Vintage Dust

Our house on Rusty Hinge Road is nothing if not reliable for its creaky floors and arctic drafts, typical to a house of its vintage and locale. And we have spent years attending to the various weatherizing needs our New England environment requires.

So, adjusting to our new life in the Arizona desert has been full of surprises for Melissa and me. The first time we strolled down Pyrite Street in our new hometown of Lake Polvo and peered through the wavy, antique glass windows of the adobe house we would shortly afterward, unexpectedly own, I remember chuckling haughtily at the hardwood floors. Termites, a phenomenon with which I was only vaguely acquainted from my Realtor days had gnawed great random paths in the floor.

That was the last time we considered not buying the property, knowing the potential damage that can be wrought by the little buggers. But we were in love, and love is blind so after being assured by a local, well-recommended exterminator named Berle, that he would remedy the situation, we bought the joint.

There are three wooden buildings and a historic adobe house on our Lake Polvo property so Berle had his hands (and it, appears his lungs) full solving our termite problem.

We have started an art gallery in the adobe and our first show opened on Thanksgiving weekend. Since we aren't there full time, we have to plan everything from a distance and slap it all together when we arrive.

We arrived a week early to get ready. The first order of business was to clean things up. Our adobe was built with a flat roof in the 1870s. It was constructed of layers of saguaro cactus spines, laid over wooden rafters and planks finished up with a layer of dirt.

Around the turn of the last century, when commercially milled lumber became available, a peaked roof with cedar shingles was installed, leaving the flat roof intact. Over the years, the dirt and debris from the old , flat roof has sifted through the ceiling and dust has accumulated behind everywhere below. In order to rid the premises of said dust, shop vacs were wielded and the whole place was cleared of possibly a century of cobwebs and filth. The windows required gallons of Windex and elbow grease to free them of wind-blown crust.

But the floors, mostly intact, needed my special remediation. The sections that had proved so delectable to the termites had to be ripped out and replaced with unchewed planks that were carefully removed from another house on the property that was even more devastated by the little cellulose lovers.

This, like so many projects upon which I had previously embarked, proved to be far more time consuming than I had expected, and took me most of the first three days to accomplish my goal. I had to rip up the chewed planks and carefully replacing them with intact boards. I am not getting any younger and this sort of labor, repeatedly squatting and standing, not to mention wielding a hammer around the clock, left me stiff and sore and barely able to walk upright. My obsession with the project prevailed, however, and when I was done, we got out the Murphy's oil soap and mopped the whole expanse several times until the floors revealed a respectable luster and warmth.

The place shined. It had a whole new feeling. When we had finished, we recalled our first encounter, we found ourselves staring through the spotless pane of glass on a freshly re-hung door across the vast expanse of pristine oak; what a difference a little cleaning made. The Southwest sun reunited with the surfaces, now freed from the obscuring grimy glass, bathed the shining floors anew with light, as the air circulated through the open doors and windows. Our basking moment was brief for we had a show to mount.

This opening show would consist of an exhibition of mobiles, made from rusted metal by my 94 year old father Pedro, whose home and studio was two blocks away. The delicate quality of the artwork required us to hand carry each piece across the town's Main Street, one by one.

The show was a success insofar as it set the tone for future shows. Townspeople, friends and relatives came together for crackers and wine and freshly mopped floors lit by candlelight, as my father, set up on the long front porch, assembled a mobile for the amusement of curious patrons.

When it was over, we put everything back where it belonged to await our next visit. Carefully, using a burning hank of sage, we smote any evil spirits that we may have roused, drank in the beauty of our labors and headed back home.

We’re now planning a show in February. I often find myself in bed, unable to sleep as the chores that lie ahead caffeinate my bloodstream. We need electrical work and a shower and hot water and a working stove. The flat roof should be removed and the peaked roof should be replaced. One house has no foundation and another is missing floorboards. When we return we intend to set up camp and sleep our first night in the old adobe with its unknown creaks and vague history stirring in the dark as we try to get cozy with the spiders and the ravenous termites.

And continue to adjust to life in the desert.

Scorpion? Where?

Just Screwing Around

Our house on Rusty Hinge Road is like an unfinished sandwich. Which is to say that the attic and the basement –the metaphorical bread – still await finishing touches, while the middle two floors – the meat – have been redone.

While those last few last projects linger, I often look around and notice other things that have already begun to fall apart in the dozen years since I redid them.

For example: when I built my office, I constructed three drawers to store art supplies. Regular readers will not be shocked to learn that all three drawers now house random flotsam and jetsam.

The top drawer actually holds art supplies but they are the ones I should throw out: dried-out markers and hardened paint tubes. Unfinished, blobby modeling clay amoebas that my children crafted before they developed hand-eye coordination. I have two hot glue guns in there, twice the number I need. There's an old bolo tie with a broken cord that has needed attention since before I was born.

I looked in that drawer today searching for, of all things, art supplies, and as I pulled on the knob, it came off in my hand. This was troublesome because I labor under the delusion that I make sturdy furniture and the knobs shouldn't be coming off in my hand. Adding to the dilemma, I am lazy, and since I practically never go into that drawer, I felt obliged to fix it. That way there would be one less broken thing, right?

So, with knob in hand (I knew if I put it down I'd never find it again or a curious cat would bat it down the stairs and under the sofa) I went about fixing the drawer.

I knew I would need a Phillips-head screw driver, but the last time I saw one was in the console of my truck (there are, mysteriously, two there). Being lazy, I didn't much feel like bending down to put on my shoes, especially with a knob in my hand, so I did what anyone else would do, I looked in the pencil holders on my desk. Aside from pencils and pens, these cans, decorated by my children for Father's Day, have been known to hold the occasional screw driver. I found a chop stick, several hardened paint brushes, a fork with bent tines, a back scratcher, a tire pressure gauge and somewhere around the bottom, a U.S. Postage stamp with a picture of Harry Truman. But no screw drivers of any sort.

Down in the garage, which at the moment is serving as a combination lawn furniture storage facility and feral cat condo, is a shelf where I have, over the years, been stacking screw drivers. I don't remember ever buying one, they seem to replicate like bacteria. Somewhere in the reptilian remnants of my brain stem I have a synapse that derives pleasure from grouping like items with like items. All of these screw drivers are of the "flat head" variety. I can't remember the last time I used one of them to actually drive a screw; I use them mostly to open cans. The flat-head screwdriver is the VHS of screwdrivers. Long since outmoded by Mr. Phillip's ingenuity.

But, being lazy, I didn't put on my shoes and a sweater and walk down stairs, through the house, out the back door and into the garage.

And I had a new problem. In order to reattach the knob, I had to open the drawer. Like the drawer itself, this proved to be a bit sticky. Without a knob, I had to open the second drawer, reach under and wiggle the top drawer open.

Once the drawer was open, I was able to locate the head of the screw that is threaded into the knob and by pushing it through from the back, I was able to tighten the knob in place just enough to keep it there so the whole thing wouldn’t just spun in place.

I remember the first time I saw an electric screwdriver gun. I was a small kid and my father had tightened a handle-less, flat-head screwdriver into the chuck of his old one-speed Black and Decker drill. I don’t recall the purpose of this endeavor, but knowing Dad, it might have been some sort of prank he was pulling on our neighbor, George. I remember thinking at the time that it was a brilliant idea. It wasn't until about twenty years later that I observed some Canadian workmen installing sheetrock on a ceiling with a cordless, electric screwdriver.

They are everywhere today, but I remember the early ones were temperamental, quite expensive, and didn't hold a charge for long.

I bought one shortly after we moved here and it is never far from my side. After a few years, the batteries lost their charge, so I bought new ones on the Google. Mine is blue, and Japanese and with it, I have screwed practically every screw and drilled every hole in this house with it.

Luck would have it that Melissa, tired of seeing it on my dresser, put it on my desk by the pencil holder. I just picked up the old blue electric screwdriver, moved a bunch of stuff out of the drawer, and carefully tightened the knob, where it will stay, with any luck, for as long as it has to, provided I don't go snooping around the drawers more than once every couple of years.

After all, I know what's in there.

Nothing useful.

Don’t get me started on Allen wrenches. ben.guerrero@sbcglobal.net

No News is Good News

Forty years ago, with bag-less, dewy eyes, someone, somewhere was moved to plan it. They advertised– we all chipped in - probably in the Times, while local, like-minded groups organized. Then someone hired a bus and before the sun was in the sky, we climbed aboard.

Hours later in the shadow of national marble, we gathered amidst the port-o-potties. Our permits were filed and we marched.

Our full heads of hair shone in the sunshine and the PA echoed across the croud. Familiar voices sang familiar songs and we all sang along. Mort Sahl. Harry Belafonte. Peter, Paul and Mary and Pete Seeger, of course.

We were against the war. Whatever war. And I like to think we helped end it. There was a sense, as we sat together determined to overcome someday, that the songs and the signs we waved along with the two minutes we'd get on Walter Cronkite that night, would start national sentiment rolling in our direction. And while our sentiments were not popular at first, there came a day that the country changed its mind and we put down our guns if only for a while.

We went down to Wall Street last weekend to check out the protest there. When we got out of the subway car and made our approach, the population of the street thickened. At the core, if you took off your glasses, you could vibe right back to the Washington mall. Noise and smoke and signs in the air. Drums and chants. Folks of all ages and stripes.

But it was different.

In the 1960s, the marches in Washington swelled out of the grassroots efforts of organized people who believed in the uniquely American concept of free speech and our right to peacefully congregate to protest. We held a fundamental belief that if enough of us said something: our voices would be heard. But it took months to get the word out and dollars to place the ads and dimes to make the phone calls and sweat to get the job done.

The Wall Street movement, with the aid of technology and the need for the global news media to fill 24 hour cycles of news each day could have been sparked by a single well-worded "tweet." This brought the world to the park in Manhattan, before they could even come up with a clear agenda. Sure, the sentiment is visceral, but so visceral that it almost has to be expressed with a belch or a sneeze. It is not controversial to say here that the balance of wealth has tipped and it is becoming almost impossible to exist on the low side of that balance. And most of us, alas, reside there.

My children grew up with keyboards as extensions of their fingertips. They have subsequently proven to be expert typists, rattling like castanets while dear old dad hunts and pecks. I have heard that some of our youth are so facile that they can "text" on a cell phone while it is in their pocket. So the organization of this protest is topsy-turvy – where the participants show up and then the organization starts.

The crowds in Manhattan were different than the ones who sat on the Washington mall. They are pierced and tattooed and plugged in and unlike the peaceful throngs who wore headbands and bellbottoms and passed around flowers, these protestors, while peaceful, seem to have an angry edge. I don't know why that is. It may just be the times and the frustration, but I wonder if it is the fact that the information is two way and instantaneous and unfiltered by the dulcet, avuncular tone of Cronkite at seven o'clock.

I believe in social protest. I believe in the first amendment. I believe the most patriotic thing I can do as an American is to publically question the government even if I have to get on a bus to do it.

I used to watch news all day but it got be an endless loop and, if there is a breaking story, they will focus on nothing else even if there is nothing new to add to the story for hours. And if it turns out there actually IS no story, they start the loop over.

I used to have a smart phone, but I down-sized, because I realized I was a lot less stressed if every time got an email from an Ethiopian prince, offering to make me a millionaire, or a drug company promising to restore my inner stallion, my pocket ceaselessly dinged and vibrated. I cashed in built-in GPS for Rand-McNally.

I still usually have a cell-phone in my pocket, but I seldom receive a call. The kids, thumbing their tiny keyboards like African Kalimbas, communicate with me exclusively in text messages. The old flip phone, like the Dude, abides.

After we circled the Wall Street park protest, we headed back up town. We passed “Ground Zero” on the way. Suddenly, up in the sky, we saw a small airplane. That was a bit off-putting. After a moment of staring skyward, it appeared that the small airplane was writing a message.

A park of emotional placards, a place of national tragedy where planes were used, in a most violent way, to send a message, and now, while we were there, a plane in the sky over the park, over Ground Zero, writing words in the sky.

A few of us on the ground looked up. The cops and security guards seemed unimpressed.

“Last Chance.” It said finally. But what does it mean? All the news stations on the drive home offered nothing. An at-home Google search proved the stunt to be an innocent art project, but the whole thing was strange.

And it wasn’t on the news.

This is why Bob Ross should always be on somewhere.

Floss on the Mill

Listen up kids: take care of your teeth.

First and foremost: make sure you have good genes. My mother had troublesome teeth. Lamented all of her lifetime that she had worn braces for twelve years to adjust her “lantern jaw,” which, in spite of the orthodontia, went with her to her grave and passed on to me. She had a close relationship with several dental professionals and was forever trying new appliances, methods and tortuous procedures. Yowch!

My father, on the other hand, up until his mid-nineties, had spectacular choppers. He had a dentist that made him come in once in a while just so he could to view the perfection.

Brush and floss, brush and floss: I have heard it a million times. And now and then I actually do both things. As a younger person, I had my share of cavities, but generally I have had average to good dental health. In spite of my uneventful history, my semiannual trips to the hygienist are a study in nervous tension. I’m always convinced that something ugly will be uncovered.

When I was much younger, my fear was so great that I avoided the dentist chair for years. When my wisdom teeth arrived, I was lucky that they grew in without incident. Even so, all four of them had to be yanked, and that experience involved such a combination of medications that by the time the dentist was done, he could have yanked out the rest for all I care. Charlie Sheen on a Saturday night had nothing on me.

As my hair and gum line recede, I have found a dentist who keeps me in line. They call me every six months to remind me of an impending cleaning. I always leave the place with a gleaming smile and an armload of free tooth care paraphernalia.

A few years back, they noted a loose molar, way in the back. The hygienist called in the dentist and he reached in and wiggled it. Over the ensuing six month intervals, they attempted a few procedures to save the tooth. Alas, about a year ago, I was told it should be yanked.

“You don’t have to do it right away,” the dentist explained, “but it’s going to have to come out.

I was in denial. Most of the time “old uncle Wiggly,” felt as firmly attached as all the others. Now and then, though, it would become shockingly loose. But, there was no pain, so I ignored the issue.

Finally, a couple of weeks ago, it became infected, painful and really wiggly. I supplemented my supplements with over-the-counter painkillers with some relief, but yesterday I called the dentist’s bluff. I rang the office and –wouldn’t you know – they had time for me this morning.

Nice fellow, my dentist. He poked me with Novocain, calmed my nerves, and after the right side of my face was numb, “lifted” the tooth. It didn’t make any champagne cork noises. There was no splattering carnage. The dentist didn’t have to put his knee on my chest for leverage. Best of all, I felt nothing except the sudden loss of a tooth that had been with me for over 40 years. I asked him to wrap it up in a piece of gauze and he was happy to oblige.

It sits, as I type this, in a bleach bath. After it’s cleaned up, I will put it in the same old Kodak Film canister with my wisdom teeth. God knows what kind of macabre art project I will create with this collection. I told the dentist I’d hold on to it and maybe if technology improves, he can put it back into my face in a few years.

I took today off to rest and catch up with a full DVR of mind-numbing television baloney. There is a hole in my head which I need like a hole in the head. The Novocain is beginning to wear off and a dull throb is filling the hole.

A few years ago, my father got dentures. It took him over 90 years to acquire them. His parents were in their 90s when they were fitted and I am thinking maybe if I save enough teeth, I can have dentures constructed of my own teeth.

Meanwhile I will brush and floss myself silly. Watch out Steve Buscemi!

Where’s the Advil?