Home improvement

Posted on by Michael Dickson

One big advantage to being a homeowner, as opposed to a renter, is that you can do anything you want. I like that.

I’ve only owned two homes in my life. The first was in Houston, which my last wife and I bought in 1986 for what now seems a pittance — $86,000 — and she lives there to this very day.

And it’s worth a whale of a lot more these days.

Getting work done on your home above the Rio Bravo often is very expensive for even the smallest of things. In Mexico, work — and most everything else — is far cheaper. I surely like that.

A couple of weeks ago, I hired my go-to guy to rip out the plants and weeds from a section of the yard I’ve long referred to as the Willy-Nilly Zone because things grew there willy-nilly.

Here he’s doing that.

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Behold, a sea of soil, greenery gone:

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And the cement is poured:

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And Miguel starts to lay the brick surface. That’s his name, Miguel, and he’s an artist of construction:

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And now it’s done!

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The Willy-Nilly Zone has lost its willy. The entire thing, labor and materials, cost the peso equivalence of about $1,500 (U.S. bucks).*

Next up for home renovation will, I hope, start in a week or two. Waterproofing the roof of the kitchen/dining room, painting the service patio (two floors) and redirecting rain runoff from the second-floor roof directly to the street. It currently falls onto our property.

Always fun.

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*My sister who lives in California paid about 2.5 times that amount last week for two root canals and crowns.

Living loonily

Posted on by Michael Dickson

I am reading, for the second time, the unique and wonderful novel A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. The setting is New Orleans which, though I lived there just 18 years, I consider my home town to this day.

They were important, formative years. I arrived just after I turned 20 and I departed about when I hit 40. In between I spent 16 months in San Juan, Puerto Rico, but that was just a diversion.

In New Orleans I met, married and divorced my first wife and spawned my daughter, not necessarily in that order. Later I met the woman who would become my second wife. My track record with Gringa spouses is dreadful.

My first father-in-law was an often-violent alcoholic carpenter. My second was an often-commited schizophrenic. Many years and children later, they finally made him placid via medication.

The first was a Louisiana sort. The second was from St. Louis, or somewhere around there. A Confederacy of Dunces‘ lead character, Ignatius J. Reilly, lived on Constantinople Street with his mother in a house of disarray, which got me to thinking about my first in-laws.

They lived in a shack in Kenner, a small municipality on the outskirts of the New Orleans area. The carpenter built the house himself in the woods and years later, Kenner grew up around that shack.

Picture this: A small, wooden house sitting on brick pilings. You step into the front door and see an engine block on the living room floor. Other junk litters the area. Off to the right is the kitchen where years of grease hang like small stalactites from the ceiling.

The father-in-law, Bud, who was sober more often than not, thank God, would be sitting at the formica table, drinking chicory coffee, smiling and talking. His artworks, on poster paper, were tacked to the wall. He was very talented.

The mother-in-law, Violet, would be standing by the old stove, cooking and chain-smoking Picayune cigarettes. Picayune packs hilariously proclaimed themselves Extra Mild. Those cigarettes would choke a mule if only mules had the habit.

There were two small bedrooms in the back. I rarely set foot there, but a hallway led to the sole bathroom on the left. This is where it gets goofy. Due to a rotted hole in the floor, you could sit on the porcelain throne and look between your legs to the ground beneath the shack.

I often expected to fall through, but I never did.

There were dogs outside, lots of dogs, because they were rednecks.

In the unkempt yard sat an old DeSoto. I’m guessing the make and year, probably about a 1948.

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This looks about right.

I recall just one ride, a night when Bud drove us to a pizza parlor. The seat springs were shot and so were the shock absorbers. We undulated down the street like a ship at sea.

Ignatius J. Reilly would have looked all right in that car.

I recommend the novel to you. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981 and had been published posthoumously after the author commited suicide at 31.

The pet thief

Posted on by Michael Dickson
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I have two tales to relate today. One deals with pet thievery and the other deals obliquely with pets, baby chicks to be specific, the sort you get on Easter Morning, supposedly if Jesus loves you or the Easter Bunny loves you. I’m not sure which.

I’ll reveal right off the bat that the pet thief was my father who was also the cause of what I’ll call The Baby Chick Capers. Let’s start with that horrible thing.

After the old man, who was hardly old at the time, returned from serving as a secretary — yes, that’s right — in Korea at the tail of World War Two, our family went to live on a farm in southwest Georgia. It was my maternal grandparents’ place, all 500 acres of it.

It’s also correct that he was stationed in Korea during World War Two, not the Korean War, which muddled along without him a few years later.

Dear Old Dad was publishing short stories in the late 1940s in what were known as pulp magazines, mostly mysteries and crimes. To supplement this income, he turned to chicken farming, selling both eggs and chickens for broiling and frying.

He bought crates of baby chicks to raise and, as you might imagine, some were in less than prime physical condition. Those he gifted to me. I was 4 or 5 years old at the time. They were doomed little chicks though I was unaware on receiving a few as pets.

I kept them in a shoebox, fed them and cared for them, loved them, but none lasted long. They always died.

Let’s jump ahead about five years. We were living in Jacksonville, Florida. Dear Old Dad worked on the newspaper in the evenings. After getting off work, he and a few coworkers would retire to someone’s home, play poker and booze it up.

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Once he brought home a little doggy, a black cocker spaniel, that he’d apparently won in a poker game. My sister and I had always been told no when we asked for a dog, so that was a surprise.

I was so happy, and I loved that dog. But within a month, he ran away. I remember that dreary night. My parents drove around the neighborhood hunting the little guy — whistle, whistle — but no luck. We never saw him again. I cried.

About 45 years later, when I lived in Houston, for some reason I do not recall, a light bulb flipped on over my head. The cocker did not run away. Dear Old Dad, sobered up, dumped him.

Dad was dead by then, so I phoned my mother who confessed.

My baby chicks died, and my doggy “ran away.”

I’ve never had a pet since, and for years I drank too much.

The island haircut

Posted on by Michael Dickson
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Watching for pirates or maybe just cruise ships.

I’ll hit 81 in a couple of weeks. As one ages, one tends to focus on memories because the road ahead is short, ending at the Dead End sign.

So here’s one of those memories.

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I lived in a penthouse apartment in San Juan, Puerto Rico, for a spell in the early 1970s. The photo above was taken as I stood on my rooftop patio. Note the cigarette, one of many vices I once embraced but do not anymore. I am now unflawed, perfect.

Note also the hair and beard. One day, I decided to get a haircut, the only one I got in 18 months, but not in San Juan but in the nearby U.S. Virgin Islands where English was spoken. I speak Spanish now, but I did not back then.

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I booked a flight on a Grumman Goose seaplane for the relatively brief trip from Puerto Rico. The Goose only seats about ten people, but it was not full on my flight, plus the copilot position was empty. I asked the pilot if I could sit next to him. He said yes, and off we buzzed to Charlotte Amalie, the capital city.

I walked about a bit. I found a barber shop and got my trim. I don’t remember it at all. I flew back to San Juan on the same plane. What I recall most vividly was that the Goose flew very low, not far above the waves. It was fun, one of my better memories now that memories have grown in significance.