Persuade It

Bring me the persuader.

My beloved Uncle. He’s the liveliest of men. Strong as an ox. A tender heart. Fearless. A quiet temperament. Funny. Forte is a word that does not translate properly. Forte.

I was younger then. We were fixing to lift a freshly framed wall. It couldn’t be done, really. 2×6 sticks, thirty odd feet of it. Sheathing on. There were not enough of us. Three of us. But he said it could be done, and though he must have looked at our rangy frames and compared them in his mind’s eye to his own bearish self, he did the arithmetic in his head without mentioning it. Whatever they lack, I will make up myself.

Sometimes you need someone to simply say it will be done. Not that it’s possible; that it’s inevitable. A will to counter the forces arrayed against you. People will follow such a man. In a desultory and tentative fashion at first, but without hesitation later. The noisy leader gets the enthusiasm right out of the gate, and it fades by the first pole. Go to a marketing convention. It’s Triumph of the Will in the hall, and morphs back into Little Bo Peep by the time they hit the lobby. You can only show. Telling doesn’t last.

You tilt it up. Only half of the weight is in play. Half is plenty. You cannot fail. The wall will fall on you if you do. Your mind is often sharp under such conditions. You feel like your ancestors in a cave or a tree. Your senses are heightened. You are aware of the slightest breeze. You hear a tiny sound, and your mind has only two slots now: OK, and Danger. You never know this feeling in regular life unless you are in a fight. And who fights? Only men that lift walls.

But not my Uncle. He is too formidable to look at, and too pleasant to talk to, to get in a fight. And he laughs easily. He is chuckling as we try to lift the wall. It can’t be done. Let’s do it.

A 2×4 is called dimension lumber. It is 1-1/2 inches thick, by 3-1/2 inches. It is called a “two by four” as a reminder of its size before you dry it, and it shrinks. All problems are like a 2×4. You refer to them as they appear in theory –big; but they are slightly smaller by the time you get your hands on them.

We can get the wall up enough to slip the 1-1/2″ blocks under it, surely. We do. Let’s turn them on edge this time. 3-1/2″ is little more than double. We can do that, surely. Now 2×6’s. Milk crates. Sawhorses. Stepladders.

Once the wall is at a forty five degree pitch, the weight diminishes on the lifted end. Surely this is so, my Uncle knows, and we say. We are educated, and he knows things. We talk, and he does.
Push up, now. Hard.

There is a moment when you are nowhere. It is not accomplished, but you cannot go back. You gather yourself, and arrange your bones and your sinews and your flesh, and you flip the switch in your mind to: NOW.

And the hard work was already done. Your Uncle knew that because he’d done it so many times before. The hard part was getting through the part he coaxed you along saying: It’s easy.

Every inch you raised it made it easier, until you just had to guard against pushing it over into the yard. Imagine that. Back off, tiger. The wall’s up.

You had cut the metal strapping — it holds the framing lumber delivery– into strips. You nail the strip to the subfloor, and to the bottom of the “plate,” the horizontal run of framing lumber. That is the fulcrum that holds the wall in place, while you lift with all your might against it. One of them snapped.

The wall bulged out there. It was a twenty foot drop to uneven ground on the outside of the wall. The thinkers got busy.

We could get a ladder.
We could get a come-along (winch) and pull from the inside if we set a hook in the bottom plate.
We could…

Hand me the persuader.

You know he would call the sledge that. He sat in the window opening, legs inside, the rest hanging in the ether, held the frame in his left hand, and swung that sledge out and up and over his head like mighty Thor, and brought it down on that spot as sweet as you please. I had needed two hands to pick it up. Nail it.

You guys hungry? You’re always hungry.

Out Walking

We were out for the Veteran’s Day commemoration last weekend. The toddler likes to roam, of course, and I spent the greater part of an hour with his hot little hand in mine, wandering around.

Marion is a pleasant place to do that wandering around. It is a village, and there is a little rabbit warren of streets where you can promenade, with no shortage of things at look at, whatever the season. But for such a compact place, it’s kind of desolate. There are mostly no people about. We have walked around the village for a pleasant half hour many times, and more often than not never encountered another person on the street.

People often remark that they find suburbia stultifying, and dream of a village setting for their affairs. Walk places. Bicycling without risking being mashed flat by a semi. A bit of bustle, without crowding. Sidewalks and gnarly overhanging trees and rhododendrons in bloom and chipmunks darting in and out of voids in the dry laid stone walls.

Well, you’re all full of merde. I live in such a place, and I really do enjoy it, and I’m all alone. Everybody’s driving around or watching television while we’re out walking. It’s fine to have nebulous ideas about the kind of life you’d prefer, and the wilderness you’d like to inhabit, or perhaps the sleepy pace of life you could see yourself slip right into, but there’s reasons we don’t all live like that. We’re not all on vacation or retired, are we? Or odd, like me.

People vote with their feet — if you let them. If you want to move to a sleepy little town, you should. I did. But there is no Dunkin’ Donuts. There are no restaurants of note. There is no movie theater. There is no…

Never mind what it doesn’t have. I can just walk through it, and point the camera at anything. I often do.

I Can Hear His Fingers Squeak

Lovely.

My older brother is a lot older than I. His march to manhood always appeared only on my horizon. He was gone from grammar school before I began it. Graduated from college before I started High School. My admiration and affection for him approached that one reserves for an Uncle, or a Father. There is always a kind of awe mixed up in the regard one has for your older relatives.

My brother is a real musician. I’ve always banged out pop music for grins and giggles – and money- but I never took it seriously. My brother was a musical scholar, while I was in the back of class, passing notes. And bad puns like that one.

When I was very young, he took up the Spanish guitar. He’d listen to records like that Segovia, and Christopher Parkening; and he’d have sheet music for lute laying around the house. It might as well have been Homer in the original Greek to me. Until he played it.

There is something about being in the same room, intimate, with musical instruments being played. It’s completely different from listening to recorded versions, no matter how good the apparatus becomes to deliver the recordings.

There’s a sense of danger. You wonder the whole time: Can he do it? No matter how many times he managed it, you knew he was always taking a chance of failure, the mildly embarrassing tableau of running out of gas partway through. My brother rarely did. Look at Segovia in the video. He’s very old, and his physical tools are obviously diminished. The chance he takes grows profound. He will be compared to himself when he was young and strong. Perhaps it is as important to say: Here is how an old man plays. This is what is in his heart, and his hands might falter but his spirit is not dimmed. What I think trumps what I can do.

We’d visit my aging grandmother and numerous aunts in the 1960s. They lived in rapidly aging triple deckers in sketchy neighborhoods in Boston. I felt as though I was traveling back through time a bit. And eventually my father would say: “Let’s have a song.” My brother would take out his spanish guitar, and a bit of Scarlatti or Vivaldi would wash over us as we sat in a little semicircle around him. There was a man -barely- that could bring a smile to a hard face. There was a vehicle that suspended a person’s cares for a quiet moment, and transferred them to another’s fingers. And those cares were worked out for a few minutes; and you knew that any world was not a malign place, that had music in it. And a musician.

Asturias. My brother sent it to me. It reminded him of Segovia. Segovia reminds me of him.

To Work Alone

I work alone.

Not always, of course, but generally. This was not always the case.

I’ve worked in about every kind of work setting. Mill building. Clean room. School. Office. Concrete block building. Ditch. Shed. Barroom. Boat. Hospital. Home. Above ground. Below. Hot. Cold. Dry. Damp. Boring. Terrifying.

The vagary that makes any setting go is the other people. And now there aren’t any.

I’ve been responsible for hundreds of employees at one time, and just a few at others. Hundreds of employees is much easier. When you only have two, and one is named “Rob,” and you find out that “rob” is a verb, not a noun, you’ve got a fifty percent failure rate. I had a guy sleeping at his workstation working for me once. He was just one in a hundred. No big deal.

But to work alone is to be you own annoyance. You’re the laziest, stupidest person present. There is always a person to encourage sloth — you; but there is never anyone to shame you into holding up your end. You’ve got both ends. And the end in the middle.

Sometimes, the light is good. The tools are sharp. The wood is flat. The mosquitoes are on vacation. Your shoes fit. There are no splinters. Whatever you look for is on the shelf. The dimensions add up. Vivaldi comes on the radio. The money comes. The floor is swept. Nothing is late. The phone does not ring unwonted. The blade does not wander.

And when all that happens…

How the hell would I know? I’d settle for two of those things at the same time. I’m all alone.