About

I live on a hill in Oakland, California, overlooking the Oakland Coliseum, the Oakland airport and a stretch of San Francisco Bay. The flatlands between my back deck and the bay are what a lot of people would call one of the bad neighborhoods of Oakland, but I love it here.

I love my back deck with its peeling paint and spiderwebs, its year-round flood of afternoon sunshine, its nighttime view of the hood below (headlights, tail lights, street lights, home lights — all punctuated periodically by streaks of emergency-vehicle reds and blues). I hear sirens and gunshots more nights than not, and though I always say a silent prayer-like thing for anyone who might be hurt or in danger, I prefer this to the Bay Area’s gentrified neighborhoods. I feel real here, and closer to whole. Especially out here on the back deck.

The deck is where I do the bulk of my reflective thinking, and drinking. It’s where I go when the phone rings and I want to have a real conversation. It’s where I sit and read; it’s where I sit with friends and eat and drink and talk and sing. A while back I strung colored lights above the table out there, and somehow they make a regular old weeknight feel pretty magical. The table is surrounded by four large, square, VERY WEATHERED wooden chairs.

These chairs (and the table out there, and the grill) belong to my landlord, but I’ve grown attached to them even though they’re falling apart. The wood is sun-damaged like mad, cracked and grey. Worse, the joints are all weak as hell. The chairs wobble like jello when you sit in them; shift your body weight just a bit and you know they could fall the fuck apart any minute.

I started talking about tightening them up a while ago, and several well-intentioned friends said, “Yeah, just get some wood glue and squirt it in, easy peasy.” But that sounded way too simple. I mean — these chairs are FALL-ING APART.

One night last week I woke up at 3 a.m. almost frantic with the idea of fixing them — but fixing them right. Which I had no idea how to do.

It was 3 a.m. though, and a work night. Needed to sleep. Do NOT pick up your phone, Manning, do NOT–

But it was too late. I don’t know why, but this idea was demanding attention. I sat up in bed and turned on my phone and started searching. And eureka! Found two nuggets on the world wide web that completely hooked me.

The first was this Popular Woodworking Magazine article, Regluing Doweled Chairs, by Bob Flexner. It explains in detail the RIGHT way to re-glue a chair, which (simply put) is to take it apart, clean off all the old glue, and put it back together.

I’d never heard of Bob Flexner, but apparently he’s some sort of woodworking guru. (Check out all the books he’s written!)  What grabbed me, though, was the way his sentences quietly radiated reverence for his craft. I was smitten by the subhead, “Philosophy of Regluing.” Seriously. Couldn’t resist riffing off it when I titled this blog.

The second thing was How to Restore Outdoor Furniture, a YouTube video by Ron Hazelton. The scene where he’s rinsing the scum off the bench with a hose made my heart skip a beat. ❤

Anyway. I was up half the night reading and watching videos about wood restoration and thinking about my game plan. I’ve never been very good at building or fixing things, especially when patience and attention to detail are required. But by the time I got up to go to work the next morning, I’d made a decision:

I’m gonna fix those goddamn chairs. The right way. I’m going to make them solid again. By myself. I’m going to give them superpowers against the elements. Bring it, El Niño, just bring it!

And you know, what, dammit? Sorry, Ron Hazelton, but forget the gel stain. I’m going to paint these fucking chairs in vibrant red or green or blue or yellow. Or maybe each chair will be a different color.

~~~~~

So, yeah. This blog is about this DIY project, which is going to take me about 100 times longer than a handier, more dexterous human.

Though if you know me maybe you think all the fixing and making solid and developing superpowers and colorful paint actually have something to do with this cuckoo inner journey I’ve been on for the past three years. The one where I left my four kids with my then-husband for a month to hike the John Muir Trail, and then cried like a lost child when I came home and tried to sleep in a bed again, and then instigated a painful breakup after 20 years of marriage, and then fell in love with this sexy bad guy I thought I could fix, and then got stomped on and cheated on, and then left that bad guy and sought redemption via Graceland and the streets of Memphis and the beaches of North Carolina and all night symposiums with my twin-soul cousin, and then spent a year or so dating — for the first time in my life really, and I’m forty-freaking-eight! — meeting guys online and, in a few cases, the old-fashioned way (once at the oldest dance hall in Texas, once at a karaoke bar), and then meeting and falling wicked hard for A, whose own situation is complicated enough that who knows, really, what’s in store for us? Maybe you think it’s really about that, and how I’m trying to figure out who the fuck I am, and what I want, and whether or not I’m capable.

Well, you might be right, but you’re gonna have to read between the lines for that shit. Because mostly this blog is going to be about those goddamn chairs.

About those chairs, and about glue and solvents and sealer and paint.

About tools and technique and patience and reverence.

And about my nascent philosophy of rebuilding.