August 20, 2012

All of us spend some of our lives doing things we don’t enjoy and aren’t very good at. The less time we spend doing such things, the happier we are. You could telegraph your life’s discontent by blacking out squares on a calendar, dot dot dash, for tasks done joylessly and badly.

This is not an unqualified endorsement of the fun and easy. Chips and salsa are easier and more fun than boneless chicken breast, mashed potatoes and canned peas, but you could live on the latter, though doing so might make you wish you were dead. And there are jobs that look like work that we do for fun.

I had my friend Zach over earlier this summer to help swap out the battery cables on my old car. This involved a lot of time on the ground trying to remove the old positive cable from the starter, which is under the engine, behind an exhaust manifold, and above a ball joint that adds grease to all the rust you shake loose onto your face. Also, the work was done in my sloping, sun-broiled driveway on the only day we were both free, when it happened to hit 95 degrees.

After hours of working, swearing and laughing, we were disgusting, delirious and triumphant. The frozen pizza afterwards tasted like steak and I think of our good times every crank of the starter.

***

There have not been many moments like that in the past month. My family and I have been moving to a new house, one with a two-car garage and a flat shady driveway, a basketball hoop and a good school system. This is entirely a positive development, a step we are fortunate to make, but knowing that does not erase the nasty-gram sent by my contentment calendar. Moving is a decathlon of unpleasant tasks at which, forgive me, I suck. The frozen pizza has tasted like crap and when I’ve given in to the urge for chips and salsa, or donuts and vodka, my stomach’s reminded me to miss normal mealtime unhappiness.

A period of difficult transition teaches us to cherish “ordinary time.” I like that term, from the Catholic calendar, which assures us that all those saint’s days and feasts and epiphanies can’t last, no more than the stations of the cross can ever fail to reach resurrection. Ordinary time is a proportioning tool, a backdrop with hashmarks, an arena for feats of median and equilibrium. Without ordinary time, acute but temporary moments of pain or pleasure would seem permanent. Something in us knows that’s impossible, but we need a place to expect sunrises and clean socks, to remind us of that.

In ordinary time, our days relay us from memory to expectation, from last night to this night at the same table. That swinging sensation through the days, the rock and sway of routine, keeps our direction steady even as events try to kick us sideways. At least, it does until we dismantle home and try to conjure up a new one, in a different building entirely.

***

As may be obvious from my struggles with the battery cables, I’m not really much of a mechanic, but I enjoy trying to be better at it. I like seeing my dashboard clock keep correct time for the first time in years and thinking, “That was me.” And after we finished the job and ate pizza, I showered and rested and read and made dinner where I had a thousand Sundays before. I slept knowing that on Monday, I would be back here at my preferred carrel, at this sturdy little keyboard with my thoughts and sore back, as content as I can make myself be.

Moving takes away the means for making this contentment. One moment I am swinging through my routine, chains pulled tight toes up and a whoosh through my ears; then the chains let go and I am just falling, gravity mocking muscle without a sound.

That I know I’ll soon get a new home doesn’t stop the dismantling of an old one from feeling like death. For example, I am not good at packing books and I don’t enjoy trying to get better at it. I make the boxes too heavy until I give up keeping certain books together as friends, and just forget that I know what they mean to each other. They are solid rectangular prisms and I need to mix heavy ones with light. Then the task is complete, and my matchmaking is gone completely to hell, and I’m supposed to feel good about my empty shelves and head?

***

Movers are professionals, with strong backs and healthy attitudes, trained to put their customers at ease as they handle all our stuff. I am not a mover. I’m also not a lawyer, banker, real estate speculator, truck driver, carpenter, electrician, travel agent or therapist, but I’ve had to fake it for the past month. I guess I’ve honed some skills. Of course, by the time I need to use them again I’ll be rusty, so the relative proficiency I’ve developed in putting up bi-fold closet door tracks will vanish by the time I have to do it again, if ever.

My wife is better at logistics than I am. I have been both grateful for her guidance and determined to carry my weight as best I can. So I am dogged about finishing my tasks, even the ones that make me so crazy and surly that she offers to take over. No, you shouldn’t have to do that, baby, I say in some way. I imagine she then thinks, no, I shouldn’t, but I’ll do it if it makes you less of a basket case, because I have enough other problems to manage.

To forestall such exchanges, I have tried to manage my attitude. I don’t whine about the tasks as I’m doing them, even if I screw them up and have to do them over. I will gripe after the fact about the heat, but not about my knees as they crack audibly, saving my voice the trouble. And I don’t let my frustration at my failings keep me from appreciating the abilities of others.

A move lets you see all sorts of people doing their jobs well, people who are mostly invisible in ordinary time. I’ve mentioned that I liked the movers we hired, who were fast and efficient and polite to each other. We like our attorney, who has a cheerful way of explaining dense and boring stuff. I liked the chatty plumber, who remembered me because he’d dug my daughter’s phone out of a toilet last year.

***

There were moments this summer when I got away from new and old houses and the portage between them. I brought foil-wrapped burritos to my friend Karin once, and we had lunch on her 3^rd floor porch near Davis Square.

Karin is a former coworker of mine, a farm girl and securities analyst and Peace Corps vet who is blonde and athletic and adventuresome, among other qualities that I don’t have. We got together and I told her about people we both knew, and the new house. She told me about her hundred-mile bicycle race through the Colorado Rockies, about all the sweat and mishaps and the people she’d met. I hear her and envy her discipline and courage, even as I’m reminded to be grateful for my smaller and more certain world. I chose it as deliberately as she’s sought her great airy one, the distant country she shares with me on her flowery porch, a few miles from here.

The next day, after packing and hacking at my home all morning, I drove my old car out to Concord for lunch. I happened to have another burrito, this time on a picnic table by the woods. A persistent pale violet dragonfly kept returning to my table, so I took a picture and sent it to Karin. Two charming burrito dates in a row, lucky me!

I like company, and I like solitude, and like everyone I get frustrated with moments that offer neither. At another picnic table were 4 or 5 people, though I could only pick out one guy’s voice consistently. He was loudly telling a story of what a hilarious scene he’d caused somewhere, by doing what? I couldn’t tell. Maybe he’d been bragging about some other scene he’d caused? His companions were taking turns cackling just as loudly at everything he said. They were too loud to ignore and not remotely funny, so I resented them for coming between me and my calm purple pal. Neither company nor solitude; I got out of there fast.

September 18

I return to this story with the hoped-for happy ending. After a month in one house, I am once again steady on my swing. I write, I make dinner, I come and go and can find my keys. Yesterday I installed an antique light fixture that was dented, and missing some little parts. I fastidiously fabricated some replacement parts, and fixed the dent with a hammer, confident that I knew what to tweak and what to bang.

The instinctual – but conditioned, and never entirely secure – knowledge of how much force to use, along with the tools to deliver it, is confidence. There is no contentment without it. I unlearn it and misplace my tools, when I move. My son lacked it the first evening we went out to shoot hoops in our new driveway.

Now, there are dads who teach their kids the proper form for five different sports before their fifth birthdays. I’m not one of those dads, and neither my Dad nor I had one, either. If I can hold my own on a field or court it’s because of peer pressure, as in my neighborhood growing up, there was always someone playing something in a road or yard. My kids have grown up in very pleasant places, but without much unorganized game playing.

Sports, for my kids, are something you do at school. I am not lamenting this, as they like school more than I did. My son was delighted by his first day of 6^th grade and has gone on gushing about his teachers and classmates, about Chorus and French, with a confidence I’d already mostly unlearned by his age, except when I was playing unorganized or alone.

When I told him we were going out to shoot hoops, he shrugged, and then missed a lot. He was lunging diagonally as he shot, as his body must have learned to do when he was shorter and weaker. I had to convince him he now had the tools to stay nice and vertical, and make a shot a pretty arc. “No line drives in basketball,” I told him, though that might not be true. Still worked though, as I only said it twice before he said, “I know I know!” and I could see him getting better.

Now he goes out to shoot hoops alone, to kill time and chill out and get better, which I would never have expected in the old house, which was no good for ballplaying. Now I know why we moved.