20 minutes were over. I took a long drink of beer and a deep breath, and I got up and stood over the rickety frame of the chair, the wood I’d cracked last week clamped so I wouldn’t fuck it up any further. I took a solid stance, braced myself for failure, and turned the thing lefty loose-y.

There was about an inch of give that sparked a short-lived flicker of hope, but then resistance.

Utter. 

Fucking. 

Resistance. 

Once again I was at an impasse. Fuck all. I flipped the whole flimsy thing over to give the not-stripped bolts on the other side a try. They were just as stuck. I doused them in penetrating oil, stood with hands on hips watching it sink in.

Fuck all. 

I decided to skip ahead, to remove the planks of the seat and start cleaning the ends and the grooves they fit into, to prep all that for re-gluing. They pulled out pretty easily, thank you, Jesus. There were tiny nails in the slats and I worked them patiently with pliers until I could pry them out. I cleaned each piece of wood with soapy water and a rag, slopping dirty water all over my bare legs. I dipped the rag in denatured alcohol and started working on the old, hardened glue, scrubbing at it and then also chipping away at it with my rasp. I relaxed into the slow, deliberate chore of it all, let time slow down, let the sun warm me inside and out.

And my thoughts drifted to this line of Rilke’s: “I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough to make every minute holy.”

Hear that, Jim? There’s “too alone” but there’s also the holiness of alone. I can attest to it, can cite just how delicious it is, for example, to walk the sidewalks and railroad tracks of Memphis, Tennessee, where I know nobody, just me under the hot southern sun. I can vouch for the beautiful loneliness of an 11-hour Greyhound bus trip. For the glory of a twin bed in a hostel. For bellying up to the bar in a strange town and ordering a drink without a word to anyone but the barkeep.

And, hell, you know how I feel about this one: miles and miles and miles in the mountains – no companions / no cell phone / no evening news or social media – and sleeping alone under the whole big, starry sky, courting a kind of lonely so glorious it feels like religion. That sweet wholesome delicious sort of lonely, I absolutely love it, I crave it even.

The tricky thing – and I thought about this as I scrubbed at the wood, picked at the glue – the tricky thing for me is the raging dichotomy at my core, this fierce desire for solitude competing for space, somehow, with its opposite. I mean, Joe’s dead so you can’t ask him, but ask A or boy-who-broke-my-heart or maybe even Ex (though I’m not sure he knows) – but I’m sort of a fucking lunatic that way. How deeply intimate I want to be when I’m in love – heart to fucking heart – and how a lesser thing – a fine thing, a complacent thing – makes me want to run away to the wild, wild wilderness and let loneliness and the enormous beauty of the world burn me into something spare and pure.

Rilke says it – or something similar – better: “and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times when something is coming near, I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.”

~~~

I’d barely made a dent in the glue when it was time to take a shower and get ready to go out. Not the best chair day, but somehow I felt okay. Maybe because…well, have you ever given someone advice and then panicked a little (or a lot) thinking maybe you’d steered them wrong? Well, my chair was still a hot mess but at least the day’s reflections made me confident in some amateur life coaching I’d offered up the day before:

Never stay with someone for fear of being alone.

I tidied up out back – my back deck. I put my tools away – my tools, for fixing stuff myself (or trying). I rinsed out my beer bottle (yeah, bitches, a beer before noon) and dropped it into the recycling bin. And on the way to the shower I paid very close attention to the lonesome sound of my bare feet on the hardwood floor, and I felt tremendously grateful.

I am too alone in the world, and not alone enough
to make every minute holy.
I am too tiny in this world, and not tiny enough
just to lie before you like a thing,
shrewd and secretive.
I want my own will, and I want simply to be with my will,
as it goes toward action,
and in the silent, sometimes hardly moving times
when something is coming nearer,
I want to be with those who know secret things
or else alone.
I want to be a mirror for your whole body,
and I never want to be blind, or to be too old
to hold up your heavy and swaying picture.
I want to unfold.
I don’t want to stay folded anywhere,
because where I am folded, I am a lie.
And I want my grasp of things
true before you.  I want to describe myself
like a painting that I looked at
closely for a long time,
like a saying that I finally understood,
like a pitcher I use every day,
like the face of my mother,
like a ship
that took me safely
through the wildest storm of all.

Rainer Maria Rilke,

translated by Robert Bly

Big as an Ocean

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I bought a drill, my own drill, and now I am unstoppable.

Unstoppable, Manning? Because you have a cordless drill?

Yes.

And so now you have to flip off the whole world?

Aw, hell, it’s nothing personal but, yeah, I kind of do somehow. My very deepest-down insides are all, FUCK YOU, WORLD, and I absolutely delight in the fact that the thing is fully charged when I take it out of the box. What a beautiful whir it makes when I depress the trigger! I feel like a million self-sufficient bucks, and it takes me back a few years to when I first moved out of the big house–

The big house.

The big house is my name for the house I owned with Ex for about 15 years. He doesn’t like that I call it that, but here’s my first memory of that place: sitting with him on the hardwood floor of the open front room — two expansive rooms in one, really — getting all giddy about the possibility of, together, becoming homeowners for the first time. There was no furniture, just sunlight streaming in the windows and dancing from wall to wall, lilting from the planks of the hardwood floor to the high ceiling. We sat where we imagined we’d put a couch one day, and our view out the window opposite was of treetops. We sat right next to each other even though there was all this airy space, and everything felt so goddamn big that our hearts were full to bursting.

And sure enough. We already had two kids when we moved in; we had two more by 2004, making us a family of six. Over the years we had good friends live with us when they needed a place to stay — whole families, sometimes, for months at a time. Our best friends and our kids’ best friends were always welcome, we never even locked the door. We hosted — well, actually, “hosting” sounds weird. We embraced parties; celebrations seemed to spring up organically at the big house. Not Martha Stewart-y parties, but chaotic, messy affairs with lots of food and lots of drink and lots of music.

Music. There were guitars everywhere — Ex played and so did my bro and eventually so did #1 son and his best friend. (I tried but was outdone by a trillion miles.) There were amps and mics and songbooks and a piano nobody really played. Eventually there was even a drum kit in the living room.

So see? It was big. It was wonderfully big in so many ways.

Maybe Ex thinks “big house” is code for how I came to feel so confined there, and maybe that not-so-subtle other meaning is something I need to dull the sting of giving up/losing that home of mine. But still. “Big house” is too accurate of a name for me to call it anything else, and so…

Anyway. Brandishing my new drill brings me back to when I first moved out of the big house, when I borrowed Ex’s drill (borrowed? wasn’t it, and everything else I left behind there, half mine?) and — by myself — hung this million-pound mirror in the little upstairs bedroom of the small cottage my mom and I would be renting together for a while.

Caption from July 10, 2013: Little victories! You can’t tell from the picture because I was holding the camera crooked, but the level says I hung this big heavy thing perfectly level. Feeling empowered and almost cocky. I challenge all comers to a game of air hockey!

~~~~~

It was last Sunday that I bought my new drill, a Hitachi DS18DSAL, and just holding it in my hand made me feel fiercely capable, the same way I feel when my backpack is loaded with everything I need and I’m about to shut down my phone and head into the backcountry all by myself. Good, good, good, right? But I was nervous, too, because I’d gotten busy on Chair #2 the day before and quickly run into a problem. The wood was falling apart, splintered more than Chair #1, and while some of the joints came apart easily, the bolts holding the arms to the legs of the seat were stuck fast.

My plan was to force a bit into the head of the bolt and reverse drill it out. Like the guy in the YouTube video had done with a bit and an extension and a ratcheting socket wrench.

But what happened when I tried that? I stripped the goddamn bolt, of course. I stripped the fucking bolt. And then maybe I panicked a little, and in my stupid, impatient, pathetic desperation to get the goddamn chair apart I thought, Ooh, what if I just rotate the whole side of the chair? The leverage will turn that stupid rusty bolt, right? Right?

And I found myself turning it before I could even answer my own question. Found myself bracing the body of the chair with my feet and turning the side of the chair, thinking that would unscrew the bolt, daring to hope but oh, god!

I should have imagined, maybe, that this might happen, but I didn’t: the piece it was screwed into, the side piece of the seat, began to crack. The sound was sickening — it made me want to throw up, or cry, or both — and yet I kept turning, in short, sharp bursts. With one hand I held the wood of the seat-piece together where it was cracking, and with the other I made a few last, futile attempts.

And then I went limp. Slumped there on the floor of the deck, I wiped my sweaty, dirty brow with the back of my hand and absorbed the defeat. It was already mid-afternoon, and I had plans for the afternoon/evening/night, which meant I needed to shower and get my ass out the door.

The shower. Where I do way too much thinking all the fucking time. And so I left poor Chair #2 and stripped naked and turned the water on full blast and stepped into the tub.

Fail. Fail. Fail.

Fuck everyone, I thought. Fuck me.

Maybe I should have wondered who could advise me, who might help. A or Badore or my bro or my brilliant engineer sister-in-law or my fucking amazing rocket scientist (ish) wife-if-I-were-a-lesbian. But no. Like most of my life fails it just made me want to shut out everyone and/or run away to the mountains. Kick things. Abandon shit. Set out alone and fail and fail and fail and fail but survive.

And I thought of Hayduke, of course, because at times like this I always do. Hayduke and canyons and deserts and being thirsty and hungry and hot and cold and filthy but surviving. Hayduke and also beds, beds as big as oceans. That bed in that hotel room in SoCal that I hate, its crisp white sheets all tightly tucked. That generic hallway, geometric pattern of the carpet and the loneliness of the goddamn elevator. Book club that one time in that lame chain restaurant next to the dumb hotel, Kazantzakis and McCarthy and that married guy who likes poetry.

Beds as big as oceans, they’re so stupid. I want my tiny tent and a solo journey into the wilderness.

My Tiny Tent, big enough for EXACTLY ONLY ME.

Why does that make me want to cry fierce hot tears? I love my tiny tent. I love carrying it and setting it up and sleeping in it under the stars out in the middle of this beautiful universe and tearing it down at sunrise and continuing on, solo. Love, truly love. So what is there to be sad about?

Its antithesis / this big bed and he says can you scooch over a little? And I don’t know why or how but suddenly I’m on the far edge of the bed, a million miles away. I hang an arm over the edge, dangle a foot. And I hate this but it’s undeniable: not-touching reminds me of Joe, of the heartrending contrast between nights when we’d sleep all night in each others’ arms, deeply and well — and nights when Joe wasn’t touching me. Because when Joe wasn’t touching me, it was with full intent. It was punishment doled out with icy precision.

“Goodnight, Karen,” he’d say.

His ex-wife’s name.

And he’d sleep like a baby freshly sated while I lay awake burning, staring wild-eyed at the ceiling and saying to myself, Just leave, Bethy, just go home.

But I never did.

Whereas, Ex.

Those years, the waning years. I wouldn’t say it was a roller coaster, because the highs and lows weren’t split-second thrills, they were long, slow, bone-deep goodness and then also long, slow, bone-deep depletion, often overlapping.

There was so much unspoken.

But when our bed felt ocean-big, when we were at odds or out of sync, when I felt on the brink of knowing we’d never be whole again, sometimes I’d manage, just barely, to say, Can you just put a hand on me?

And he would.

He would.

He always would.

On my bare shoulder or my back or my hip, he would lay a hand on me, and every time, every time, I would feel comforted and grateful and profoundly bound. Which was sometimes a happy feeling and sometimes so bittersweet I wanted to die.

His hands, they were an exact, particular size I still know.

And he wore his wedding band for months after I’d stopped wearing mine.

When I asked him to put a hand on me and he did, sometimes I’d just want to sink into the ground and be forever buried under cool, fragrant soil — me in those ages old baggy plaid pajama pants he absolutely hated.

He wasn’t perfect by any stretch and I’m not saying everything was my fault, but fuck me, you guys, in some ways I was a real asshole.

I never meant to be, and he thinks I’m not sorry but I am.

God. I never would have imagined that at FORTY-FUCKING-EIGHT I’d have so much left to figure out. But look at me, wanting nothing from anyone and then again wanting the fucking world. Look at me brandishing my drill and flipping everyone off and drinking hard and asking for more than my fair share of love. Look at me stripping screws in my impatience and making the wood crack and leaving it all for another day, too fucking stubborn to give up but too lost to figure out the best, right way and just do it.

Sometimes I think I need a horse and a border to cross, but I’m not sure. Sometimes I think I need Billy Parham or a certain sort of Jesus Christ.

But the things I know I need, the things I’m sure of, they’re pretty fucking simple.

I need my kids like I need air.

I need some penetrating oil, and maybe a screw extractor, and some solid sunshine to renew my diligence.

I need cold water on my bedside table, and I need to hear my own, whole name.

And sometimes I need my tiny tent.

And sometimes I need a hand on me.

Everything I Don’t Know

Slept late this morning, and while I was still 98% asleep a tapping noise wormed it’s way into my dreams. It was subdued and even — tap tap tap tap tap. Familiar, but distantly so. A sleepy woodpecker? A neighbor practicing a soft shoe tap dance? I couldn’t place it.

It continued, softly and evenly, as I started coming into consciousness. Finally I opened my eyes, looked at the clock, rose. I peeked out my window to see what I could see, and everything was blanketed in heavy, gray fog. The tapping was water dripping from the water spout.

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California is suffering from severe drought, and like most Californians I’m forever praying for rain, and even looking forward to the wicked El Niño we’re supposed to get this winter.

But somehow it hadn’t occurred to me for one second that it would rain on my chair project. Each day I’ve spent on them so far has been hot and sunny and perfect for the task, because in addition to the obvious — needing the wood to be dry — working in the hot sun is delicious. I love how the sun warms my skin; seeps into my soul and enriches it. I love sweating and therefore feeling like I’m doing real work. I love drinking an ice cold beer when I get hot and thirsty.

But now it’s Saturday morning, which I had slated for disassembling Chair #2, and it’s wet on the back deck. And all I can really think about is this song by #1, and all the things I don’t know.

Because of the dripping fog, but also, maybe, because I still have this weird Thursday in my head.

On Thursday morning, I was getting ready for work when I decided to test the air out back, see if I could get a whiff of the weather and what the day held. I stepped out onto the deck and oh, damn, that morning air. It fucking kills me, the taste and feel of it, when it’s still cool but there’s an undercurrent of warmth and you can feel that it will be hot later and the sky will be so brilliant blue it will pierce your heart.

When the morning air is like that I feel there’s a cavalier god watching me, laughing, booming this: a whole day, Manning, this air and this sunshine and 12 hours of light, what are you going to do with it?  Like he knows I might try to seize the hours – and that I might fail – or that I might just let them tick away. Like he’s mulling over the many ways he could toy with me – the small beautiful things he could put in my path; the memories he might serve up with a song or a smell; the miniature heartbreaks with which he could test me. Little things nobody could fault him for, like shimmering light off the glass of a skyscraper or the way my kids look from behind, walking away from me and into their worlds when I drop them at school.

Yeah, things nobody would think were a big deal, only this imagined god knows, of course, the exact condition of my heart. He knows its tendency to overflow and he knows every crack, every fissure. He knows it’s made of glass.

Anyway. It was that kind of morning air on Thursday, and the trick this god threw at me was this: the impulse to take the clamps off Chair #1, to sit in it and face the music. Would it be solid or a wobbly mess?

So I did it. I unscrewed the clamps and sat down in Chair #1.

The seats of these chairs are wide. Even with my big butt and thighs there’s room on either side of me when I sit down. To rest my arms on the arms of the chair means my arms are away from my sides. I’m wide open, sitting in Chair #1, not tucked into myself. I feel vulnerable, and like I might cry. I rock at the hips to test the chair, and no answer comes to me.

I couldn’t assess the stability of the chair. There was no definitive wobble, but there was no definitive solidity either. I couldn’t tell if it was strong now or still weak. I couldn’t tell if the new bonds were temporary or lasting.

I couldn’t tell these simple things.  

I sat there, breathing that wickedly beautiful morning air, open to knowing but receiving no answers. And all I could think was  I don’t know.

A.

I don’t know.

And all day Thursday, this feeling of knowing nothing. This feeling of being naked, of having said too much, to him and him and him and all of you.

Smell of wood smoke, of every campfire, real and imagined, solo and with companions.

And that night, Thursday night, I couldn’t sleep. This swirling nausea in the pit of my stomach. These Joe scenes in my head, but more so the vivid remembered sensation of feeling so sick I often thought I might puke.

That sensation, and these scenes, remembered now with the after-the-fact knowledge that he was/he was/he was, Joe, with another woman, saying to her the same things he’d said to me about love and heat and destiny and walking on air.

These scenes, for example:

~~~~~~

Me saying I’d come over since he couldn’t come to my place, and him insisting he’d be terrible company because his allergies were so bad, and me saying, That’s okay, I don’t mind, and him saying, No, really, don’t come.

~~~

Me not being able to reach him all night, and him perturbed the next day at the rising urgency of the texts I’d sent the night before. I just fell asleep and didn’t hear the phone! I’m supposed to feel bad about falling asleep? Stop being so needy.

~~~

Us in my kitchen, together, cooking. It feeling so solid and profound and fun, and me feeling all giddy about it, and him, it seemed, feeling the same. He wraps his arms around me and I look up into his face and he says, Jeannette says you’re really lucky. 

In.

My.

Kitchen.

I pull back and he says, You know, Jeannette from the program. She says you’re lucky. She wants to date me but I told her I have a girlfriend. 

This burning feeling, this absolute understanding of his psychology, of the sweet, devilish satisfaction I know he feels saying another woman’s name aloud to me in that context in my kitchen. I know he wants to make me prick and burn, to make me feel jealous. But I don’t know if he’s lying or telling the truth, do I?

I’m wide open to knowing, to letting the truth come to me, but it doesn’t.

I don’t know.

But I feel sick.

He gets mad at me when I don’t want to touch him anymore. Gets mad and says I’m a baby, that I have no reason to feel insecure, that she likes him and wants him but he said no. Because he loves me. So much. Forever.

~~~~~~

These things in my head, these moments of cocky, premeditated deception, they make me feel like there’s a fist grabbing at the insides behind my belly button. Grabbing and twisting and pulling — those guts connected to my heart and so my heart is dragged behind, and everything is battered/crushed.

But I can fight that.

My instinct is to fight that, to rage that I AM NOT SURPRISED, I ALWAYS HALF KNEW. I TRIED ANYWAY BECAUSE I’M BETTER THAN YOU, A MILLION TIMES BETTER IN EVERY WAY. I HATE YOU SO MUCH YOU MOTHERFUCKING LYING CHEATING SOCIOPATHIC ASSHOLE.

And in fact I’d like to stand by what I told #1. That Joe could really not damage me, not in any lasting way, because I was never fooled. I simply hoped, against my better judgement, obviously, but I was in love for some goddamn reason and for as long as I could I hoped. 

But if those things didn’t damage me, then why could I not sleep on Thursday night? Why did I start crying and why was it so hard to stop?

It was because of these memories, I think, these ones:

~~~~~~

Us sitting cross-legged on his bed when I finally got to his house after a long day of missing. Knee-to-knee, face-to-face, just sitting talking about his day and mine, so purely glad to be in each other’s company. Simple as that.

~~~

This one exquisite hello kiss, sitting in my car after I’d picked him up from BART. The longest and lightest touching of lips; barely touching, not moving, our breathing in sync, slow, slow, slow. Eyes lightly closed. And a minute into this barely-kiss, Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” came on the radio.

~~~

Frisbee. God. Stupid, but it was such a deeply satisfying thing just to throw that disc back and forth with him. What a weird thing to feel like love but it really did. Partly because of the perfection of his throws, and the way a frisbee floats, and the green grass we’d play on. But also because every once in a while he’d say, “break?” and start walking briskly toward me. I’d meet him in the middle and we’d stand, he was tall, we’d stand and just kiss for five minutes, and then we’d go back to our respective spots and resume our game.

~~~

And this: when the acoustic version of Everlong came on the radio while we were driving across the new span of the Bay Bridge under one of those killer brilliant blue skies. Windows down. Air warm. Holding hands. Not talking, but catching each other’s eye now and then, and smiling because our hearts were just so fucking content.

~~~~~~

So, see? The memories that fill me with righteous rage, those I can rise above. But these. The ones that make me want to plead, BUT I LOVED YOU, EVEN THOUGH! And YOU LOVED ME.

YOU.

LOVED.

ME.

Didn’t you, Joe? Didn’t you? Did you? Did you?

As ridiculous as sitting in that fucking chair and not knowing whether or not it’s true, I don’t know. Can never know. Shouldn’t care, and yet…

Some damage was done after all, I think.

because now, A

I don’t know, and I’m hungry to know, and I’m so sorry

I don’t know, and it’s not coming to me. I sit in that wide chair and that cocky god reveals nothing, just chuckles.

~~~

It’s almost 2 p.m. now and the fog has lifted. The sun is shining and the sky is that brilliant blue again.  I don’t know a goddamn thing, and maybe when all is said and done I’ll take those four boxy old deck chairs and toss them into a heap and light a fire under them, have the bonfire of my life. But not yet. And in fact when I get back from late lunch with JVO I think I’ll get started on Chair #2.

Selective Deconstruction

I woke up today with A’s name in my throat. Stupid, but I feel his absence so keenly some mornings I swear I could cut it with a knife. I usually close my eyes another minute or two and let the thought of him swirl around in my head, let the missing have its way with me. It’s kind of masochistic, I guess, but I don’t feel like it’s a thing I oughta deny.

I miss that motherfucker every morning, and that’s just the way it is.

That’s just the way it is. Maybe not for too much longer, but for now. And so…get up Manning, and conquer some shit. Like, hey… THE CHAIRS!

After reading about how I’d attached two slats wrong-side-out yesterday, a friend who does a lot of woodworking advised me to think of nothing else while doing this kind of job, to focus consistently and mind the details. It’s already pretty obvious, right, that I’m no good at that? But I thought I’d give it a try, and so the first thing I did on the project today was to sit outside in the mid-morning sun with a cup of coffee, contemplating the chairs and letting my head clear of everything else.

It was a good start. I felt optimistic; thought maybe I could get through the rest of the deconstruction and reconstruction of Chair #1. My contemplation had helped me see next steps: remove and disassemble the sides, first one and then the other, and lastly do the seat.

I got the right side off and lay it on the deck. From that angle, I had a clear view of the bottom of the right arm, only… check it out — what’s wrong with this picture?

Can you see that? The sticker on the underside of the arm that says LEFT? While my little masking tape labels say R for right?

Well, hell, maybe that sticker was stuck there inadvertently, or maybe whoever affixed it meant left / looking from the back, while I had meant right / looking from the front. Or maybe someone had disassembled and reassembled these chairs before. I laughed and took it as a sign that I was going to have to roll with some punches today.

I was right. Each side had a bolt through each leg and into the side piece of the seat. Both had come out easily on the right side. But when I went to remove the final bolt on the left side, my allen wrench wouldn’t get a grip. The damn bolt was stripped. Noooooooooooo, I moaned, just no. The whole side of the chair was stuck to the seat because of this one stupid stripped bolt. I tried finesse, and then I tried forcing it until I thought the allen wrench was going to break. I tried banging the allen wrench into the bolt cap with my mallet. I consulted YouTube and found (and got kind of excited about) this:

Dang, I would have felt like such a champ if I’d been able to make this work! And maybe I could have if I’d had an extension for the screw driver tip, but I didn’t.

Boo. Defeat. I sat on the deck, noticing its peeled paint and how some of the wooden planks are rotted in places. It struck me that everything that’s mine (rented or otherwise) is beat, or partial, or tenuous. I put a hand on this awkward partial cube. It was just a jumble of crappy wood. Only…

I put my other hand on the wood. Held this hunk of Chair #1 and felt how solid it was. There was a little wiggle between the joints that joined the side to the seat, but the arm was attached firmly to the side piece, and the slats of the seat — I tested them to see if any would pop out if I pulled real hard, and none of them budged.

Why take the really solid pieces apart?

I had a bucket of hot soapy water, and I used a rag to scrub away at all the joints. Got my too-strong glue and worked some into the narrow spaces between the few loose joints, and then I clamped that baby together. And know what I had then? Just three big re-glued chair pieces (and a few odds and ends: screws, bolts, end caps). I didn’t know whether to feel satisfied or like I’d failed. So I decided to take a break and let the glue dry.

Not my first break of the day, mind you. It’s my kid-weekend, which means the chair stuff has been mixed in with being-a-mom stuff all day. Kai woke up after my first cup of coffee and had a cup herself, and around 11:30 the two of us drove to Berkeley to pick T Rex up from the sleepover he’d been at. We got some groceries on the way home and had a little picnic in the midst of my mess on the deck — soft French bread and Colby cheese and roast chicken and red grapes and, hell yeah, an ice cold beer for me.

On this break I checked my phone and saw that A had messaged me and wanted to talk. Yes yes yes yes yes!

Have I mentioned that I love that guy?

It’s scary as fuck sometimes, and so I was so grateful for this Martha Nussbaum quote a friend had posted on Facebook earlier this morning. She said, —

Well, first, actually, let me tell you about last night. It was just me and Kai here at Sunkist because T Rex was at that sleepover, and at bedtime I said, “Hey, come sleep with me!”  She’s turning 14 in about three weeks, so I wasn’t surprised when she said, “Um, nah, that’s okay.”

But then she said, “I’ll come hang out for a while though.”

And so it was that Kai and I lay in my bed having a bona fide GIRL TALK, which doesn’t really happen often because most of the time we’re together T-Rex is there too. It was awesome. Only we were talking about boys and stuff and I was so thrilled at the prospect of that whole world opening up to her — only then it hit me, the terrifying risks — and I’m not even talking about the really tragic stuff that can happen to a girl in this world, but about the almost inevitable battering a heart takes. And oh, lord, the thought of my baby girl’s heart — !

Maybe some of you skate through life and love unscathed, but I don’t think that’s in the blood I’ve passed to her, I think she’s going to feel 

every

                 last

                           thing,

— and holy fuck!

Suddenly I found myself delivering a litany of heartfelt contradictions about the joys of being in love and the kick-ass excellence of being on one’s own and the thrill of falling for someone and the devastation of heartbreak and OH MY GOD. I’m all, don’t ever ever let your heart get broken, Kai / if any boy ever breaks your heart I will DESTROY HIM / be careful, be careful, be careful — but no, don’t be too careful because oh my god love is the best thing — but most important be strong, always be strong, always be your awesome strong, beautiful, smart, funny self and love will find you — though hell, you don’t goddamn need anyone else, Kai! — you don’t need anyone else and neither do I — but hell, yeah, talk to that cute boy and find out what he’s all about.

I might be the worst mother in the world. Fuck.

But I’ve wandered off track again. The chairs.

I let the glue dry for an hour or so to be on the safe side (the glue bottle says it needs 30 minutes), and then I readied myself to do the final deed on the reconstruction of Chair #1 – putting the three pieces back together.

Before I began, I sat looking at the pieces, trying to focus as I’d been advised; to get my brain wrapped around their shapes and sizes and the best order of operations for getting things snugly fit and neatly glued. I don’t know how long I sat there staring at the wood’s angles and joints, puzzling over them, but at some point it struck me as pretty funny, me just sitting cross-legged on the deck giving this heap of wood the stank eye. So I took a picture for y’all.

And then I set about connecting the pieces. Finessing a bit and forcing a bit. Gluing where glue was required, and finally clamping together ONE WHOLE CHAIR. Amen!

I’ll let it sit clamped like that overnight. Or hell, maybe I’ll let it sit all week, since I have work Monday through Friday and dinner at JVO’s Monday night and school function Tuesday night and Mom coming to stay on Wednesday and Thursday and a doctor’s appointment for my cuckoo hormones on Friday afternoon and a soccer game on Friday night.

Yeah, I’ll be too busy to un-clamp that thing during the week.

Too busy and okay, yeah… scared. I want to un-clamp it and have it be solid and true, but hell, I know there are 100 things I’ve done wrong. And maybe this project was doomed from the beginning anyway; the more I work with the chairs the more I see how trashed the wood is, cracked in a million places and warped in a few, weathered all over and dirty. Clamped together it’s solid, but what’s going to happen when I take the clamps off and sit in the thing?

I’ll let you know next weekend.

Meanwhile, feel free to share and comment and all that good stuff. As with most things I undertake on my own, I know I’m never really alone-alone.

Oh, and one last thing. That Martha Nussbaum quote, from an interview with Bill Moyers on Brainpickings.

This, Kai, is the essence of what I should have said to you:

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the human condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from its fragility.