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(Photo by innocent bystander)

chapter 15

Bricks and Lobsters

If you need a drink, have one before the ceremony. We won’t have any alcohol at the house. We took all the money and blew it on soft-shelled crabs, oysters, and barbeque.

—our wedding invitation

There had been fourteen years between my third and fourth breaks. Fourteen years after the fourth break I was very relieved that nothing untoward seemed to be happening in my head. Barb, who I knew was trouble the minute I saw her, and I decided to get married after five years together. We bought a two-hundred-year-old barn and carriage house with major structural issues and a lot wrong with the rest of it too. More sensible people would have torn it down and started over.

When I was telling a neighbor what he could do with a big maple tree that was dying—make planks out of the trunk, use the smaller branches for firewood and the scraps for kindling, plus the sawdust could be mixed with compost and used to grow mushrooms—my wife said I sounded like a male version of Martha Stewart.

It’s more about Doctor Zhivago. If I’m careful to not waste things, especially things that have to do with heat and staying warm, I’ll never have to go out in a blizzard and come home with a few pathetic pieces of pine ripped out of a fence.

Trash costs three dollars a barrel to remove. All the landfills are closed, and you can’t get rid of a pickup-truck-load of brush for less than $150.

When Omar Sharif went out into the freezing Russian winter to search for fuel to keep his sickly, starving wife and child from freezing to death, he came back with three ¾-inch boards of plain pine, the combined caloric content of which was probably less than what he wasted opening and closing the door. Taking into account the high ceilings and inefficient stove, it probably wasn’t a net gain.

But it wasn’t nothing. He couldn’t have known that those boards were what he was going to find. At least he came back with something, but if he had come back with three or four dry oak logs and had an airtight stove, it would have been a whole different story. It was really just a plot device, a way for him to meet his brother, Alec Guinness.

I don’t want to throw away building scraps and then need kindling and not have any.

I’ve had people of questionable immigration status tell me in broken English that el doctor shouldn’t be burning building scraps for heat.

“Have you ever seen Doctor Zhivago? El Doctor Zhivago?” They look back blankly.

Bogden was one of my workers who actually had a visa; it was a student visa but a visa nonetheless. Bogden was Polish, the brother of an old girlfriend of Ralph’s. Ralph was a carpenter who agreed to help me out with projects and teach me some carpentry as long as I never called him or yelled at him for not getting things done.

Bogden is worse off than the Spanish-speaking guys because no one learns Polish in high school. The deal with Bogden was that Ralph would bring him to our house in the morning and he would work like a bull for ten dollars an hour until you didn’t have anything more for him to do. You could drop him at any T station and he’d find his way home.

The first few jobs I gave Bogden were ripping out brush and hauling piles of heavy things from one place to another. It was hard to keep up with him. An overgrown tennis court was turned into something you could almost play on. The tools were lined up like punctuation marks whenever a job was done.

I was making a little brick patio in my backyard.

“Wooooden hammer?” Bogden said, watching me bang bricks into place with other bricks, chipping both the banged and the banger brick.

“Yes. A wooden hammer would be nice, but I don’t have one.” I actually did have a wooden hammer, but I didn’t know where it was.

“Oh. Too bad,” said Bogden.

“When you’re done sweeping off the tennis court and getting all the stone dust out of the truck, maybe you would like to try the bricks? Does Bogden know bricks?”

“Try bricks? …Sure.”

When I got back from an afternoon of pediatrics, Ralph had picked up Bogden.