Indoor Swimming Pool

When we recently had the house torn up and put back together, I saw it as sort of a maturation process. Until then, the old house on Rusty Hinge Road was a modified version of the previous owner’s decorating tastes. Sure, we painted and put up shelves when we first moved in, but when we redid the bathrooms to our own specifications, the house was officially ours.

This, in my mid-50s mind meant growth, which translated to Melissa and I needing to purge the pile of pointless pollution that we had collected over the decade. How did this happen? First, there was the doubling of debris when we merged our two households and second there is our mutual, almost pathological hording disorders, also known as “collecting.”

We had postcards, pots, paintings, empty plastic nut jars, brown paper bags, Clementine boxes, shoe boxes, shoes, hats, food processing equipment, sheets, sheets, towels and more towels, etc. and more etc.

Our initial thought was to get rid of a bunch of this junk, and regular readers might remember the under-attended tag sale we held last summer. In spite of our best intentions, most of the stuff stayed on the porch. We couldn’t even get the local roving bands of teenage punks and wise guys to steal the stuff. So, as prearranged, nothing went back into the house. It went into the big Volvo and off to Goodwill.

As a natural consequence to our recent bathroom renovations, Melissa and I discussed purchasing new towels. Grown-ups, it could be argued, had towels that “went” with the décor. Up until this discussion, we had a grouping of mismatched, leftover linens, selected from the mountain that had formed in the basement. I agreed to the new towel purchase, but had to include a clause about the aforementioned mountain of reject towels in the basement.

“We’ve got to get rid of some of the junk around here.” I said.

I knew that’d never happen. Now and then I vow to myself to open the Bilco door to the cellar, back up the big Volvo and fill the cargo bay with some of the stuff that waits, neatly folded and untouched for years, and lug it off somewhere.

Our new, Egyptian cotton towels arrived, and Melissa hung them on the towel bars in the master bath. They were luscious, soft and the right color. Very grown up. I don’t, in fact, remember every buying a towel in my life, but the old bathroom towels ended up in the stack with the others, down in the basement by the washer and dryer.

Then came the day, not long ago, when Melissa and I went to Costco to buy a rotisserie chicken, some mixed nuts and a skid of toilet paper. As we pushed our oversized cart down the aisle, Melissa noticed some towels on sale. Needless to say it was a fancy brand that I had never heard of, let’s say they were “Elite Deluxe” brand.

“Oooh, “cooed Melissa, “Elite Deluxe towels on for only $7.99! What a deal!”

Apparently if I had been up on my towels, I’d have been equally excited.

“Ain’t that a shame?” I said, “and we just got new towels!”

Melissa said, “Oh, you’re right, but that blue goes with our color scheme!”

A week later, while I was stuffing clothing into the washer I noticed two new blue towels on the stack. I would never have noticed but for the shiny, new “Elite Deluxe” tags still on their hems. My initial reaction was to flip my lid but I changed my mind. After all, who was I to throw stones in the basement of my glass house?

I set the washer load to “XL” and waited for the agitator to kick in. It’s been known to run and run and overflow and fill the basement. (Homemoaner, February 2008) The agitator kicked in and I went upstairs and got lost in the usual ongoing rigmarole that fills the hours between sleep. In a day or two, if the opportunity arose, I’d mention the new towels to Melissa.

One fine Saturday, it popped into my head during a debate. I was losing, so I casually mentioned the new “Elite Deluxe” towels. She was surprised that I noticed them, seeing as how there are so many old towels among which they were concealed. I didn’t win our debate, but it was close enough to a draw that we were soon sitting at our respective computers, busily whiling away the rainy day.

At some point Melissa went downstairs for a cup of tea or some cat-related medical emergency. A few minutes she was hollering and hooting so loudly, I thought she had fallen down the stairs.

As I rushed to her side, I realized the washing machine had overflowed. She’d put in the new towels, and in an effort to conserve water and assuage her guilt, pushed the “large load” button and forgot about it. “Large load” is notorious for causing floods and sure enough the water in the basement was more than ankle deep.

I said nothing to Melissa, no words would have made her feel any better or any worse. I turned on the pump, which is set up for just such an event, and in a couple of hours the water had been sucked out the window and into a convenient nearby street grate. We just swept the puddles across the floor and into the big hole in the floor where the pump is installed and moved the soggy cardboard boxes full of unnecessary junk up to higher ground.
Fortunately we had plenty of old towels around to soak up the last of the water.

Smug as a bug in a waterlogged rug.

Crock Plot

If we were to move, we’d have to have a two car garage and a fireplace. These are things we don’t have in our house on Rusty Hinge Road. So this is the criteria I use search the real estate web sites.

Recently a really interesting property popped up, so I called my old real estate buddy, Bryce. He was happy to get us in. In fact he’d bring along his significant other, Lily, and we make a day of it.

The property itself was an old creaky cape, not very photogenic, but cheap, and it had a two car garage with a rentable apartment - plus it was on 7.5 acres of land!

It had snowed that week and the weather had stayed chilly, so the ride up into the back country was lovely. Somewhere, as we chatted away, Bryce and Lily told us about their crock pot.

I think I can pin point when crock pots suddenly became such a huge part of our lives. It all started at our lazy, family Christmas in Vermont where my Sister, Barbara, and her husband, Charlie, non-chalantly pulled a vintage Rival two and a half quart out of the pantry and put together a beef barley stew right after a gut-busting country breakfast of butter-smeared pancakes drowned in Charlie’s own maple syrup and hickory smoked bacon from the smokehouse down on the highway. While Melissa, my son Alexander and I draped ourselves like wet mittens on comfortable chairs around the wood stove, Babbs and Chaz put dinner on, slow and low.

We thought nothing of it, eyes at half mast, intoxicated by the Green Mountain ambience, and would not have even been aware of their labors had the house not slowly began to fill with a delicious aroma that seeped out from around the heavy Pyrex lid, stimulating our appetite glands, making us quickly forget that after that huge non-Jenny Craig breakfast, we’d sworn off food for the duration.

No matter, Christmas night, we inhaled the sumptuous stew, mopping up the last rich, brown, dribblings with redundant slices of buttered bread.

So as we sank up to our elbows in the equally sumptuous leather upholstery of Bryce’s car, we were hearing wonderful tales of hearty stews, and fricasseed chickens, all prepared far in advance, spending the day simmering and filling the house with a wholesome, heady, heavenly bouquet. So, when you walk in the door – rode hard and hungry – dinner meets you at the door like the old family dog: kissing your face and filling your senses with love.

We could imagine just such a scenario as we arrived at the old creaky cape. Built in 1918, she boasted of a stone fireplace and wide-plank floors (gaps chinked with rope, of all things), two need-to-be-redone bathrooms, an unremarkable kitchen, several teeny tiny bedrooms, and a (real) wood paneled den. A total fixer-upper.

The apartment over the two-car garage definitely needed work. Most of the walls were painted shrill lilac and chartreuse.

Through the kitchen window of the apartment, right on the edge of the tree line, you could make out the unmistakable, weathered colors of barn board, put together in the form of some sort of shed. Against our realtor’s advice, we trudged through the ankle deep snow to inspect what would be, were we to go so far as to actually buy the place, a potential art studio/junk storage/source of kindling.

An “outbuilding” is on our wish list of any potential property we may, in our dreams and in the future, buy.

This particular out building grew more interesting as it came into focus over the field of snow. It appeared to have originally been some sort of tractor shed, judging by the two garage-style doors on the long side.

We wrestled the operating door open and when the low light streamed in, the four of us gasped in unison.

It felt as if we were the first people to set foot in the space in 30 years. A 72 inch Locke mower sat rusting, right where it had been parked the last time it had been run over the lawn. There were work benches wrapping around the space and multi-paned windows on three sides. There was a table saw and a radial arm saw and jars of nails and screws. There were old cracked fan belts and ancient, empty beer bottles and old wooden crates filled with darkened chunks of who-knows-what and cob webs.

In the center of it all: a pot-bellied stove. And rust: rust on everything. It was a man-cave on the brink of crumbling back into the soil. But it was also a place that a few replacement panes of glass and a few trips to the metal recycling center, could be transformed into a remarkable work space that Melissa and I could spend our dotage competing for.

We talked about making an offer. Bryce advised against it, citing “too much work,” and uttering my two least favorite words “tear down.”

In spite of the huge potential, the initial attraction to the property and the acreage, did not push us into a place that we could comfortably consider complicating our lives and our budgets for untold years to come. In spite of the possibility of income potential from the apartment and the romantic charm of the pot belly stove in the dilapidated shack, we decided it was much too far away from civilization so we passed on the property with a bit of reluctance.

We did, however, buy a shiny new crock pot. Now, our old house is full of the wonderful smell of winter.

Now we don’t have to get a dog. ben.guerrero@sbcglobal.net

Driving Down Memory Lane

I used to work in a record store on Sundays.



I made a little extra money, and to be truthful, it got me out of the house and allowed me to hone my interpersonal skills. When I was of such a mind, the occasional socialization with attractive women was another motivation.



I have exhibited hermit-like behavior in the past. When you don’t really have any money or anyplace to go, hermatism ensues. Part of me felt sorry for myself and another non-sorry part sort of exhibited my midlle finger to the rest of the human race: didn’t suffer fools gladly. Bastards! I was deflecting the slim possibility that if I put myself out there in society, I’d be rejected. Wow. Self-discovery.



I have always considered myself a non-conformist. The old home town was pretty conformy: everyone is a republican and a church goer. They are all slim and coiffed and rich. I was never any of those things. Never wanted to be. But being the opposite of all those things made me stick out like a democratic, heathen, chubby, disheveled, welfare recipient sore thumb.
So without veering off into some sort of epic, PhD in Psychology thesis, let me just point out that





I have mellowed a bit. But still…



The clientele at the record store would typically walk in the door and immediately ask me or an associate what was selling the most. This was information we had on hand. Whatever people were buying, they’d buy. If it was a recording of vomiting, and it was in the top 10, out came the gold AMEX card.



This flock mentality had always bothered me. It still bothers me.



When I was younger, back in the late 70s when my liver still had a chance and my muscles were visible through the flab and none of my joints ached, I made some observations. Everyone in my home town had one of two cars: a Volvo Station Wagon or a BMW 2002. Some families had the former for Mom and the latter for Dad, but I am not generalizing. If you walk down the main shopping street of my old home town that’s what you would see parked at the curb. Volvo Volvo BMW BMW Volvo.



The men of my age wore Lacoste Alligator shirts and the women had disco hair. They went to bars at night met up and followed each other’s Beemers and Volvos off up onto the ridges for pre-aids sexual adventure. I’m not bitter.



For a while, after the 2002 rotted out, 325s were parked in the town spaces. Then there was a brief minivan epoch.



I am not going to fill this space with a complete vehicular timeline except to fast forward to today where the entire town (and most of the rest of my fellow countrymen) drive SUVs.



It’s stunning, shocking and embarrassing. Huge gas guzzling behemoths where the humbler, smaller cars of my youth once parked. They block the view and the rays of the sun.



No one rives a car older than 10 years anymore. Except me I think.




Anyway, I was tooling down the road in my 1987 Volvo Station wagon when an odd vehicle pulled onto the highway in front of me. It was tiny, dwarfed by the Suburbans, Land Rovers and Expeditions that sped by in both directions. As I crept up behing the tiny car, which was holding it own in the velocity sweepstakes, I suddenly realized it was a BMW 2002. Wow! It survived the rust plague! Some guy had fixed it up nice. So I took a picture and here it is. By the way, I plan on buying a Ford Flex as soon as I can.

Negativity

Pop a cork and light up a Churchill! We’ve been on Rusty Hinge Road for 10 years! In the early months of our residency, as the sawdust levels began to subside and the patina of the previous tenants faded away, I began to collect ephemera related to my new home town. Just post cards at first. In those early days, when EBAY was just a little more than an idea, I could win auctions without much competition: two dollars here, five dollars there, before long I had quite a collection. Then it was on to pottery and books, anything even vaguely related to my zip code was fair game. I would seek it out, bid on it, and for a while, there was a fairly steady stream of envelopes, padded bags and boxes arriving at my door.

Once I figured out how to do it, I set up my EBAY account to run automatic searches specific to my desires. Borselino hats is one of my favorites, as are Volvo parts and antique banjos. The one I get every day centers on items related to my home town.


Not too long ago, I received an EBAY notification offering old photographic negatives that were alleged to have been snapped by a renowned local WPA muralist. It promised images of street scenes (I like those), old cars (sign me up) and people (I’m into people).



I won the lot for $3.95 plus postage and a week later I was running 4X5 negatives through my scanner. As anticipated, my computer screen delivered photos of old houses and cars and old-fashioned people in a 1930s back yards, sipping lemonade and pretty much doing what we modern folks do on a summer’s day (without the technological gizmos).




One of the things I began to do with my postcard collection was to get in the Toyota and drive to the various locations pictured in my 80-year-old images, with the idea of replicating the exact image as it looks today. I had some success with this, but it often required some research, since occasionally streets are renamed and in some cases entire neighborhoods have been paved over in favor of a commercial enterprise. My newly acquired negatives sparked a renewal of this interest, especially since I had the name of the photographer and some possible landmarks I could use to identify the scenes I now had on my hard drive.

I googled the artist with limited success, save for a whole lot of images of his fine murals which are still on display in many local government buildings. My next step was to go to the local library to search the town directories.

After finding a “Jim Rockford” parking spot in front of the library, I walked in the door and practically knocked over Gilbert, the unofficial town historian. I had spent many hours in various places listening to Gilbert rattle off his boundless knowledge of local lore and on this particular day, I merely mentioned the name of the muralist I was researching and Gilbert was rattling off reams of valuable information that was priceless for my research. He gave me so much data that I decided not to pursue the reference desk for the old directories and set out to photograph modern digital versions of the vintage images that I now owned.



In what I thought was a delightfully karmic twist, the address Gilbert sent me to happened to be right around the corner from my property at Rusty Hinge Road. The house was one with which I was quite familiar. Gilbert’s description of how the artist’s family used the property all made sense, but I instinctively felt that it was not the one depicted in my photos.




I won another EBAY auction of negatives of identical description and while I was waiting for them to arrive, I returned to the library to do more research on the photographer. I found three different addresses from three different decades. My subject had moved several times. From the driver’s seat of the Toyota, I took three new photos, I also discovered that, unfortunately, one of the locations was now a more modern strip mall.

Maybe one of these properties could have been the location of the back yard in my photos. I continued to poke around and email Gilbert while I watched the mail for the new (old) negatives.
In a week, I was scanning the new material. There were a series of interior shots, taken around a Christmas dinner table, and a few others of folks sitting on a back porch and then, hallelujah, one of the properties I had photographed came up, exactly as my modern photograph had captured it.

I get an immense sense of satisfaction I get when I am able to bring the past to the present. When I am able to replicate a shot that had been taken before my father was born and study the two images side by side, every little detail and grain silently tells the story of the passing decades. I posted these images to the internet in a photosharing site where I have found neighbors with similar interests. I explained what I was doing and revealed my sources. There was some response and I was given some useful suggestions.

More negatives came up on EBAY the next day, and some of the images look like they might contain a few shots of the house around the corner.

I put in my bid and rubbed my hands together in anticipation. Lo and behold, at the last minute, I was outbid! Drat! Now someone out there has “my” negatives!

I know where you live!

Halloweener

I'll do anything to avoid doing what I have to do.

I bought 26 dollars worth of candy and parked in the living room and waited for the parade of ingrates to come to my door for handouts.

I thought I was going to have to eat all the candy myself, but eventually, some kids came through the rain, most of them in actual costumes (for once) and some of them actually enthusastic.

Well sir, they got about half of the bowlful. Normally, I have to keep a ruler handy to whack the little buggers' hands when they over-grab. These trick or treaters where very polite, if surly.

"How many shall I take?" I was asked.

"Take a bunch." I said. And because I am a health care ptofessional I said, "brush your teeth!"

Chilling Out

The house on Rusty Hinge Road came with a fairly new gas furnace. It is connected directly to a municipal gas line that lies beneath the pavement on the other side of the chain-link fence.

Last March, Melissa told me that the heater was on the fritz. This was a new experience. With my old oil furnace, I could go down into the cellar and press the button on the red box. If the Gods are in alignment, the problem was fixed.

This gas unit has no such button and unlike the oil variety of yesteryear, there is no international safety orange sticker on the side of the machine displaying the contact telephone number for service.

I called the gas company and after going through a couple menus, got a human on the line who told me that the gas company doesn’t “do that sort of thing” and I should find myself a reliable plumber who specializes in heater repairs.

So I contacted a contractor friend who recommended a plumber buddy, who I called, and that afternoon his truck was at the curb, and he had his nose inside the fallow furnace.

“You burned out the motor,” he told me in very sketchy English. “I will go to my supply house on Monday and get you a price.”

It should come as no surprise that the heater finked out during an early March cold snap and on a Saturday morning so we could plan on pretty much freezing various nether parts off until midweek.

Melissa, the saver, the collector of things, went to the basement and retrieved a couple of electric oil-filled radiators she had bought when she lived out in far more temperate Oakland, California. These portable units served her well in the short, mild winters of the bay area.

“Don’t be silly,” I chided her, “How will these things help us?” This is a big old house and those tiny things are like pebbles in the ocean.”

Unphased by my chiding, Melissa pluged them in and in a couple of hours, with the aid of some baffling laws of physics, the oil-filled electric radiators had transformed a sizable portion of the chill in the house to a comfortable level.

“I think it’s actually warmer than our furnace,” I remember thinking as my fingers thawed and I was able to type again.

On Monday, I called the plumber. He let me know that his supplier not only did not have the motor BUT they could not get one.

“It’s discontinued.” Discontinued?

He suggested I go online.

I did and after poking around for part numbers, model numbers and serial numbers, I located a brand new, non-returnable part at a warehouse somewhere in Illinois. I had it Fedex-ed out to me at breathtaking expense, and it arrived on my frozen porch by the end of the week.

Deciding that he was kind of flaky, I fired the plumber. Ultimately, I ended up calling the number on the side of a truck, “Demitri Plumbing and (more importantly) Heating.” They were able to fit me into their schedule that day.

A pleasant gentleman with a baseball cap and his name (not Demitri) embroidered on his pocket brought his tools in from the cold and in 10 minutes our house was vibrating and getting warmer.

“I guess I didn’t need that non-returnable motor after all.” I said.

“It was simply a dingus schnobber,” the technician explained, adding numbers up on an invoice. Of course it wasn’t really a “dingus schnobber” that needed tweaking -- it was something equally as unfamiliar to my vocabulary.

“It happens all the time,” the kindly technician explained, “It’s the first thing I always check.” I wrote out a big check and handed it to my new friend.

“Your plumber should have known that much.”

“You know anybody that needs a motor?” I asked, seeing a fairly hefty portion of a weeks pay in an unopened box on the cellar floor.

“I could take it off your hands but it is of no value to us,” he said.

“Skip it,” I told him, graciously leading him out the door.

March became April and we opened the windows and turned off the furnace. The warm blur of summer went by. We tried to put it off as long as we could but a couple days ago, we turned on the heat.

Again the comfortable hum of the motor could be felt throughout the ancient beams and boards. The dust bunnies and cat hair that had collected over the summer was rudely awakened from hibernation and made airborne as the warm air came blasting out of the registers. And then, alas, no heat.

When I returned from work one morning, the oil-filled radiators were back on the job. Before I went to bed, I had an appointment set up with Demitri.

The next afternoon, the house was humming and I was writing a check to Demitri, who assured me that my furnace would be giving me many more years of happy service.

I need a new roof and the paint is peeling and I would really love to put in a new garage. In spite of Demitri’s attempts at calming my qualms, am I going to need a new furnace? Good thing Melissa saved these oil-filled radiators.

Maybe I just need a new house.

Meanwhile I’ll go online and look for a replacement dingus schnobber.

Flour Power

I am on a diet again. I am really good when I set my mind to it. Problem is that the minute I even start to fit into that pair of pants I have stowed somewhere back in the closet, I celebrate with a never ending conga line of delicious food that I had so diligently resisted for months and months.

So, in truth, I am pretty good at starting a diet, but I stink at staying on a diet. And take a note, kiddies, it gets harder as you get older.

So with my increasing girth, the achy joints, sagging jowls, elevating blood sugar and the specter of mortality staring me in the face, I have dusted off the old diet book that was recommended to me many years ago by my dour doctor and joined the losing team.

The diet book on my shelf is basically a Frenchman’s version of the Atkin’s plan: nix the carbs and loose the pounds. One slight deviation from the late, great Doctor Atkins prescription is whole wheat bread, a carbohydrate, is allowed for breakfast. Not your basic grocery store whole wheat, mind you, my book insists on purely whole wheat flour, with out a speck of enriched white flour. After scouring the ingredient labels in every grocery store in the county, I decided I was going to have to dust off my old bread pans and bake my own.

When I was a kid, I got into making bread. I think that probably one of the neighborhood hippy chicks had made a fresh loaf and I was attracted to the enticing allure of both. My sense memory alarm clangs loudly with the taste of that first oven fresh chunk, slathered with butter in a once familiar, fragrant kitchen. After that first taste, I was hooked. With my soon-to-be lifelong instant-gratification issues blaring loudly, it was just a matter of minutes before the family kitchen was a flurry of flying flour.

My mother, a talented cook, was not especially keen on the wife/mother expectations thrust upon her by the “Mad Men” mores of the time. She gladly relinquished her kitchen to me; in fact she’d have resented the concept of the kitchen being designated as “hers.”

So she was delighted to underwrite my bread-baking phase, and happy to lend her expertise. As much as I loved the idea of making fresh bread, I was completely unaware of the choreography involved in the process. There’s a thing about yeast and its properties and its sensitivities to temperature and ingredients. There are huge periods of waiting for stages of rising and something called “proofing” not to mention the fact that once all of the front end stages are completed, there’s a matter of waiting for the baking piece and once it’s out of the oven, you have to wait a few minutes for the bread to cool down before it can be safely eaten without serious injury. So much for instant gratification.

While my memory seems to look back at what seemed like months of bread-baking experimentation, I suspect it was no longer than a week or two, but I am also sure it was something with which I was obsessed. During the bread making epoch, I made white bread, French bread, rye bread, whole wheat bread, raisin bread, pumpernickel, rolls and virtually every recipe the Joy of Cooking offered.

I always came back to plain old white bread because it was the most reactive to the yeast, wherein it dependably rose with gusto, while some of the others seemed to rise with indifference or worse, not at all, leaving me with fragrant inedible bricks. The white bread, God Bless America, was the most popular among my family of tasters.

Somewhere, possibly in a landfill in New Hampshire, there may be remnants of the old family kitchen. Archeologists, many centuries from now, painstaking sifting through that landfill, will scratch their heads, write papers and give lectures about the layers of sturdy wheat-based cement and linoleum circa 1955 uncovered there.

Fast forward three decades, Melissa and I are making whole-wheat bread in the test kitchens of Rusty Hinge Road. I have hit upon a fool proof, all-wheat, batter-style bread found in Fannie Farmer. It works well, smells terrific and tastes pretty good. With the internet at our fingertips and about four feet of cook books on the pantry shelf, there is no visible end to the recipes available for the type of bread required by the French diet book my dour doc gave me. A wheat berry, rye and whole wheat recipe from last week is quite edible but a bit too dense. It toasts well, and it fills the house with an intoxicating aroma that cannot be described accurately except to say it smells like home. Particularly with a hefty dollop of fat-free ricotta cheese and a splash of that Korean hot sauce with the rooster on the bottle.

The diet seems to be working. The most used notch on my belt no longer requires a struggle to reach. I am starving most of the day, but using the Frenchman’s diet, I can choose from a variety of specific snacks to fend off the cravings.

And every morning, I look forward a slice or two of delicious homemade bread for breakfast.
Now, where are those pants?