Retired Guy Battles Maintenance Challenges. Hey, at Least He’s Busy.

Scout wondering where her old pad went to in the RV. We’ll put it back before our next trip. Here I am, swilling coffee to stay awake for the long haul.

Road trips are fun but it’s good to be back home.

I am recovering from hernia surgery and, being a fairly tough old specimen, doing well. Same as when I’d had the shoulder operation. Both surgeries were made necessary by overstrain at Safeway. Tell me again why I’m romanticizing that last-ever job of mine? It’s a job for a young guy, that’s for sure.

I healed, that’s the main thing.

And weird thing is, as the hum of silence surrounded retired little me and my slumbering tome of Sherlock Holmes tales, I told myself I might go back to Safeway if I got bored enough.

But that hasn’t happened yet.

God sent me a reason to stay retired. With all the maintenance challenges that have cropped up, I don’t have time for anything else. I’ve had to put the book down and fix my creaky old RV and my bizarrely misbehaving hot tub.

Overcoming deficits is part of life.

On the trip, a month from the operation, I proved fit enough for an eight-mile hike at Lake Mead. We traversed scenic desert all the way to Hoover Dam and back. Scout traipsed along. I barely felt the hernia scar’s tug and burn. My nurse friend Russell tells me it’s the inside stitches dissolving into my own tissue. I got some of that CBD oil everybody’s talking about and rubbed it in. I can’t tell if I don’t hurt now because of that or because I’m about healed anyway.

As well as hike, Barb and I saw friends, veteran campers who’d invited us along. And, key thing for me, we ate good, my wife being an expert cook inside our commodious 2009 Ford Ranger Tioga Class C Fleetwood Design E450 motorhome. (Just had to say all that. Makes me feel manly.) I also fressed, as I regard such trips as an opportunity to bring along chaserai like Entenmann’s Glazed Buttermilk Donuts and all manner of greasy flavored potato chips. (Sorry, no Yiddish translations included in this blog post.)

It was freezing out when we hiked Valley of Fire State Park, but invigorating.

The jaunt was marred by a water system freakout which turned out to be a disconnected overflow valve. When Barb turned on the water pump the place flooded. But when I saw a lake of water under the rig, on the way back from an Indian reservation gas station, I deduced a hole in the tank. So we didn’t use water from the tank. We peed in our little airplane-style commode and flushed, pouring water in afterward. We used nice outhouses for our other bodily needs. We washed dishes old style, pouring water from gallon jugs into the stopped sink in the RV. We had lucky campsites. The spigots to refill the jugs were right outside our door both at Lake Mead and Valley of Fire, which is over the Arizona border into Nevada.

The weather was blustery and cold, but we didn’t care. The motorhome was warm and accommodating.

We spent much of our time wondering how much Scout was enjoying herself. She didn’t ride on top of the bed as I thought she might. There, she can gaze out the window at the road going by, sinking into slumber as I push my ten cylinders over the Kerouackian road. No, she spent her travel time negotiating herself onto an old pillow Barb had put between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat. We’re going to put that big old beat-up dog pad back behind the driver’s seat, like it was before.

We let her sleep with us. The first two nights I slept blissfully. Didn’t even have cramped legs from the dog hogging space. Next two nights I had to get up to pee and got back to find her slung across my warm pillow. I tried to cajole her to move. She grunted. Finally, I wrestled her from her usurped position. I thought she might be mad, but she was like, “Okay, now I’m here.” And fell right back asleep. We all slept well, that back window cracked for cool night air.

I got home and, with the help of Blue Compass RV down Route 69, got to the bottom of the water problem as well as a thermostat issue in the refrigerator. Didn’t even run me much money. Both problems wound up being things that could have happened to anybody.

But then I had to grapple with a fucked-up hot tub. Had to have a guy out; almost $900 on my Visa. I’d flubbed the maintenance. Learned hard truths about how to clean the thing, keep the water right. Had to buy and install three new water filters, hose in new water, test chemical levels, add calcium concentrate. All was right again. I had clean clear water, a far cry from the green, turbid sludge my negligence had produced. I got in and enjoyed a hard-won victory in the pristine jetstream, temperature having climbed back up to a muscle-easing 104.

But a few evenings later I got into my swim trunks, bathrobe, and flipflops, expecting another great soak, and got to the tub to find the water level had dropped a couple feet, waterjet hose shooting over the sunken waterline. I squatted down and saw that the two drain holes at the bottom of the shell were sealed shut. What the …? If he was still alive I’d have called Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for a clue.

My friend Phil came over and scratched his own head. Nor did he gainsay my plan to just refill and pray. He did have me recheck chemical levels; we were looking a little cloudy again. I dipped the test strip in to find I was high on pH and calcium hardness. I added two caps of pH decreaser, put a calcium leaching pillow in there.

It worked. And the water level stayed up.

I don’t have to know why it worked to be happy about it.

Come to think of it, that’s a pretty good rule for my life. The wisdom of age seems to boil down to various iterations of, “You’re not as smart as you thought you were.” I seem to get by on grit and patience more than anything.

Back home. Taking a break from reading, I gaze at my little friend. I look old here … like Holling Vincoeur in Northern Exposure. Love those reruns on Prime.

Art Has Drawn Me in Again

I took art for five years in middle and high school, and people who bob up from my past remind me of this. One friend, whom I plan to see in Cleveland in June, became a public relations executive. He’s fond of telling me it’s odd someone remembered for his art ability should have become a writer.

“When they came through the door,” he’d say of the hiring ritual at his firm, “we’d ask them, ‘Words or pictures?’ It was never both.”

I wonder, having signed up for and found myself engrossed in a drawing class at the local community college, and having reconnected with the sense of fulfillment which doing art confers, whether “I’m a writer” was the way to go.

Did I go that way because everybody else in my family was a writer? My father was a writer. My older sister was a writer. My younger brother was a writer. Was I conforming? I suppose if my dad had shown me how to fix cars I might have become a mechanic. But Dad was different. He walked around the house declaiming the virtues of strong verbs.

Being a writer might seem a mistake, something I backed into, viewed coldly now. This very blog represents a capitulation of sorts. I don’t earn dime one from it. Is it foolish, a waste of time, to spend energy on an enterprise that does not make money?

Actually, I did do a little art after high school. I must have been in my thirties when, working from a photo I took in Cleveland’s old Hungarian neighborhood, on Buckeye Road, I worked up this acrylic painting. I always liked the feel of that grey cinderblock wall and the black Courvoisier ad.

I made a little dough as a journalist in the eighties, but never much. Wrote two angsty novels that got read by New York publishing bigshots. No cigar. A drug problem exploded, casting toxic waste all over everything, including the ongoing farce of calling myself a writer. I became a high school English teacher. Which was worse. Furthermore, I could not stop writing. Old habits are hard to break. I had nothing better to do with my free time, no better way to vent off psychic energy accumulated over a misspent life. All that residual anger and confusion found a place. A hole to be shoveled into.

I still write. I like doing this blog for the very absence of commercial target. I do it for myself. For amusement, you might say.

I talked about this in AA recently. Told my home group, a discussion meeting, that I plumbed no deep meanings in my bloggings, had discovered no higher aim than that something I wrote might be funny. It’s one of those deals where you become more interesting the more you squeeze the fat out of your intention. The less you make of the thing, not the more. This was in response to a reading from the Daily Reflections about not taking yourself so seriously. That is my cardinal sin, as many have reminded me. “We are not a glum lot” is a sentiment I need to revisit whenever I can.

The teacher for Drawing 1 at Yavapai College had us take an object we knew well and render it in charcoal.

Could I have sold art? I suppose. Short of that, you can at least put a frame around your drawing or painting and put it up in your house.

Exercise in one-point perspective: the inside of my motorhome

Time has flown by as I meet the challenge of sitting and doing art again after all these years lying fallow. It’s been a kind of revival for me.

And so my retirement goes apace, planned and productive. The big clan reunion in Ohio incubates toward its June hatching, the yellow highlighter creeping across the highways in my huge Rand McNally. I recovered like a champ from hernia surgery and am hiking the poor dog like some Olympic trainer.

And I forget all else in the effort to render a cast shadow or highlight on whatever mundane object I’ve eked out with pencil or charcoal, finding its essence in the work of determining shape and contour.

Hail the happy draftsman! He conquers the world with his drawing tool.