Eschew On This

 

    “Catshit!” Suzanne shrieked from the other room. “Catshit! Catshit! Catshit!” I put my book down and studied the ceiling, pondering the possibilities. We hadn't owned a cat in years, although it's remotely possible one of the dogs had found a bit of almond roca out there somewhere and brought the festering morsel home to thaw out on the rug. I swung my feet over the edge of the bed, marked my place in “The Bully Pulpit ” and prepared to deal with cat shit in the living room. “Yo!...  Don't you touch my Tom Brady!”, she cried out. Ah, I thought, reclining again, opening my book, football....She's watching football.

     Before I ever played real football – football with pads and cups and coaches and jerseys – I wanted, as most boys my age, to be a quarterback. In the Park, after school, I would toss long bomb after long bomb, in spirals so fine and tight they might have shamed Fibonacci. 

   On my first day of High School one of the older boys approached me and said, “You play football, right? You're going out for football, right?” You bet I am, I thought, puffing up the chest a bit, basking in the glow of the older boy's approval. The coach took one look at me and made me a lineman. I never touched a football. The cup hurt. The pads hurt. The helmet hurt. The coaches inflicted additional pain with evident pleasure. Boys I'd never met, hunched up before me with their faces inches from my own, spat out epithets about my mother and sister. After two knee surgeries I renounced football and haven't missed it for a moment.

   Around this time I found myself at a friend's house for the weekend with nothing in the fridge but leftover, grilled meats from a neighborhood cook-out earlier in the week. My friend's parents had gone off in their Camper and left little else behind. We ate steak for breakfast, sausage for lunch and chicken for dinner. This was long before anyone had dreamed up a fad-diet featuring such excess and after three days of corpuscular glut we agreed to experiment with vegetarianism, just to see how long we could go. Coming off that weekend, refraining for a bit was no big deal, although American cuisine in the Woodstock era wasn't what it is today and options beyond spaghetti were limited. Still, sensitivity and awareness were coming into fashion and my renunciation of meat might well have proved the gateway to more effective dating, so I stuck with it. For about twenty years, as it turned out, finally throwing in the towel after a trip to Australia and Indonesia rendered the whole thing fairly pointless; the Australians didn't eat vegetables and the Indonesians would simply respond to queries regarding the contents of any dish based on what they imagined from my inflection that I might want to hear. I resumed the ways of the flesh obliquely, though, coming back via such exotics as Kangaroo kebabs and broiled Crocodile. Back in the States, I renounced vegetarianism and haven't missed it for a moment.

   The other day I was out in the woods cutting up dead-fall hardwood to supplement our dwindling woodpile. 

   After a few hours of stumbling and careening through the forest  humping the heavy sections of frozen maple trunk out to the truck I was pretty exhausted and sat for a bit on the tailgate, catching my breath, massaging my arthritic hands and catching up on a moment of self-reflection; a dangerous enterprise I might have normally renounced. People often think I'm “handy” because I fix things around the house and perform most of the routine, physical chores integral to New England life myself. We've never hired a lawn-boy or gardener or plowman; I mow and weed and dig and shovel. Having gone to Art School, a basic understanding of construction and painting and electricity and plumbing became essential to making any sort of living at all outside that available in the hospitality trades, so I've always done that sort of thing around the house as well. Most of the time I can figure out how to fix the car or the washer or the stove and it's rare indeed to have a service technician at the house. My father was a do-it-yourselfer and I've become one, too. Just the way I was brought up, I guess. Lately, though, buns-up-kneeling on the ice floe leaking through our roof, with a shattered mallet clutched in a frozen, swollen claw, I'm having second thoughts. Perhaps it's time to renounce the do-it-yourself thing and call for help. 

 

 After I've renounced self-employment in favor of a regular job.