Turmoil catapults us into harmony, whether we’re acting as an individual or a nation. Really, when we’re disillusioned or confused, isn’t improvement the next step?
I don’t know, either.
Last Saturday I had quality garage time with two guys who squeaked around on old office chairs that roll really well on a cement floor. One of them is 80, the other 73. The chairs are almost that old.
They were so distraught at the price of lumber going up due to “The Covoid,” you’d have thought they were talking about the family fortune being in peril – all because an 8 ft. long 2×4 costs one-third more than it did last Christmas.
I wanted to shudder in solidarity about the end of life as we know it, but I’m not quite sure how one shudders. It’s not like how one shivers, but it’s close, right?
The boys, who like being called menfolk, were cheerless because they couldn’t go to the Canadian fishing cabin this year even though the Canadian property taxes to own a Canadian fishing cabin still had to be paid. But Canadians won’t let Americans into their country, even ones who would happily quarantine in a fishing cabin.
So, since a man’s garage is his sanctuary, a surrogate weekend afternoon vacation was spent in a garage in Busch. I was lucky to get invited in for a can of Rolling Rock and sterling conversation that did not include politics. Well, other than, “This election is like football – both sides are afraid the other will win.”
I finished a second beer, thanked the host and meant it, but wanted to go home and pull weeds or build a garage.
As Irish luck would have it, I instead chanced into a friend who said when she woke up last Thursday, she saw a rooster in her yard. A full grown Araucana with the spurs to prove it.
She called her neighbor with chickens and said, “I have your rooster,” and he said, “I don’t have any roosters.”
She let her adopted rooster sleep in the garage because to her, a garage is a garage. It holds stuff and you don’t ever sit in it and drink beer and roll around on second-hand office furniture.
The rooster found a horizontal bar in her garage, six feet off the ground, and is on it from dusk to dawn.
Last Saturday, around twilight, my friend was on the phone with a tech rep trying to fix a meteorologically caused glitch. They had talked for 40 minutes when she said, “Hold on, there’s a fox in my yard and it’s after my rooster.” She put her phone down, picked up her gun and got the fox away from the rooster.
She picked up her phone. “Are you still there?”
“Yes! What happened? Did you shoot a fox? How’s your rooster? You have a rooster? In your yard? At your house? Are you okay?”
She looked out her window.
“Oh! An eagle just flashed into the water right by the bridge and caught a fish, a bass, and carried it away.”
And they spent another half-hour talking, just not about tech stress.
These garages are a mile from each other by river, but if you stay on the road it’s five miles. These people were thousands of miles from each other but talking in real time.
Don’t ever sell your garage.