Short Cuts

 Dedicated to the vets at Pearl Harbor

                                                                                     

Short cuts to make the opening kickoff....

       Whenever I passed it, I could hear my bay window call, “Hey, bro’, it’s time to get a painter out here.  Look at me. The old paint’s cracking and peeling. The rain’s coming, and I’m going to get soaked, maybe mildew, and, who knows, termites.”

     I’d ignored the plea as long as I could. I mean, from the sidewalk, the bay window looked okay, presentable for public consumption, but up close, unless you were blind, the damage was obvious, shabby and in need of care. Then, I heard, “You better get your ass in gear, dude.”

     “Alright,” I answered, and started calculating, always intellectualizing everything, from home repair to a subject for another novel. For a painter, it’s a small job. Most painters won’t come for one window, not cost effective. A handyman? Like those guys who hang out at Home Depot, holding signs, or calling out, “Trabajo?” One measly, bay window, I thought. I can handle it. I looked over, one more time, at the dried, peeling paint, the bare wood almost exposed. I answered, “Yeah, yeah, stop griping. I’ll do it myself,”

     I thought I could hear something like a groan, then, “You’re a teacher, Ay. What do you know about prepping and painting?”

     I ignored the last comment, except it was true. I hadn’t done work like that in some time. I’m getting spoiled. At my age, I don’t like getting dirty, anymore, or the hassle of it all. Lucky my Chicano, WWII parents didn’t shy away from giving us, kids, chores, from housework to yardwork and everything in between; though, at the time, I guess we thought of it as a form of punishment. There was no allowance, but if we wanted to go someplace, like to the movies or out with friends, my mom would always fork over a half-dollar. For the Saturday movie, that’s all it took, a quarter to enter, a dime for popcorn, a dime for a soda, and a nickel for lollipop.

     My dad wasn’t a dynamo with tools. In the garage, hanging on the wall, he had the basics, a hammer, saw, a couple of screwdrivers, a wrench, and pair of pliers. I still don’t know why they call it a “pair,” since it’s only one set. For minor repairs, which he saw more as an annoyance than a challenge, my dad saved Saturday mornings, after we cut the lawn and pulled weeds. Anything with a motor or engine, forget about it. If the job included something electrically charged or carrying pipes transporting large amounts of water, he might give it a look, but, ultimately, he’d pass and call an expert, usually a friend. We were blue collar people.

     He and his friends, each an expert in some type of skilled trade, bartered for complicated work, his expertise in cement and stucco for theirs in whatever he needed, except for his childhood friend, Georgie Saenz, a true wizard of repair, who had the knack to fix anything you put in front of him, from a broken toaster to a leaky water main and even getting a sputtering 1965 Dodge Charger with a Hemi humming like a kitten.

    Whatever repair my dad attempted, he had me by his side, not as a display of fatherly, son affection but, more, to hand him whatever tools he might need, especially if he was up on a ladder. Of course, I’d always rather be doing something else, like hanging with my friends. What I did like about helping my dad was he didn’t waste time. He took short cuts, if he could. He was like in-and-out fast, vamonos, let’s go. It wasn’t that he didn’t’ do the job right, but he was far from a perfectionist. He was more like, “Hell, it works (or looks) better than it did before we started.”

     The reason he started early Saturdays, and took short cuts, was, mainly, I think, because he wanted to be in his chair, in front of the television, for the 1:00 P.M. kickoff, usually for UCLA during football season, and the opening tipoff in basketball season, a real college sports enthusiast -- the pros, not so much. Sunday, to him, was the Lord’s Day, even if he hardly ever attended mass. He made sure we did. He’d dress nicely, casual, and wait to see which friends or relatives would drop by for a visit.

     I wasn’t an expert at this stuff, by any means, but, thanks to my parents, I learned to work and do certain repairs. Over the years, especially in those early days when paying someone to do small repairs was out of the question, I’d improved my skills, though to be honest, after I graduated college, I’d prefer to pay someone else do them, like Jose, my gardener, who is in and out in about fifteen to twenty-minutes, what they call, “mow, blow, and go,” all for $75 a month.

     I could take care of my own yard, but, for me, time has become a commodity, which I value tremendously, especially as I come to realize I have less and less of it in my future, so I prefer to let Jose do it. Besides, I paid my dues, before college, years of landscape-gardening, shlepping tools under the blazing sun across hillsides from Brentwood to Hollywood. Those memories stayed with me, a form of minor PTSD.

                                                                                     

One more coat of paint and ready for rain

     So, there I was, attending to my bay window, up close, realizing how much I had neglected it. So, I got to it, like my dad had taught me, starting with the putty knife, scraping loose dry paint from the wood. Then came the electric sander, grinding away the years of accumulated coats of paint, stubbornly sticking to the sill and window edges. In the old days, we did it with sandpaper wrapped around a block of 2 x 4. As the sander roared, I could feel the old bay window rattle, paint chips and wood dust flying everywhere. There were more layers of old paint than I remembered, past homeowners, probably dead now, their handiwork under attack by my sander.

     I couldn’t remove all the layers of paint, I mean, I could, but it would take longer, and the mighty Black 'n Decker might chip away at the wood and cause gouging and splintering, an entirely new problem, which I didn’t need.

     As I worked, goggles, face mask, and old clothes covered in dried paint and wood soot, I noticed a hard crust begin to crumble and drop onto the sill. I turned off the sander, took a screwdriver, and tapped at the old glazing. It dropped onto the sill in chunks, exposing the edges of glass. The aggressive sander had loosened the old glazing. “See what you did now, smart ass,” the bay window scolded, “probably because you’re rushing.” The words and voice sounded familiar, like my dad’s.

     Would I need a window "guy" to re-glaze, to get it right, to be precise? I didn’t have time. No window guy would come out for such a small job, anyway. Should I call a friend. Hell no, too macho, my conscience saying, "You can’t tell a friend you don’t know how to glaze a window." I mean, I knew I could do it, not as nicely as the “guy,” but good enough.

     I remembered, once, when my dad had to change a broken window in our bedroom. My brothers and I had been horsing around and thrown a tennis ball through it. I'd done it before, so I could do it again, but it was scary, just the idea of exposing the entire glass pane to the elements. I got to it, again, scraping off all the old glazing, hoping I’d only have to re-glaze one pane. The other three looked okay. As I worked, I could see my dad, making me, a kid, watch, as he scraped away all the old glazing, removing the broken glass, measuring the empty space, going to the hardware store to buy a new pane and glazing, coming home, setting it in, just right, and glazing it with a putty knife, smoothing the glaze, so it wasn’t lumpy, and making it straight along the edges. When he finished two sides, he handed me the putty knife, and said, “You finish it.”

     I did, awkwardly, lumpy and a little too crooked along the edges. My dad clasped his big paw over mine to show me how much pressure to put on the putty knife and how to angle it to get the slanted edge, wiping excess smudges off the glass with a wet cloth. Then, he had me do it again, alone, an Independent Studies, of sorts, not perfect but better. Since that time, whenever I had to change or re-glaze a window, I’d panic, at first, then remember myself, at ten-years of age, a kid, and my dad teaching me how to do it. 

    I had to let the glaze dry for a couple of days, so, in the meantime. I spread putty, on the windowsill, in places where the old paint and the wood didn’t meet evenly. The house is seventy years old, a lot of uneven places, and splintered wood. Miraculously, today’s putty dries in a few hours, like the paint, which I applied with a brush, old school, no electric spray gun, again, not with the perfection of a professional but with the skill of a novice, enough to make it look good and protect it from the coming rain.

     When I finished, I put everything back in its place, somewhat proud, even with the slight imperfections, unnoticeable to the eyes of the casual pedestrians walking past on the sidewalk.

     Some memories of our childhoods come around when we least expect them, and sometimes they are more than just images. They return as life lessons, or like I heard the bay window say, in a voice much like my father’s, “Good job. That’s how you do it. Now, let’s get in there for the kickoff.”