August 13, 2007

Banished to the Shed, Cherished Items Bid Farewell

As some of you know by now, there is a benefit concert coming up at our house on Labor Day. If you haven’t heard about it, you can get all the details at www.lostvoices.org. To give you the short version, Josh White, Jr., Kitty Donohoe, Robert Jones and some other friends of mine are going to join me to make music to raise money for Lost Voices, a group that works with incarcerated kids. We’ll use our deck as a stage and perform for a whole lot of people on the lawn and on boats.

I discovered that the one problem with having a party for, say, hundreds of people, is that my wife is not necessarily all that keen on the idea. I discovered this when she handed me my pillow and suggested that I sleep in the shed for the next few months.

She apparently feels that the house should be tidied up a bit before all those people get here. I tried to calm her down by putting on my best Johnny Cash voice and saying, “What’s the big deal, Baby. It’s just a little old concert.”

When I came to, I was sort of folded up on a pile of gas cans in the shed. And my wife had apparently changed her mind about letting me have the pillow.

It took some serious negotiation and personal groveling before we were able to reach a compromise. She finally agreed that we could have the event here, on the condition that I would spend every moment until the day of concert either working on some aspect of cleaning the house, or unconscious in the shed.

A couple of my friends, as soon as they heard about my situation, immediately offered to help me “muck out the place.” A quick trip to the dictionary revealed what every horse owner already knows – that “mucking out” is the process of shoveling poo out of a stall. Now I am aware that over the years I have accumulated a pretty fair amount of poo here in my stall, so I decided to take them up on the offer.

It never occurred to me that my friends might take a sort of sadistic pleasure with the whole situation. They will hold up an item I haven’t laid eyes on in years – like my favorite fishing rod with the tip broken off and the fish line caked with rust from what was left of my favorite reel – and coldly suggest tossing it in the pile headed for the dumpster, never heeding my pleas of, “But they make kits so you can fix that kind of thing. . . ”

And my wife has not been any more sympathetic. She will narrow her eyes and say things like, “So exactly when do you figure you’re going to need this cracked goalie stick, considering that you’ve never played so much as one minute of goalie in your life?”

And so I’ve been watching helplessly as some of my favorite possessions – in a very real sense my prime poo – have gone into the garbage bags that would bear them out of my life. Last night I woke up in a cold sweat, dreaming about the discarded paper bag of leftover screws and washers I had been saving since the early ’80s when I first assembled the late, great gas grill, Carl.

Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth, wipe away a tear and let go.