Notes from Maine - 2024/05/18
A couple of days ago, I took a break from kitchen stuff and went to work on the roof of my brother’s new garage. I’m comfortable on roofs—I’ve installed a lot of shingles over the years—and it was nice to get outside for a change. Trying to keep the shingles in straight rows reminded me a lot of putting down tile. The stakes are much lower though. You hardly ever get a good look at a garage roof, so a line that wanders off course isn’t going to really bother anyone.
In contrast, I’ve been obsessing over the kitchen tiles. The most-recent bathroom here has a ton of mistakes that I see every day. I don’t want the kitchen to turn out like that. Functionally, it makes no difference if one of the grout lines is slightly wider than its neighbor. I’ll keep telling myself that—maybe I’ll believe it eventually.
You know that feeling you get when your attention is pulled several directions at the same time and you can’t focus on any one thing? I have the opposite of that. Maybe it should be called Attention Surplus Disorder? That’s the wrong name. I just looked it up—it’s an actual thing and not what I’m describing. So I guess that’s not what I have. It’s uncomfortable when a thought gets stuck in my head and I can’t shake it. I’ll start thinking about a interesting problem I’m trying to solve (like how best to find the timbers buried inside a eight-inch-thick wall that is covered with foil backed solid-core foam insulation and gypsum board), and the stupid problem will keep turning over and over in my head like a repeating song that I can’t stop hearing in my head. In the middle of the night I’ll wake up with ideas still spinning. It feels like a luxury problem—I only obsess about these details because I don’t have anything real to be concerned about. Whatever the cause, it’s torture.
I guess that’s the other reason I enjoyed working on someone else’s roof. After the final shingle gets placed, I’ll never think about that roof again. It might leak next year or it might outlive me by two decades, but it will never be my problem.
I’ll happily pay someone else to put a roof on my own house. Well, not happily, but I’ll pay. I have done a metal roof before, but there’s a big difference between slapping some metal panels on the barn and the ”standing seam hidden fastener” roof that the wing demands. Meanwhile, I keep staring through the window at the maple tree where the raccoons live. That branch is dead and it could fall. I’ll have to get it removed before the new roof goes up.
My mother and sister are coming up in a week. My sister will focus on the camp, working on the gazebo and Mom will oversee things here. Each morning, they’ll have to go outside and come back in through the side door if they want to get anything from the refrigerator. The tile in the kitchen might not be walkable yet. I haven’t mentioned that to them. I’m sure they won’t mind. I just remembered that next weekend brings the big appliance sales. I need to take advantage of that. As much as I enjoy my twenty-four-year-old washer and dryer, it’s probably time to retire them. And because I detest my refrigerator, that will go as well. I’m growing numb to all these expenses. That can’t end well.
It’s already hot out. Feels like summer has already started. I’m being dragged into the future by my heels. At the same time I feel like I’m slipping into the past. I was standing on my brother’s dock (which used to be my grandfather’s dock), throwing the frisbee into the lake for Albert (who looks a lot like another black German Shepherd named Duke). Thirty years ago I stood in that same spot, throwing a tennis ball into the lake for Duke. When Albert came back with the frisbee, I ordered him to stop and drop it. He happened to be standing next to my brother when I said, “Shake!”
I never teach a dog to offer a paw when they hear that. I always teach them that “Shake!” means to shake off the water. It’s useful to get them to do it at a distance so it doesn’t happen unexpectedly. My brother gave me a withering look as he was showered with dog water.
I used to ask Duke to shake next to my grandmother all the time. Each time, she would frown at me and say, “You did that on purpose!”
Mark Twain is sometimes credited with saying, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Laurie Anderson has been credited with saying, “History is an angel falling backward into the future.” For me, history is a black dog cutting a sharp line through calm waters.
