If you asked me to design the perfect week, it would look a lot like this one. The World Series is on, and the Dodgers are not in it, which I mention only because I’m an SF Giants fan and I take great joy in that. My Forty Niners are 6-1 and nearly halfway through what’s looking to be a great season. The NBA has started, too, and I’ll just say the Warriors are also playing basketball.
Finally here in California, where fall is mostly a rumor, there’s a crisp to the morning air. It’s not quite heavy sweater weather, but it’s fuzzy sock weather, and I’ll take it.
For me, it’s writing weather. I had the whole picture in my head: laptop on my lap, socks on, a cup of tea or a Diet Coke within reach, and a game playing in the background. I’d draft between innings or revise at halftime. For once, I’d have a cozy fall routine instead of the kind where I lock myself in my office and stare at my monitor for hours on end, willing the words to write themselves.
Then my husband, David, decided to clean out the garage.
To be fair, it’s been a long time coming since his retirement. Forty-five years of work lives out there: tools, hard hats, Makita batteries, and stacks of saw blades. He’s decided this is the season it all gets sorted, and somewhere along the way I became his designated laborer. I find this strange given that my main contribution to any heavy-lifting or building project is usually unasked for supervising. I don’t get a schedule in this new job and that gets drives my organized brain crazy. I’ll finally land the sentence I’ve been working on for twenty minutes, and then I hear, “Doe!” from the other side of the house in a tone that means labor is needed right freakin’ now.
So my cozy writing days have actually gone like this: draft a paragraph, then move a box to the side of the house, then draft half a paragraph, then hold one end of something heavy (to me anyway) while he figures out where the other end goes. I come back to find the tea cold or the ice melted, the inning over, and no clue of what I meant to write next.
Last Sunday, he handed me a small box of steel rail pieces from his Van Ness job, which weighed as much as I do, and asked if he should keep it. I didn’t answer right away. Our garage holds forty-five years of his memories and I didn’t think I should have a say. He told me the rail had been under Van Ness Avenue since 1914. It was laid for streetcars carrying people to a world’s fair. His company spent seven years on that job when it was supposed to take three. I’m sure he remembered the commute, the late nights, the double shifts, and the one stretch of twenty-three days when he barely made it home. I know a little about a project that takes longer than anyone planned. I worked ten years on my one book, and a lot of that time it wasn’t spent writing. It was deciding what stayed.
Tonight there’s another game on. The garage door is closed, at least for now. I’ve got my fuzzy socks on, a Diet Coke, and I’m going to write until I hear “Doe!” from the garage, which if history is any guide, will be somewhere around the bottom of the third.
P.S. He kept a couple of the rail pieces and set aside a few as gifts. I would have kept them too.
Photo: Grok Imagine