Poly-euw

Diary of a Small Contractor

Monday, November 3, 1986

All day
shaping lumber with a
clear heart.

I've built a cabinet and a laminated-wood countertop: cutting, gluing, clamping, sanding.  A pleasure.  Now, just before bed, I want to apply a first coat of finish.

To many woodworkers, the use of polyurethane is a mortal sin.  I'm sympathetic.  In fact, my favorite wood finish is good old tried-and-true linseed oil, a 100% natural product.  But tonight I'm finishing a bathroom countertop which will be under constant assault.  I'm going with poly. 

A long time ago I used poly-euw (as we call it) for some other project.  I ended up with half a quart unused, so I poured it into a jelly jar and screwed the lid down tight.  Air tight.  Exposure to air, of course, makes poly harden.

Now the lid is frozen to the jar.

As a child I learned a trick from my mother: she used to open the stuck lids of food jars by tapping the handle of a butter knife along the outside of the lid, glancing blows in the direction she wanted it to turn.

Mother knows best.  In the basement where I'm working, I don't have a butter knife handy but I do happen to have a 22 ounce framing hammer in my tool belt. 

Tap.  Tap.  A few glancing blows on the lid. 

It still won’t come off.  I rotate the jelly jar in my hands, tapping.  I make dents in the lid, but it just doesn't —

Oops.

Broken glass in my hand.  Poly-euw all over my clothes, the worktable, the radial arm saw, the basement floor.  Poly-euw mixed with blood.  Sticky.  Smelly.  Gooey.  Unwashable.

“Rose?”

“What?”

“I can’t do the poly tonight,” 

“Why?”

“I just broke the jar.”

“How?”

“I was just trying to open it.”

“With what?”

“A framing hammer.”

Bless her, she keeps a straight face.

Stripping off my shirt and pants, I throw them in the trash.  Rose wipes and then binds my hand with gauze and tape.  Then I go directly to bed. 

Maybe it's a message from the wood sprites.

Lit Night in La Honda

On the last Wednesday of every month, we hold Lit Night in La Honda.  We meet in the bar of the Cafe Cuesta (formerly Sullivan's) for beer, wine, dinner and audience-friendly words.  I'll be reading as usual, along with a mix of pro and amateur writers.  Poetry (including the always-popular cowboy poetry), amazing stories, and the occasional one-person drama.  For the folks in Australia and Slovenia, I'm giving you extra advance notice this time.  Y'all come!

365 Jobs: Peace and Love and Wall Thermostats

Diary of a Small Contractor, Day 23

Wednesday, October 29, 1986
 
An early morning consult.  Taylor is an intense, speedy young man in blue jeans and a black mustache.  In less than an hour we plan about $2000 worth of small projects in his glorious house, a beam-and-stone castle with a broad view over Silicon Valley.  Whenever I name a price, Taylor immediately says "Okay" so quickly that I wonder if he heard it.  He gives me a business card: he's an electrical engineer, a manager at Hewlett Packard.  By my reckoning he's about 24 years old in a ten-room house with no wife, no kids.  King-size bed. 

Standing in the driveway we agree to a timetable for the work.  Taylor zooms off in a shiny black Porsche.  Hesitating for a moment under the quiet redwoods, I can see sunlight glinting off tiny windshields on a fabric of highways from Palo Alto to San Jose.  A whole world is zooming off.

It's 1986; I'm 39 years old.  I've just bought my first computer, a Mac Plus.

From Taylor's tony estate, next stop is Sonny’s bungalow right next to the rush and rumble of the Bayshore Freeway.  Lovely red-haired sparkle-eyed Lorraine, Sonny's wife, is dealing with a three-year-old daughter and a one-year-old son.  Lorraine says she always thought she wanted seven children, but now she’s wavering.  “But don’t tell Sonny.  The minute I show the slightest doubt, he’ll run out and get a vasectomy.”

In one long day I install a sink, a faucet, a garbage disposer, a dishwasher, a vent fan, plus switches and outlets.  Sonny arrives at the end.  He's been out installing doors — his niche.  I tell him the parts cost a hundred dollars.  From his wallet he whips out a hundred dollar bill.

Sonny can’t stand to have anyone do favors for him.  This was an even trade, and he knows it, but still he won’t let me leave without giving me a screwdriver, a bran muffin, a cup of coffee.  Sonny is probably the most generous person I've ever met.  He's also a hardworking hippy, if you can handle such a combination of terms.  Sonny is part of a whole cadre of hardworking, hardplaying freaks in the crafts.  After the Haight came the diaspora.  They learned skills, found niches, and held onto their values.

From Sonny’s, next stop is an apartment complex near Stanford University.  Most of the residents are foreign-born students along with their spouses and sometimes their grandparents.  They don’t know how to use garbage disposers or dishwashers, and as the maintenance guy I end up performing some very simple repairs while trying to teach non-English-speaking housewives from Thailand and Paraguay and Nigeria how to use an American kitchen.

It’s dark when I arrive at the apartments.  Everyone is cooking dinner.  I smell rice frying here, pork baking there.  One of the units has “an electrical problem.”

It’s a bad light bulb.

Another unit has a "broken heater."  It's turned off.  I try to teach a Croatian-speaking grandmother how to operate the wall thermostat.

I'm not sure she gets it, but she seems satisfied.  She gives me something that looks like stuffed grape leaves.

It's 7 p.m.  I've been working since 7 a.m.  It's the era of Ronald Reagan.  The Fox Network has just launched.  I drive through rain to pick up 4 gallons of milk at a Menlo Park supermarket where, selecting vegetables, there is a lovely young couple.  Menlo Park, by the way, is the headquarters of Sunset Magazine.  Back home, on the Mac Plus I write this:

He wears an ill-fitting gown   
in this Sunset Magazine town.
She's dressed as a peasant.
The effect is pleasant
and flamboyant in this middle class store
of homeowners writing checks, wanting more.
This couple wants less.

Her hair needs care.
His beard is straggly, partly bare.
Age: about nineteen,
faces fresh, eyes keen.
The decade of their birth
was a struggle on Planet Earth.

In this cornucopia of Wonder Bread and Froot Loops
they choose rice, wheat germ, and chocolate soup.
On one hand he wears an embroidered glove.
What does he know of the Sixties, the Summer of Love?
Naive, laughed-at, sincere. . .

. . . back then, it was me
cruising the ghetto A&P
in paisley and sandals
for peace lighting candles
and what I mean is, God bless you, young couple
as your bubble of idealism washes down
a sea of weary shoppers in a too wealthy town.
My cart fills with yogurt and imported beers.
Somehow we saved the planet these nineteen years.
So much we learned!
Now it's your turn.

Thursday, November 17, 2011

I wrote that poem 25 years ago.  The Menlo Park supermarket is now a Safeway so vast you can get lost in it.  The young couple of 1986 would now be age 44.  Perhaps they have children, teenagers.  The Sixties are four decades gone, a time as distant and unreal to a present-day teenager as the Roaring Twenties were to me.  

Much of the world becomes middle class.  We are wealthy but feel poor.  We live better than medieval kings — better food, softer beds, longer lives.  In every castle we have music and jesters at the push of a button.  We have dishwashers, garbage disposers and wall thermostats.  Do we want more?

So much has changed.  And so little.

365 Jobs: Good Craftsmanship is the Lack of Botch

Diary of a Small Contractor, Days 17 and 18

Saturday, October 18, 1986

Surrounding the ultra-wealthy center of deep Woodside lies a territory that is merely well-off and sometimes, on the periphery, downright normal.  Today I'm in shallow Woodside working for normal people, spiffing up some closets. 

Magda is a chainsmoker, a “financial advisor” whatever that is — a tough-looking woman whom I wouldn't want to cross.  Her house is set on stilts clinging to a steep hillside.  The structure is solid but small.  The bathroom has been remodeled and is a knockout.  The bedrooms are plain.  The kitchen is an eyesore, poorly laid out.  The living room is falling apart, awaiting a remodel.  They seem to be upgrading the house piece by piece as money allows.

For Magda I install two sets of sliding mirror doors.  Easy.  Takes less than an hour, and I do a perfect job.  In this case, a perfect job is one that nobody will ever notice — the absence of botch. 

Next, Magda wants me to install a pair of birch doors on a sliding track for another closet.  These doors are solid core, heavy, easily scratched, difficult to carry without banging into something.  I install the track, the rollers, take meticulous measurements.  I place towels over sawhorses, scribe my cuts with a knife to prevent chipping, slide my power saw over paper to prevent rub marks on the wood.  After three cautious hours, the doors are hung — and one is nearly an inch shorter than the other.

Sacré bleu!

I had meant to trim 7/16 inch off each door.  Instead, I trimmed the same door twice!

So I have to trim the other door 7/8 inch too short, which means I have to lower the track that suspends them, which means I’ll have to buy and install a wider apron to hide the track, and I’ll have to eat the cost for time and material.  The doors would’ve looked better with the extra inch.  And I was so careful! 

So far Magda's husband, Kerry, has spent the entire day on the sofa flipping channels on Saturday afternoon television — a football game, an old movie, a panel interview, a standup comic.  Magda's gone out, so I tell Kerry I need to discuss a small problem with the doors.  From the sofa Kerry waves me off and says, “I’ll never drink again.  Until next time.”

A few minutes later, Magda returns.  I tell her we need to discuss the doors.  Without waiting for an explanation, Magda stomps to the bedroom and pushes the wooden doors along the track. 

"Why do they stick?" she asks.  "They're too hard to push."

Aha.  She hasn't even noticed the door length. 

"That's a light-duty track and roller set," I say. 

She frowns.  "It's what they gave me at the door store." 

"For solid core doors, they should have given you heavy-duty track and rollers."

"I'll get them," Magda says.  "And I'll give that salesman a piece of my mind."

I pity that man.  But I benefit from his mistake.  At least for a while.

Tuesday, October 21, 1986

When I return, Magda has the new heavy-duty track and new wheels for the closet door that I botched — and she still hasn't noticed that they're nearly an inch short.

To my delight, the new track and wheel combination requires nearly an inch more space.  My botch is perfect!  The doors are pre-trimmed!

Magda also asks me, as long as I’m there, to try to make some recessed lights fit into her ceiling.  I say okay.  She goes off to work and leaves me a bakery roll and a cup of coffee.  Nice lady.  Seems tough as nails at first.  But nice.

Whoever installed the recessed lights didn’t cut large enough holes for them.  His error becomes my pay.  I spread a dropcloth, remove the cans, resaw the holes, replace the cans, pick up the dropcloth, clean up some dust that settled on the floor.  Like most craftsmanship, in this case doing it right means doing nothing showy or creative — nothing you'd notice — it means simply the lack of botch, followed by a good cleanup.

It takes four hours to do the additional chores.  All billable.

Sometimes, everything works out.

365 Jobs: Afterwards, It's Still There

Diary of a Small Contractor, Days 10, 11, and 12

Wednesday, October 8, 1986

The porch is rotten.  Rusty doorbell button.  A dog barks.  The person opening the door has an undefined body: shirt, blue jeans, short hair — what gender?

“Hello,” I say.  “The owner asked me to look at two small decks.  She said they needed rebuilding.”

“Oh yeah.”  The voice of a young woman.  So, okay.  Female.  “The one you’re standing on.  And another.  Out back.”

She leads me through the living room.  She smokes.  The air stinks.  Massive stereo equipment, stacks of tapes.  A ratty chair.  Rock posters on the walls.  A bookshelf sagging with college texts.  A fine old oak floor covered with scratches and stains, ruined. 

The back porch has termites.  No concrete pad.  Wood in contact with earth.  I take measurements, then return through the stale air of the kitchen and living room.  I measure the front porch, where somebody built a nice pattern into the handrail, though now it’s wobbly. 

The young woman is lifting weights in the living room, taking breaks to puff on a brown cigarette.  Half the books are in German.  Rock music is blasting from the stereo.  In one corner there’s a playpen full of toys.  Otherwise, there's no sign of a child.

The house is a crime.  Absentee landlord.  Careless renters.  At a nearby pay phone, I call Carol, the owner, and tell her that the two porches are well on their way to becoming two piles of termite turd. 

Carol asks, "When can you fix them?"

"I'm booked up for a couple months, but I've got the rest of today.  I could juggle tomorrow, free it up.  Two days would do it."

Carol laughs.  "Somebody told me, if you want to get a job done, call a busy man.  You sound like my guy."

Her reasoning sounds flawed, but I'll take it.  Cash flow, needed.

As I lift off the boards, dismantling the back porch, I start to wonder how far the termites have spread.  I’d better inspect the house to find out where, if ever, the destruction ends.

In the crawlspace I see evidence of termites and evidence of repair.  No active infestation.  The foundation, however, is crumbling away.  Good grief.  As if termites ate the concrete.  The grade beam is turning to powder.  I can pull it off with my fingers — by the handful — like a sandcastle built wet but now dry.  There is practically nothing holding the house up.  If the earthquake chooses this moment to strike, I’m a goner.

Back outside, the almost genderless young woman is straddling a motorcycle.  I ask her to leave the door unlocked for me.

“What for?” she says as she pulls on a helmet.

“So I can use the bathroom.  The telephone.”

She laughs.  “No way,” she says.

Well, shit.  She’s a renter.  She lifts weights and reads books.  There’s a shadowy man who comes and goes in a van and never speaks to me.  There’s another woman living in the garage who ordered me to move my extension cord so it wouldn’t crush her plants.  “They may not look like much to you,” she says, “but they mean a lot to me.”

Actually, I’d admired her plants, especially an oddly shaped purple flower.  I’d intentionally placed my extension cord so as not to hurt the plants, but somebody moved it, perhaps the shadowy man.

I tear the porches out and leave them in a pile in the yard.  Mix and pour two concrete landings.  When I leave, both the front and back doors are three feet above the ground. I could build a temporary step, but I don't.  Take that, motorcycle mama.

At night I call the owner and tell her that before I build porches over the exposed foundation, I should do something to brace it.

To my surprise, she agrees: “Let’s do it right.”  I didn’t expect such an attitude because nothing in that house is right.  She must have recently bought it.  Maybe she doesn’t know what a wreck it is.

"What you really need is to jack up the house and build a whole new foundation.  It'll cost big bucks, though."

"Will you do it?"

"You need a different contractor for this.  I just do small jobs.  Since the house is in Palo Alto, the permit will be a nightmare.  It'll take months.  I can place some piers.  That'll remove the time pressure."

"Do what you can."

Thursday, October 9, 1986

I pull out the old concrete.  By hand.  Amazing.  Whoever mixed this stuff must’ve used the wrong proportions.  Too little Portland cement.  Impure water.  Something.

I mix a fresh batch of Quikrete in a wheelbarrow and pour it.  Then I shove two pier blocks into the puddles of concrete and wedge wood between the piers and the sill.  One corner of the house has already sunk an inch, and I don’t try to jack it up.  At least it won’t sink farther.

Next, I rebuild the front porch.  It goes up fast. 

Two Stanford students are practicing football plays in the street.

The motorcycle mama who wouldn’t unlock the house for me yesterday, today gives me a black cherry seltzer to drink.  On the wall by the telephone is a photo of her and another woman and a baby, all three naked, smiling, in a bathtub.  Definitely not genderless.  I feel like a voyeur.

Two mothers bathing
with one baby.  All look up
smiling at the man.

My hands are eroding.  The fingers crack and peel.  Copper Green, dry Quikrete, they do a job on your skin.  My thumb has a big tender bruise from a misguided hammer.  A nail scratched one knuckle; rebar scraped one wrist.  You can't always wear gloves.  Now I rub my hands with jojoba oil while contemplating the completed front porch.  It’s simple but solid.  Honest, plain, strong.  It’ll outlast the house. 

And that’s one of the reasons I like this kind of work:  afterwards, it’s still there.

Friday, October 10, 1986

This is my third day on a two-day job.  I had to postpone and reschedule; some clients are sore.

Today I'm under time pressure because I have to pick up my son at five o'clock.  On the back porch I cut one board badly but use it anyway leaving a half inch gap where there should be a tight butt joint. 

I load up the twuck with leftover lumber and concrete plus the debris of two porches with the wheelbarrow on top.  Then I pick up Jesse, my son.

With Jesse beside me in the front seat, there's probably a one-ton load in this half-ton pickup.  The truck sways from too much weight.  After four miles on Page Mill Road, greasy smelly smoke starts rising from below the gearshift knob.  It fills the cab.

I open the hood.  A cloud erupts, escapes.  It seems to be coming from underneath the engine instead of the radiator.  No, now it’s coming from the rear sparkplug.  How can steam be coming from a sparkplug?

I fix houses, not engines.  I know enough to use a rag as I open the radiator, but no steam rushes out.  It’s empty.  Bone dry.

Two hundred feet away is a large brick house which looks very rich and very private and very not to be messed with, but bless them they have a hose faucet right by the road, so Jesse and I without asking permission form a bucket brigade filling a Coke bottle and a thermos over and over until the radiator is full.

No water is dripping out.  Hoses tight. 

What happened?  How’d I lose it?

I wince, thinking of the mis-cut board, the half inch gap. 

I drive on.  We fill the Coke bottle and thermos, just in case.  A few miles later, the engine is overheating.  I’m now at the foot of the mountain.  I stop, empty our spare water into the radiator.  I teach Jesse how to open the radiator cap.  Jesse, by the way, is ten years old.  Today is his birthday.

Smoke billowing from
beneath my little truck on
a road leading home.

At the top of the mountain I’m overheating again.  There’s a gas station.  Jesse opens the hood for me.  I try to show him how to set the bar to hold the hood open.

“I know,” he says, and sets it for me.  So far, he's known a lifetime of car trouble.  It's normal for him. 

I re-water, then coast seven miles downhill with the engine off and arrive home with the radiator still cool, still full.

Back home, my wife has left notes all over the house.  A plan has developed: to celebrate Jesse's birthday, my wife and daughter and younger son have hiked to the Sierra Club Hiker's Hut which sits on a mountain ridge in Pescadero Creek Park, not far from where we live.  Jesse and I are to join them there.  We'll spend the night.  Perfect.

I shower and change.  Jesse gathers supplies. 

You can only reach the Hiker’s Hut by hiking.  Jesse and I, wearing backpacks, carrying flashlights, climb through the woods up the side of the ridge starting in a grove of creekside virgin redwoods, rising through oaks.  There’s no moon.  Through a break in the trees I see bright stars.  I say, "There's Cassiopeia."

Jesse walks ahead.

I hear a sudden sound from the dark woods.  I stop, spooked.

Jesse says, "It's a branch falling, Dad." 

Things fall apart.  Even trees.  Half inch gap.

Jesse hikes fast.  I’m getting winded.  My backpack gains weight as I ascend.  I want to protect Jesse from mountain lions in the forest, or at least from falling branches, but I can't quite keep up with him.

With my son climbing
a mountainside at night
toward stars.

The Hiker's Hut is no hut.  It has electricity, a refrigerator, stove, running water, even hot water.  Well-built, nice details.  No half inch gaps. 

Dinner’s over but Jesse and I have spaghetti, garlic bread, salad.  Somehow my wife carried a small cake a mile uphill, only slightly smudged.  Candles.

We lie in sleeping bags on the deck overlooking a meadow on the ridgetop.  Deer settle, making beds in the oat grass.  The stars are magnificent.  The Milky Way oozes across the bowl of sky from the ocean in the southwest to the distant glow of San Francisco, northwest.

A raccoon is rattling logs in the woodpile.

Exactly ten years ago Jesse came into my life and changed everything forever.
 
Next week I'll go back and cut a new board.

Lit Night in La Honda

On the last Wednesday of every month, we hold Lit Night in La Honda.  We meet in the bar of the Cafe Cuesta (formerly Sullivan's) for beer, wine, dinner and audience-friendly stuff.  I'll be reading as usual, along with a mix of pro and amateur writers.  Poetry, prose, and the occasional one-person drama.  Y'all come!

More Arno Sternglass

I've talked about Arno Sternglass before.  I show a number of his paintings here and talk about his joy of life here.

Recently I bought a painting of his on eBay.  The seller had salvaged it from a barn sale.  It was mildly water damaged, but now cleaned and framed, it shines like a bright light.

Cafe by Arno Sternglass

The scene is a cafe on Third Avenue in Manhattan where Arno and his wife Lila liked to eat.  In exchange for some meals, Arno made this painting for the owner in 1971.  The owner gave Arno more credit than he had expected.  So — and this is typical Arno and Lila — they decided to celebrate their 15th wedding anniversary at the restaurant and invited 3 couples to join them.  Lila says, "We all enjoyed a fine meal and drank a lot of wine."

The cafe is gone.  Somehow, years later, the painting ended up in a damp box in a barn in New Hampshire where it had been collected — and hoarded — by a blind woman who liked to buy art work at yard sales.  For a blind woman, she had a good eye.

Here's one more painting I didn't include in my previous post.  Some of the color has faded.  It's another playground scene from Central Park in the 1950's:

Playground, Central Park by Arno Sternglass