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.