Irene Irony

We collect a lot of things. In our basement, for example, we have a stack of grocery bags from Trader Joe’s, a bag of unused wine bottle corks and several bags of dryer lint.

Hear me out. As artists, all of these things –including several Costco empty mixed nut jugs – are of potential value, will come in handy down the road, when we are struck with sudden fits of artistic inspiration. It happens.

Meanwhile, I am forever contemplating hauling a lot of this stuff away. Not too long ago, I started tackle the garage again. There is a now pile of stuff I intend haul away as soon as I have a moment in my busy schedule.

Last week, Mother Nature had some plans of her own. Hurricane Irene was roaring up the coast. All hell was predicted to break loose. Low-lying parts of New York City were being evacuated, we were watching 24-hours of overfed Americans nailing plywood over their windows. Store shelves were emptied of batteries and water. All hell, indeed.

Our concerns on Rusty Hinge Road never change. Aside from occasional gun shots and loud arguments out on the street, it is water we fear most. The wind is a consideration, of course, and there have been quite a few large trees clobbered by previous storms, but it doesn’t take much rain to cause a flood in our basement.

We bought the house on a dry October day twelve years ago when the hole on the basement floor had a rusty sump pump in place along with some spider webs, so it seemed that, like so many homes in New England, we’ll take on some water now and then.

I can’t remember the first incident, but I am pretty sure it was because of a glitch with the washing machine control buttons. If you don’t push the “load” button just right, the washer will fill with water, overflow and keep running until one of us discovers the flood, shrieks, turns off the washer and spends the next three days cleaning up the mess.

With the storm imminent, we did all the things we thought prudent; we moved the lawn furniture to safety, made sure we had cat food, checked our supply of 10,000 candles, and made sure our one flashlight, “Abner,” had batteries. Done, done and done.

The sky darkened and the wind picked up. Rain started to pelt our new roof. The bathroom skylight, recently installed and a source of ceaseless, unpredictable dripping, held tight throughout, thanks to an expensive repair job I just hired out. When I went to bed that evening, the lights were blazing and the cable channels were predicting Armageddon.

My bedside alarm was flashing 12:00 – 12:00 – 12:00, indicating a power flicker, sometime as I dozed but assuring me that we still had power. It was raining, and the highest parts of the nearest trees were swaying back and forth with malevolence. Out on the street, crushed sprite bottles and empty food wrappers collected around the curbside grate. You could hear the water rushing into the sewers. Tiny bits of shredded leaves had coated all surfaces at ground level. The streets were empty of mufferless cars, deep, buzzy bass notes and pedestrians. A large limb was down to the north, blocking the road, but mercifully away from the overhead powerlines.

“The pump isn’t working,” Melissa announced. She had gotten up and surveyed the situation.

When the ground around the house at Rusty Hinge Road gets saturated with rain, water seeps in from under the cement floor. Tiny, almost imperceptible, cracks begin to emit water. Puddles form and the previously mentioned hole – the location of the rusty sump pump – fills up with water. Left unchecked, the basement will, even without augmentation by the washer, begin to fill up with water.

I had fashioned a pump attached to a float, to activate once the water reached a certain height. If all went as designed, the pump would empty the incoming water out a cellar window via a red rubber hose.

Still groggy from sleep, and grumpy by tradition, I came to inspect the pump and after growling like a bear, discovered that the Ground Fault Interupter (GFI) outlet, into which the pump was plugged, was doing its job and shutting itself off. After all, it was I who set up the pump system and it had been known to deliver shocks. So I found a less persnickety plug, switched on the pump, and the water was on its way out.

Unfortunately for us, so was the power – just as the water level in the hole began to recede. Powerless, the rest of the bailing of the basement would have to be done, by us, with a bucket, illuminated by Abner, for as long as the water continued to rise.

We made do. The rain slowed down. We soon figured out we only had to bail once an hour. In a few hours, the sky got brighter, the neighbors started to come out and look around and fire up their noisy lawn equipment.

Funny how we are so reliant on electricity. Every time I entered a room, I automatically went for the light switch. We have a gas stove that worked, but we had to light it with a match. It felt quaint. We had missed the worse of it. My sister in Vermont and my cousin in the Catskills had not.

At one point, I wanted some coffee. And I realized I could make it on the stove but I’d have to find the old manual coffee pot. I swore I had seen it on the cluttered shelves of the basement. I grabbed Abner and went for a look. All I could find was a bag full of lint.

Completely dry.

Irene, you rene. We all rene… ben.guerrero@sbcgobal.net

La Posada Cinta Roja

Every once in a while a reader will ask me "where do you get your ideas?” I politely inform them that everything I write is true. I can no more write fiction than I can speak Swahili, bwana.

Our adobe is in a small but sprawling town in the middle of the desert southwest. The thermometer hits 90 degrees in May and just gets hotter from there. As we were buying the property, one of the minions of town officials, that drive around all day in a fleet of brand new, air conditioned Ford trucks, informed us that, according to regulation, 234-gh22-b, (I did make that part up), our house reverted back to commercial zoning status, when the last occupants moved out. In order for us to actually live on the property, we require a zoning change.

Across the arcing summer, we have to travel out there three separate times for three separate meetings in case any questions crop up during the three scheduled public hearings.

Our new home town has a population of 21,769. 82.8 percent of the population is male. Single ladies, before you pack your trousseaus, please be advised that much of that imbalance is related to the fact that the eastern edge of town is the location of a humongous prison.

Because of this, the dwindling share of state aid allotted to our new home town, is greatly skewed by the additional inmate population. The result of this boon is that the city always has more money than it can prudently handle. In other words, expenditure-wise, if it is related to infrastructure, we got it. This proves to be ripe with irony. The town itself, at least the main drag, seems to have stopped in time, as if Alan Ladd is about to walk out of one of the colorful saloons, jingle his spurs into the middle of the street and draw a blazing six-shooter on a menacing Jack Palance. It is that quaint and cowboy. Chances are good, however, if Mr. Ladd were to attempt such a feat today, he'd risk being mowed down by a retiree on a motorized wheelchair.

One of our town's charms is the ancient adobe homes that pepper the dusty lots. With the stream of hot and cold running cash running through the municipal coffers, you' think the new civic architecture projects might replicate, or at least compliment, the old style that has been so lovingly mummified by the hot sun. Instead they are more inspired by the design of the temple of Dendur than the time-tested thick walled and rough timbered adobes. The county courthouse, a majestic, turreted symbol of Roger's and Hammerstein's American back country has been abandoned in favor of a complex of looming, brown, air-conditioned cubes. The town government, which seems to be the second largest employer in the area, is housed in a characterless, earth-toned, gunnite-encrusted town hall at the dead end of Main Street, a location ripe with metaphor.

It is through the pneumatic doors of this building that the Planning and Zoning meeting was assembling. The huge main meeting room, the grandest of grand ballrooms, spread out for miles around. The vastness is so large as to require microphones be wired onto all the participants in order that their voices reach the maximum potential audience. On this occasion I was one of five members of the assembled crowd.

It appeared, at first that the meeting was not going to happen at all. After a long, expensive flight, and the rental fee for a giant Japanese luxury desert yacht, The one commissioner necessary to make up a quorum had not showed, and bylaws only allowed for so much wait time. As the minutes ticked by, I could see my presentation in tiny pictures on a distant laptop that was wired to a projector to better describe my plans to the open meeting.

The missing commissioner arrived at the last possible minute and the two presentations in front of mine were delivered to the board. I assumed that the other four citizens were (literally) locked and loaded and ready to clamor at the dais when a public forum was opened to complain about my requested zoning change. No hands were raised. The board asked only that I describe the location of the property, by which each member had driven on the way in that night.

The P and Z unanimously recommended that the mayor and town council accept my request and off in the distance I could hear, with the aid of a modern PA system, the sound of a gavel hitting the simulated wood grain podium in front of the chairperson.

I called Mellisa with the good news from the parking lot. We'll have to show up in person at two more meetings over the summer. We are taking turns.

As I drove back to the air-conditioned safety of my father's cozy guest cottage, I went by the old adobe and basked in the evening heat as the sunset dyed the horizon an almost unnatural combination of orange and purple. The possibility of transplanting our lives to this place had moved one step further along. The possibilities were as endless as the pile of money it would undoubtedly take for us to bring it back to its nascent glory. The vision was so real I could almost see Alan Ladd lurking in the lengthening shadows.

Smile when you say that.

The Gavel

It appears to have finally stopped snowing. In fact one day, not too long ago, I got out of bed, put on a pair of wool socks and a sweater, prepared for a traverse over the tundra, only to discover it was at last Spring out on Rusty Hinge Road. Hallelujah!

A week later it was summer. Go figure.

The verdant foliage and colorful flowers had Melissa and me longing for a visit to Vermont. We have been regular visitors at my sister's house up there most spring times, but with all the hullabaloo of work and real estate speculation of late, we'd barely had time to think straight, let alone contact our cat wranglers, pack up our skivvies and roar up the interstate.

Last Thursday night after I emptied my bank account into my truck’s gas tank and off we went. The main highways were at a standstill, so we took the scenic route. Less scenic in the dark, but less traffic.

The next morning we did our usual retail therapy in the nearby town, ogling the residual, aging hippies and Subarus that crowded the otherwise sleepy streets. Is it the air? The water? What makes it all so darn soothing in Vermont?

Later, we "previewed" an auction in my sister's tiny town. While there isn't much going on there, save for a whole lot of maple syrup production, there is a formidable auctioneering concern right on the main drag. The proprietors, a couple of real Vermonters, empty out old houses and auction off the contents.

The auction inventory can range from Tupperware to antique cars, there tends to be something for everyone.

My brother-in-law, Charles, is a morning person and while we snoozed through breakfast, he was off mowing a lawn or delivering “Meals on Wheels.” By the time we were out of our pajamas, he had perused the auction and was off in the hills.

We found a few things we planned to bid on if the price was right, so the next morning we got a number from the lady at the desk and stood on the sidelines as the auctioneer started moving his wares.

I had my eyes on an old trombone and a couple of Hudson Bay blankets, but first, we had to sit through a bunch of other stuff.

The auctioneer, a portly fellow with a bad tie and a scruffy beard, described each piece as if it had fallen off a truck on its way to the Metropolitan Museum.

"Look at the fine work on this lamp," he'd say, with the aid of a chin mounted microphone, "look how the naked lady's head is where you screw in the light bulb. You'd have to pay a thousand dollars for this on EBay!”

And a thousand dollars was pretty much the minimum value he imposed on every item in the place. One of his crew members would hold up the lamp, plug it in, and switch it on and off.

"How about a hundred dollars? Do I hear fifty? Ten dollar bid?"

Someone might raise a paddle and get things going, but if no one seemed interested, he'd complain to his partner, who ran the schlepping end of the auction, and save the item for another time.

"I can't believe nobody wants this lamp. They have no idea what we've got here. This is ridiculous!" He could be heard throughout the barn, since his microphone was on full blast. Maybe he thought that guilt would make the bids start coming in. Unfortunately everything he had wasn't all that wonderful. If someone did go in for a dollar, he clicked into full, manic auctioneer mode. "Dollah, dollah, how about two? Two Dollah, Three? Anybody, Four?" And so on, at a hundred miles an hour, coiled like a spring, able to catch a nod or a wink from a bidder across the room, as the dollars flowed into his till.

This went on for hours, and it was intoxicating. My sister, Babbs bought two tables and tiny Mexican chair. Melissa bought a Persian carpet, I nearly got a nice Stickley table. So it goes.

There were several seriously interesting items, like a genuine 600-pound roll top desk, but the idea of transporting some of these pieces was daunting, and once transported, where to put them? In the clogged, cluttered corners of our abode on Rusty Hinge Road? No, don't. Please.

All in all, it was a bit like eating peanuts. Each tray of glass baubles, every hotel quality painting called out with potential. Every art deco, rococo, curlicue, thing-a-ma-bob was the unappreciated Duncan Phyffe, hand-carved, one-of-a-kind, Antiques Roadshow, heart-stopping retirement plan, and for only a few dollars more than the guy on the other side of the room, it could be ours.

I was outbid on the trombone. I set a limit for myself. I wanted it for my daughter, Hannah, as back up for her more expensive trombone that is safely locked-up and unplayed at her mother's house. I figured I could afford to risk having it stolen if it was gotten cheaply enough. She'd have to play it, of course.

I got the Hudson Bay blankets for a pretty good price. There's only a moth hole or two in them and you can never have enough blankets. I am pretty sure we can find a place to store them for the summer, which should be over any minute now.

Going going gone!

A Trip to the Dump

Shortly after buying my new red truck, I purchased a ladder rack at the nearby truck accessory store. I justified the purchase because I knew, at some point, I would need to carry longer items like the occasional ladder or the long piece of lumber overdue for the side of the garage. I dug out my ratchet set and carefully mounted the new rack on my rig.

The rack was not particularly sexy, and went virtually unused, but it stayed on the truck until last week. I was in the house, minding my own business when I heard a loud “thump” on the street. Since there is a speed bump pretty near the front door, loud thumps are fairly regular music on Rusty Hinge Road.

I got up and looked out the window and saw a fellow rearranging the tools and ladders in the back of his truck. I assumed he had hit the speed bump hard and something had jumped out. Later when I went out, I saw that the rear section of my still-shiny truck rack had been sheared clean off. It had landed in the bed without damage to the truck itself.

Whatever hit the rack was pretty solid because it cracked the half inch thick aluminum mounting as if it was balsa wood.

Every car we have ever owned since we moved to Rusty Hinge Road has been damaged at least once while parked on the street. Only once, because our neighbor was out washing his car, did the culprit own up to his crimes.

Things have been tough at work, so I was glad to have my schedule rearranged so I could take few days off in the middle of the week. After the most extended and miserable winter of my recollection, today took us by surprise, delivering a sparkling spring day, full of blossoms, robins and feathering trees. I dug out a t-shirt, and decided to take the rest of the rack off the truck and take it to the dump.

I had been meaning to go down there anyway. Our blue recycling bin, issued to us as fresh homemoaners, ten years ago, had been all but smashed to smithereens by the ensuing weekly curbside garbage pickup. For a nominal fee, I could get a shiny new one at the “transfer station.” I don’t know how much it costs to get the garbage men to stop throwing my containers around.

So I set about finding my ratchet set, ironically, it was last used to install my truck rack. After checking all the obvious places, including the garage, which made the most sense, I found it up in the attic of all places. Maybe the cats lugged it up there. The culprits won’t own up.

The job was far less arduous than expected and in a few short minutes I dismounted the rack and put it in the bed for disposal.

I had a full hour until the dumped closed, so I jumped in the truck and headed across town. The city was bustling with traffic jams and blocked streets. Drivers on cell phones, windows darkly tinted, ignored all available traffic laws as well as the social contract, effectively trimming any extra leisure time I had built into this excursion.

In order to utilize the garbage dumping facilities, citizens of my current home town have to go down to City Hall with their car registration to obtain a sticker. Last time I was at the dump (sticker affixed) I was informed by man at the scales that I had to fill out some forms because I had a pickup truck. Disgruntled, I filled out the papers and the little man handed me a card.

Today, the guy at the scale took my card and plugged my number into the computer.

“I can’t find you,” he said.

“Here I am,” said I, pointing to myself.

He was perplexed and looked in a few files and tried to dial a phone number that did not get answered. Finally, he asked me if I could remember (back to November) who had issued me the card. Since I hadn’t been at the dump since, er, November, I told him I couldn’t. Nor, I thought to myself, should I have to.

While I threw the rack remnants into the aluminum pile and the crumbled bin into the plastic pile, the man at the scale straightened things out and, after waiting in line again, I received my card back with the promise it would work next time.

I took the back roads home, my now streamlined truck dodging potholes along the route. The sun had opened the buds and the long closed front doors, and brought out blossoms, lawn rakes and kids with over-sized t-shirts. Flattened Sprite cans glistened at curbside, while Walmart plastic bags loop-de-looped in the gentle breeze.

The truck now crouches like a soldier in front of the house, fearful of incoming artillery, always lurking around the corner. Over by the porch, gleaming in its shiny plastic blueness, stands a brand-new recycling bin with a solitary empty can of cat food in its optimistic emptiness.

Next nice day, I am going to go buy a long piece of lumber for the side of the garage. How am I going to transport it?

Maybe I’ll have it delivered?