Mr. Clumsy
Truthfully, I am not a handy person. My brother is. My son Joe is, all his life has built highly intricate, beautiful models, airplanes, and boats including the exquisite model of the Annie & Jennie that I'm looking at from where I'm typing this very minute. My father was, the huge insulated van bodies I watched him construct for his seafood trucks were masterful works of art and skill. My grandfather, who would qualify as a highly skilled cabinet maker, Pop built the house at 1040 E. Caroline Boulevard; and I remember them moving there in the 1940s from the rental house on Baker Court where they had lived after leaving St. Andrews in the 1920s and returning years later in the 1930s. And Pop built furniture, beautiful things, one a cabinet he crafted for Evalyn in 1947 after Mom died: he and Ruth and my cousin Ann took it on the airplane when they flew to Washington, DC for Christmas 1947; prop-planes, flying was fairly new then, you usually traveled by train. And it was still prop-plane a decade later, 1957 when I flew from PC to Rhode Island to begin my Navy life. But I was saying, EG gave the cabinet to me, must have been twenty-five years ago now, and I gave it to Malinda when we moved home from Apalachicola. It’s a treasure. My son Joe has a table Pop made, his greatgrandfather.
As for me, I inherited clumsy bumbling. Where and who the hell did those genes come from? My father played football for Bay High; and before that for Pensacola High, a tattered high school scrapbook of Mama’s that Malinda found in the house had the lineup for the Pensacola Tigers, a clipping from the Pensacola newspaper, listing both Weller and Deweese, who was mama’s boyfriend until my father came along, on the same team. I’ve told the story many times: Tom Deweese is why I was stuck with Carroll from 1st through 12th grades and couldn’t claim Tom until I got off to UF at age 18. Johnny Cash and "A Boy Named Sue," BTDT.
Anyway, I could never catch a baseball, toss a football without it wobbling, or sink a basket. I could clean mullet beautifully, though, scaled and split thousands of ‘em. But when needing skilled work done I called an electrician, carpenter, plumber, roofer. I found early that it was a lot cheaper to call the plumber in the first place than to mop up the water from my plumbing job while waiting for the the plumber. Don’t get me wrong, I can change a light bulb and a faucet washer. I did replace the brakes on the 1948 Dodge. Although come to think of it, for Christmas 1975 I made Malinda a cedar chest, Joe a drafting table, and Tass a doll house modeled after the family home, my house now. Kristen played with it for years. Caroline has it now. Hey, maybe I’m not Mr. Clumsy.
Anyway, I could never catch a baseball, toss a football without it wobbling, or sink a basket. I could clean mullet beautifully, though, scaled and split thousands of ‘em. But when needing skilled work done I called an electrician, carpenter, plumber, roofer. I found early that it was a lot cheaper to call the plumber in the first place than to mop up the water from my plumbing job while waiting for the the plumber. Don’t get me wrong, I can change a light bulb and a faucet washer. I did replace the brakes on the 1948 Dodge. Although come to think of it, for Christmas 1975 I made Malinda a cedar chest, Joe a drafting table, and Tass a doll house modeled after the family home, my house now. Kristen played with it for years. Caroline has it now. Hey, maybe I’m not Mr. Clumsy.
Recently we replaced the storm door at the north end of the house. Bought it at Lowe’s and had their contractor install the new one. It looks much better. While the contractor and his helper were taking down the old door, I realized it’s the same size as the door on the “half-house” so instead of letting them haul it away, they set it aside for me, along with all the screws.
The half-house is the little tool house out back, for gardening stuff, that we had built in 2002 when Tim, our contractor, built our new kitchen and the large bedroom across the center of the house. The half-house has the same roofing and siding as the house, so we put the numbers 2308 1/2 over the door and named it the “half-house.” Its door was the old front door from the main house, glass window, mail slot and all. But evidently feeling demoted and humiliated, the hundred-year-old door began collapsing like Oliver Wendell Holmes' wonderful one-hoss shay, only not as instantaneous. I kept adding braces and bits of angle-iron to hold it together, but last year finally took it down in pieces and stood one of the old green shutters from Trinity Church there temporarily. Metal, the old storm door looks to be the solution.
Waiting for the right mix of mood and weather, which finally arrived yesterday, I began the task of installing the storm door on the half-house. It won’t take me long, I thought, it only took Lowe’s contractor an hour and a half to remove it and install the new door. At three hours I had the hinge strip up. The door itself is ready to be screwed to the hinge strip; I started on that last evening but had to stop. To be continued when another nice day comes along. And a return of the right mood, though I did get the hinge strip up without any bad words. Surely I can do this, finish the installation without messing it up, and see the door open and close.
More truth: even this is a delaying tactic to avoid cleaning out the attic.
T+ still mucking along through +Time