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My Profile
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone... - 2009-11-05
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11:55 a.m. - 2005-10-26
Waldo is upstairs ripping the walls out of the bathroom. This kid is dimmer than a nightlight. He came through once with a sack of wallboard scraps. I tilted my head to glare at him from behind my monitor. I glared and glared until he understood that demolition waste should be taken out the front door. That he decided to drag the sack through the entire downstairs, opening two sets of doors and lugging it through my office to go out the back door and down the driveway to where the trailer is parked when the front door is right at the foot of the stairs just goes to show what a complete dipshit this guy is. But if I'm ever to get my bathroom renovated the grunt work has to be done and Waldo works cheap. Carlos the yardboy would have been my choice to help with the renovation work, despite his complete lack of English and some spectacularly hideous cystic acne which puts me off my feed, Carlos is okay to have around. Alas, alack Carlos scored a gig with a commercial landscaping crew and is unavailable during the week. I'm not a one to insist my serfs deny themselves lucrative opportunities, even if it means I'm stuck with tortoise slow nerf balls like Waldo to do my bidding. My, my, aren't we all Lady of the Manor this morning? What can I say? I might have trouble with bossing female domestic help, but I have zero problems with male flunkies. It seems only right and natural to snap my fingers and have a guy hop to it. This in part comes from watching my tiny grandmother put my scary corporate bigwig grandfather through his paces like a show pony in a 3-piece suit. The rest is residual pampered princess thinking from my time as a Barbie. Back in the day we never soiled our hands or strained our back! There was always a guy or three jockeying for position to tote my books, open my doors, haul my groceries and spread a cape over life's puddles. It wasn't until I crossed over to the night side of 30 and ballooned up into the Behemoth that ate Bensonhurst that I discovered the grim reality of living without a handy gaggle of slavies. Yeah I know, cry me a river you arrogant bitch. However, while I'm on the subject of men working like dogs to make me happy, I have to tell you what Mike did this weekend while I was partying on the west coast. Mike built a wall unit in our bedroom! It takes up most of the long wall opposite the bed. Open shelves almost to the ceiling to about 3 feet from the floor. The lower parts are closed door storage. One lower section is fitted with drawers. One is shelved to fit videos and the third he left empty so I can stash tall things like boots. He bound all the sections across the top with crown molding and stained the whole thing a warm honey maple color. Then he emptied the redundant dressers, moved them to other parts of the house and filled the shelves with my clothes sorted by type, season and color. Tidy rainbows of sweaters and tops and jeans. Fricken fantastic. Virgos show love by doing and this 'I love you' is 9 feet tall and 14 feet wide. Wow. He didn't stop there. The whole house shows signs of Mike's handiwork. He emptied about 20 boxes of books and filled the long shelf over the windows on the front porch and rotated fresh book stock onto the shelves in the living room. He cleaned up the last of the flood mess in the cellar and re-mortared the leaky wall. He also found time to sharpen and oil all my garden tools and hang them up neatly on a new pegboard dealie he put up by the cold frames. Y'all might want to stand upwind from me, this man of mine is spoiling me rotten. God, it's so weird. Four months ago I was ready to beat his brains in with an iron skillet. We couldn't be in the same room together without snarls and acid. As joyous as things are today, they were correspondingly awful and hateful this past spring. Things between us were so horrible and tense I was puking blood. The wounds we'd given each other went marrow deep. It's said that hate is not the opposite of love, but its dark twin. If the love hadn't been there all along there's no way we could have made the other so miserable. You really can't hate someone you're indifferent to. Can't shred someone's soul if they don't give a rat's ass that you're trying to bring them down. It's like the first 20 years of our marriage have been an Apache knife fight. Weapon in one hand and my other hand clenched on the end of a short rope. A rope clutched just as grimly by Mike. We circled. We sliced. We drew blood from a thousand slashes. Yet we each hung onto our end of the rope. A rope of love neither of us was willing to let go. Holding on tight. ~LA
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