1 post tagged “built to last”

What was the last thing you built with your own hands?
Submitted by Nick.

What was the last thing that I built with my own hands? Well, I built walls in a basement does that count?
The year was 1975. The street was new...the latest development in a small town in Canada called Amherstburg, Ontario, previously known as Fort Malden. It's a small town with small town ways. The local sheriff is non descript. I can't remember actually seeing police officers although once in a while a cruiser could be spotted. It was a peaceful town much like the town in the movie called Housesitter.
I had just had Ryan James Cutforth a product from our stay in Chatham, Ontario, the year before. Chatham is famous for a small town composer gal of non descript. Well, and for good manners. Chatham may be the only town on the earth where cars stop to let old women and jaywalkers cross the street every time any time. The policemen of Chatham are much friendlier than Amherstburg. One would actually cross in front of me where I stood holding my Bible magazines as if to say, "I have my eye on you." A trait shared with many a police officer in Montreal 1967. I always felt safest in Chatham where the son of Frederich Cutforth lived for quite a spell. Hector is nothing like his father. He takes after his shy Aztec mother, speaks Spanish only if he had to which was rare, and like Robert Rae Wigle rarely spoke. Old age has soften him and he shares his views on almost everything rather readily if not eagerly.
I remember when Dennis and I went to live in his basement in 1973. He had never spoken to me before. Shaking hands was rather difficult to do with real shy men. Hugs are out of the picture and for a daughter-in-law that was perfect. We sat across from one another the day after we moved in for breakfast. The quietness could be cut with a saw.
"Iris," he said dryly with his eyes down towards his hand stirring his coffee, "there is something I want to discuss with you?" Iris was already frozen with fear from the quietness. Two frozen people in what should have been a warm room. "I didn't want to tell you this before you married my son but it was something that I thought you should know." He looked into my eyes for a second before continuing with his tale. "Have you ever seen a man out golfing?" Well, golf is rather a slow game and I wasn't exactly into being that slow but I understood how the game is played. I even tried it once or twice on my own. "Did you ever notice how the golfer takes his time hitting the ball?" Well, yes as a matter of fact I had noticed how long it takes for a golfer to hit a ball. "Well, Dennis is just like that. He looks at the ball and wags a little this way and looks at the ball and wags a little that way." I continued stirring my coffee and placed my spoon down so he could have my full attention. After all, this was our official first conversation and Dennis and I had been married at least four years.
"Some golfers may take up to half an hour to decide exactly what they are going to do with that ball and you may find out for yourself that Dennis may never hit the ball at all." That was the end of the conversation. Dry, slow and right on target. Now not to be left out of the conversation the mother of said conversation had to add her in put. "We didn't want to scare you off. That was why we wanted the two of you to marry as soon as you started dating. We all held our breath that Dennis might scream and yell right in front of you. It is the Napoleon characteristic in him that started when he was just a little baby. He would scream in the night and we would all jump and he has been screaming ever since."
The shepherd dog wasn't added until we moved to Essex, Ontario. But, back to Amherstburg with it's green  park running along the Detroit bank to Fort Malden to it's one light for pedestrians at the corner where the Amherstburg library sat waiting for Erich Seigel to call to inquire if I had overdue books out at all  because if I had he was going to return them for me...some day...one day...down the road.  "Does she work there? She seems to like libraries as the form of her only entertainment." And, he was right. I loved my libraries.
Oh, and yes, there was a grocery store and even a Tim Horton's which I also frequented with Carrie and Ryan on occassion. On one occassion two JW elders sat inside watching as Erich picked up my hand. "Who was he?" they ran after me to ask. "My cousin." I should have added that he came to apologize. We both had gone to Alexander Onassis funeral Erich doing the bodyguard thing once in a while for Onassis. But, that wasn't it because the funeral I thought was in 1973. John Douglas, Erich Seigel and Eddie Arnold all have the same thing in common which may or may not be an Irish gen that requires a man to smack a woman in the mouth when they hear something that they don't like to hear. Is it a father thing handed down generation after generation.
"You broke my tooth," I had said to Eddie Arnold during a musical rehearsal. Earlier he had said to me his young wife, the age of his sons, "would never even think of running around on him."
I looked at my tooth in the mirror. "Yeah, because she is probably toothless." To which remark he started chasing me from one end of the studio to the other. Hit three times in one visit. "Can't a person have a conversation without it getting physical?" Is it a redneck thing?
We had several dentists in Amherstburg. "I don't understand it," insisted Dr. Paul Smith, a dentist that I had gone to schoolf with a Walkerville High in Windsor, Ontario. "I gave you the perfect smile." He looked at the xray again. "It will have to be pulled. Your front tooth is cracked right up through the root and it can't be fixed." Well, I wasn't letting anyone pull my tooth. "I have to think about it." And, I thought about that tooth from 1979 to 1989. And, it hurt like hell from the backup of pus shooting it's way to my brain. Then, it was pulled and from three slaps I get to have a bridge of six teeth. I lost the perfect smile which had been an improvement on the prior two front teeth that a dentist in Chatham had tried to improve on. An accident had pushed one of my front teeth back. "I could fix that for you by putting a veeneer on it. It would be thicker in the end but your teeth would line up." "OH goody!" His receptionist waved a hand, "Oh that looks horrible. Didn't you know that he was going blind and was giving up his practice. Why your about the only patient he had left." Rabbit teeth. I had two rabbit teeth. "That looks dreadful Iris. Let me give you the perfect smile." It doesn't pay for a woman to ask a question or to have an opinion.
So, there I was in my new home in the spring of 1975 and elders had met to decide whether to disfellowship us for buying a house when Armageddon was coming that October. We were very bad examples to the flock. The house was too small for a dining room. The kitchen barely would fit a small table but it was ours with a backyard for kids to play in safe from the hounds.
We insulated the basement after we had studded the walls, placed drywall over them, stucco, barnwood and wallpaper that breathed the 1930's in the form of 1930 newspaper stories and advertisements. We did the electricity which cost us another hundred dollars for the electrician to drive from Chatham to Amherstburg. He was a shy electrician by the name of Ron Teilsman. "You forgot to turn the fuse."
Now Dennis you may have guessed has the personality trait shared with the actor Steve Martin. Steve standing in the middle of the road stomping and screaming is Dennis 247 except when he is playing hockey. And, well, golf, and well tennis, and well baseball. "You don't mind."
"No go...please go."
Dennis and I disagreed on every inch of that basement. "Oh yeah, well my brothers and fathers and uncles are all house builders and I say you are wrong." Yet, I was able to keep my teeth even if they were already broken and oozing pus. Dennis likes to tell his friends that "I went to work and when I came back the room that was over there was moved to over there." Let me give you a full picture of Dennis as a carpenter. He is working on building a shed in the backyard for all our new tools. It is a shed that is basically already made...one merely has to nail the walls together as shown in the pictures. He starts with the floor and he wants to do it all by himself. He knows that "I can do it." After all, he has the photos to guide him and the words beneath the photos to guide him.
"Dennis you can't do that!"
"Sure I can. This is going to make the floor stronger," a thought that didn't occur to the designer. Dennis had the idea of sawing studs and placing them between the studs that make up the floor, "But, if you do it the way that you are doing it...the walls are going to be out of rack and the roof is not going to sit on it right. Who is the carpenter you or me?" Wrong question from a Christian wife. Men must be the roosters in the nest. The Leader...the Cheiften...the accountant. However, by the end of the week he was growing tired of doing it all by himself and God did say that women were created to be the "man's helper."
"Honey, do you know where the milk is?"
"In the fridge."
"Honey, do you know where my golf pants are hiding?"
"Behind your suit."
He wanted me to help him nail the sheets of plywood on the sides. "It takes two people."
And to nail them on. And we nailed and nailed. Dennis heard silence after a series of nail bangs which disrupted the whole morning. The silence that is...something must be wrong. "Honey," he peeked around the corner. "Did you hit your thumb?" I was sucking on my thumb. "And, she didn't even say a word, not a squeak, not a tear. It was unbelievable." Yes, I was a real trooper after all I am braving the world with broken roots in my mouth. I can face any pain. I was raised by Theodore Melbourne Wigle.
"Is that a tear that I see?"
Nope. No tears. "Do you want me to spank you till you stop crying."
Nope. No tears for me. No squeaks. I can get spank and maintain a Marnie without expression forever. You see, I am not really there in the pain. I am not in the red room in Hollywood. I am with Jesus and Jesus does not allow axes nor knives, nor broken arms and cut off legs and ears. Jesus maintains a high standard of whiteness.
Everything is perfect. The blue rugs were laid down. The wall to wall brick is finished where the stove will sit on and the chimney is...?
The two Italians looked at me and shrugged both their shoulders. "It is a little crooked."
It took a few moments for them to think about it. "It was getting dark," was their only answer. Everyone in the neighbourhood could see that we were the first to get a chimney for a wood stove. I couldn't fire them exactly. They were friends of a neighbour who was also Italian and they were doing the work for "almost nothing." And, well the Italian neighbour saved me from the plague during the basement building by bringing over homemade Italian dandelion wine. "Put it on the stove and warm it up and drink the whole bottle. You will sweat a little and in the morning you will be just fine. No more cold."
"I will be just fine and no more cold."
"I take this with me when I go to get wood in the winter and I tell you this stuff really works."
"It really works?"
The cold got worse and I was in bed for several days.
"Hey!" I screamed over to Joe, "it didn't work."
"Hey!" He screamed back. "I didn't tell you to boil the alcohol out of it. I said to warm the wine."
So, there I was with my broken tooth and the sniffles. Then, I heard this sound of bottles falling from shelves one after another. Peering into the laundry room we had built by ourselves in the basement I observe all of the pickle juice making a bead towards the drain. "Hey honey, those shelves you built me came unloose."
All that money down the drain. All that money buying bottles and going, not to a grocery store, no I had to drive all the way to Ridgetown to get the best vegetables ever, gone to waste. And, I so really wanted to be a pickle maker.
"These peaches are really good."
"I froze them."
No more pickle jars for me. I was going to modern myself a little.
"Honey, why are the lights off?"
And, that was me building something by myself with and without Dennis who really needs a hug at the end of the day. His life is just not worth leaving if he can't have the stress.
If he is to be somewhere at seven. He leaves the house at seven.
And, it's like he has to have it.
And, things just never work out for him like it should and it should because "God is on our side."
So, he will be the one looked over, he will be the one who loses the luggage and he will be the one that the insects attract.
"Honey, come and sit by the fire. Isn't this nice. I put green wood on the fire."
"There is so much smoke."
"Well, smoke is good. Smoke will keep the mosquitos away."
He didn't believe me because the mosquitos flew right by me, through the smoke, right to him.
"Well, there not suppose to fly through the smoke. I don't know why they like you so much. They never bother me. It must be your blood."
Which brings us to blood. "Honey, Carrie is RH negetative."
"Yeah, so what?"
"Well, we both can't be RH positive and Carrie RH negative."
And, Ryan, and Grant and Taylor."
"O negative...is that like Aztec blood factor?"
Dr. Pezzutto wasn't sure. He wasn't a O negative specialist.
But truth be told aboriginals are indeed O negative...I think.
So, we built a basement in a modest $24,000 home on a one income budget. Saw the interest rates fly up to almost 25%, sold it at a loss at $36,000, rebought at $57,000 at 14% and eventually we gave up on having a small modest house of our own. Not exactly like the King and I. "And, all I ever wanted was just a small home I could call my own.