The people who have been around longer than a while send emails asking whatever happened to some of the old crew that knew about the older joints I sometimes haunt.
Sometimes I tell them the old people died, got divorced, split and or decided they don’t like my style any more and sometimes I tell them to read Crazy Pussy Willow’s Guide To Cooking Cats.
“Joshua, I want real answers, not the ones you make up.”
“I gave you real answers, some of them really did die and some really did get divorced. Some of those others you don’t see, well it is pretty obvious they didn’t like me enough to stick around. Maybe I bored or maybe I offended them.”
“Wasn’t there a girl?”
“There was and there still is.”
“What happened to her?”
“That is a personal question but if you must know here is a line. Sometimes she misses me terribly and wonders if she could really live without me. Sometimes she thinks I am the most annoying man she has ever met and then she wonders how I make it impossible to stay angry with me.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything. Sounds like a couple from a movie.”
“Maybe that is all we are and maybe that is all we ever were or will be. But life is a hell of a ride and sometimes when you are surprised by how it all works or doesn’t work.”
“You could have told me you weren’t going to give me a straight answer.”
Tires & Appliances
I put on more than 25,000 miles in less than a year of driving but I wasn’t pleased about having to put new tires on the car.
It wasn’t made any better when three weeks later it became apparent the washing machine was searching for a Maytag repairman named Kevorkian.
I had fixed it two or three times and explored doing so again.
Made the family crazy by forcing them to watch a few YouTube videos with me.
“I think the activation switch is failing, but there are a couple more possibilities. I want to see how they take it apart and want another set of eyes so that we can put it back together.”
Went to the garage and grabbed some tools, took a look at dad’s framing hammer and thought about using it to beat the life back into the unit.
Pictured myself beating the machine, “you better start working or you’ll be used for a Tin Man costume for next Purim.”
Of course the machine complied and I was showered in praise and then I came back to reality and decided it didn’t make sense.
Not the beating part, that never made sense but taking the unit apart to try to figure out if I was correct seemed like a fool’s errand.
The parts ranged from $25-$47 but I haven’t done enough work to know if there would be others I would need and wasn’t sure how long the labor part would take.
Might be easy for a guy who does it all the time, but it might be a bigger project than I want to take on especially given the regular use the machine gets.
Most of the work is done on a Sunday but there are other days and given that it broke upon a Sunday after less than a third was completed it didn’t make sense to play games.
So tomorrow night I’ll make my wallet cry uncle and buy a new unit while simultaneously making cracks about how fun it is to be an adult.
****
Looked at the mix of tools in my garage and tried to remember what happened to the car ramps dad bought to do oil changes on the Dodge Colt he bought around ’79 0r maybe it was ’80.
Wrestled with memory because I realized the year isn’t solid in my mind because there were two.
There was a yellow one that wasn’t around for long because something major happened to it and it was replaced by the red Colt.
He had that long enough that he used it to teach me how to drive a stick.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if the different life I came close to having would have happened.
Not the one where I made aliyah and moved to Israel but the one where I ended up in Texas far sooner than I did.
The one where I had imagined possibly having a bigger garage in which I could work on rebuilding a car or two.
Dad and I talked about it a little bit, what we thought we could do and what we could learn to do.
Thought some more about it today when a guy at the Home Depot in Irving told me a man has to know how to work with his hands and thanked me for helping him choose which toilet to buy.
Odds and ends, flotsam and jetsam floating through my head.
How Wise I Have Become
The washing machine comes just as my life insurance premium is due. It is a term policy I took out when I was barely married and if I go it will provide a decent chunk of change.
Not enough for anyone to retire but at the time I pulled the policy it would have paid off the house and left some money for living expenses.
At the time I wanted a bigger payout but worried about how to cover the difference in premiums.
There was only one kid and he was barely walking so I figured I would do my best not to die and make the difference immaterial.
That kid is big enough now that if he was forced to care for himself he could and the house it was supposed to cover is long gone.
Sold eight years ago and just a memory of a life I used to live.
Sometimes I think about choices made and not made and do my best not to focus too long on what is behind and already done.
Better to rage on Facebook at the fool in the oval and to get irritated with those who don’t respond to my comments and those who ignore me.
Better to rant and rave on social media about being unfriended or unlinked on Linkedin and unfollowed on Twitter.
That’s a very good use of my time, ok maybe not such a good use of time but it doesn’t require much energy,
This kind of nonsense is like breathing for me, I don’t have to think about making the words appear on the page.
Nor do I have to think about whether more bills will come or how soon something else will surprise me because it is a certainty.
But there are good surprises too and I have had a few of those.
In fact I expect there are going to be more of the good ones and not just because experience has proven a man can make a certain amount of his luck.
Got a few things outside of this joint that require my attention so I will leave you with a thought of limited significance and maybe no practical use.
I don’t know why, but I think the title of this post could be used for a Bob Dylan album.
Crazy Pussy Willow’s Guide To Cooking Cats- Bob Dylan
If I had more time I’d put together fake review of the album that talked about classic Dylan railing on about injustice, class warfare and the poetry of folk music but I am tangled up in blue and have to respond to a call from the girl from north country.
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