O P I N I O N

TIMELY WRITER

by John Angelo

My wife Lorrie and I are ham-and-egger homeowners. We’re approaching 30 years of cohabitation and things work best for us with a strict division of labor. I do the dishes, the garbage and the leaf blower witness relocation plan. She does all the rest. I used to cook but it was a dagger to my cold cold heart when my wife confessed to stopping at Wendy’s on the way home when it was my night to cook so that she wouldn’t have to endure scallops with barbeque sauce or Basmati rice with only a guess on my part as to the amount of water needed.

Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Dave Barry penned a book in the 1980s titled Homes and Other Black Holes: The Happy Homeowner’s Guide to Ritual Closing Ceremonies, Newton’s First Law of Furniture Buying, the Lethal Chemicals Man, and Other Perils of the American Dream. The cover depicts a homeowner dumping a wheelbarrow full of money into a demolished foundation. That about covers it.

Lorrie is a Realtor (imagine there’s a trademark sign above the second “r”). My real estate experience is limited to reading New Hampshire Realtor, Architectural Digest and the Mar-a-Lago Caddyshack at breakfast after studying  the backs of all available cereal boxes. I refer to the latter magazine as the Mars-‘n’-Legos Caddyshack. And please don’t give Elon Musk any more toys to play with.

Our division of labor reached a crisis stage two weeks ago when Lorrie set out to get our kitchen demolished, I mean remodeled. As a Realtor she knows all kinds of manly men wearing tool belts. She’s on a first-name basis with Steve (explosives), Dennis (critter identification), Joey (electrical outlets and inlets), and Kevin (cabinets and cubby holes).

I am introduced to them at ungodly hours such as 11 a.m. I am not allowed to converse, which is fine with me as I can only come up with one question: “When will you guys be done?” I then retreat back upstairs to handicap the day’s thoroughbred feature at Churchill Downs or to watch the Sunday youtube highlights of the New York Jets and whoever they got creamed by.

You may be wondering, dear reader, why did our kitchen needed to be remodeled. Lorrie has long insisted that we have a “baby refrigerator” and that she will be happy once we get a new standard-sized model that doesn’t jettison ice cubes every time the freezer door is opened. I hear her but my fear is that deeper shelving will only result in more things getting lost in the murky recesses of the fridge.

So far the new and shiny wood floor has been put in.  It has a golden glow that our dog Xena: Warrior Princess slips on while licking the polyester finish in an attempt to reach the now deceased 1950 lime green linoleum.

I have been allowed to peruse the Benjamin Moore paint sample book, a flippy tome that exceeds the length of Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again. A single tear of sorrow slides down my face as I realize that here too I was given the book solely for amusement.  I had narrowed my paint selections down to White Dove, Dove Wing, Baby Fawn, Salmon Mousse and Midnight Hour (Wilson Pickett Paints, a subsidiary of Benjamin Moore).  I kid you not, and I never kid. These are real paint colors that even Martha Stewart or Snoop Dog would have trouble living with. My color choices were immediately discontinued.

You may have read about the 2008 sub-prime fiasco in News of the Weird. Mortgages were approved then as long as you could come up with a down payment of  $6.75 in quarters found by turning your recliner upside down and shaking it vigorously. I’m not making this up: A California landscaper making $12 an hour was approved  for a mortgage on a $1.7 million house. As Lorrie likes to say:” There are three kinds of people when it comes  to math. Those who like it and those who don’t.”

Things are not the same today, I hear every mother say. To qualify for a mortgage now on your typical $3.4 million starter home, you’re expected to write a check for the number arrived at by multiplying the Dow Jones Industrial Average by the number of votes in the Electoral College and multiplying again by the combined jersey numbers of Red Sox left fielders Ted Williams (9), Carl Yaz (8) and Jim Rice (14). This typically works out to $5.6 million and the check better clear.

Lorrie and I once went furniture shopping. I won’t name the store but it was Bob’s Discount Furniture. I was drawn to a glass-topped living room table with the glass resting on four sawed-off Buddha heads.

“It’s a no-no to mess with Buddha’s head,” I explained. “His enlightenment was attained through concentration. Lopping off the top of his head is a spiritual lobotomy in Buddhist circles.”

When I could see that my layman’s info was going nowhere, I said, “It’s the equivalent of a portrait of Jesus with a blacked-out tooth and sunglasses.”

To the store’s credit the table was gone within the week. No doubt the home office designer was sent on a 7-day silent retreat high in the Himalayas.

I want Fenway Park’s Green Monster painted Crispy Romaine. Lorrie insists on a pinkish Sweet Caroline. As Bill Murray opined in What About Bob?  to therapist Leo Marvin, played by Richard Dreyfus: “There are two kinds of people in the world. Those who like Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline, and those who don’t.”

Even in the sanctity of sports I am a foot soldier to Lorrie’s admiralship. We don’t own a television so much of her understanding of current professional sports comes through my extended and boring mansplaining.

“The foul pole should be renamed the fair pole,” she insists. “If the ball hits the pole, it’s a fair ball, right?”

I can’t argue with that.

She continued: “And shouldn’t it be the right baseman instead of the first baseman? The man standing on the grass is called the right fielder. Don’t even get me started on the third baseman and the left fielder. If third base is called the hot corner, shouldn’t the left fielder be playing the warm corner?”

When she came up with the nickname Dust Bunny for the Red Sox player Dustin Pedroia, whose jersey was always dirty, a little voice in the back of my head said, “You know nothing, nothing at all.”

We’ll be guests this Thanksgiving which means I won’t have to do the dishes. I’ve already put in my dessert request for blueberry Jello (trademark noted). I want to be ahead of the curve when they paint Pesky’s Pole Indigo Batik.

One of the astute workmen gave me a ball peen hammer on day 44 of the renovation and led me to a dark corner of the basement, handing me a board circa 1950 with an impressive collection of bent and jagged nails in it.

His Japanese advice was simple: “The protruding nail gets hammered.”

Fingers don’t count. A painful tear slides down my cheek.

You can swap remodeling stories with John Angelo at timelywriter@hotmail.com

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