Changes keep happening in my life. First there was the voltmeter. Now there's the deck.
But let me explain. I was passionately interested in electronics when I was about six. My dad encouraged me with wires and switches and books and even a tutor. He was a manager at one of the big defense contractors back then and brought home everything including an engineer. So with that background at an early age, the voltmeter he brought home for me became my touch stone to knowing about what was going through the wires.
And, eventually, that voltmeter became one of those things like a power animal in Shamanism or a favorite phrase in writing. I couldn't do without it even though sometimes years would go by without me even seeing it. Just to know that it was there, somewhere buried in my mother's garage or hidden in a box in a storage room across town was reassuring to me. It was not only a way of knowing what is hidden in wires, it became a symbol for what is hidden in my life.
These days, my decrepit deck has finally caught my attention and I don't need a voltmeter to know that it needs some restoring, or remodeling, or flat out replacing.
What's worse is that it isn't even my choice whether it gets repaired or remodeled. It's up to the local building code officials. But there is a kind of sadistic pleasure in knowing that people far and wide might read this story and some of them may just be building officials. I imagine them wondering if I live in their town and if they'll get a chance to pounce on me.
But trifling offices aside, my real question is if I should just repair the deck as it is, or maybe move it a bit this way or that so it actually fits in the right place next to the living room. It will either end up being a nice piece of carpentry with a new purpose and a new position in life, or some new wood in a really stupid place with the rail abruptly ending a couple of inches away from the front window like it does now.
It's hard to describe what that looks like or how it happened in the first place but if you saw it and you weren't the person swinging the hammer and doing the work, you wouldn't have the slightest doubt about just where the new deck is going and it certainly is not where it is right now.
Our living room is the sweet spot of the house and the deck right outside of the windows is an ugly and old thing with rotting wood and sagging boards. From the living room, it's something like a grand view of a dead carcass. Even the turkey vultures don't want it. If that wasn't bad enough, just beyond the reviled rail is a wide open view of a pretty little group of redwood circles of substantial trees.
"We could have a nice little wrought iron round table with two stools and a vase of flowers," my wife said, imagining the new deck. I could just see the deck and it's new rails (and the new French doors in the living room) sparkling in her eyes.
And I'll have to admit that I've been quietly planning a modest extension to the existing deck. The problem is that one corner will have to be clipped off at a diagonal. "It would look like a piece of a crow's nest," I said.
"What would the deck floor look like in that corner," she asked, but she already knew the answer. "Could it be laid on a diagonal to match the rail?" She was excited, painting the scene with her hands. "Then the little table and stools would fit perfectly against the rail and have it's own little floor space."
I know she likes small spaces that have their own meanings. The flowers on the table would always be fresh and this corner doesn't get the blasting noontime sun. Now even I can imagine that scene with her sitting at the table with glasses of lemonade and wearing a wide brimmed hat. But the whole scene is new and I have to stop to consider all the ramifications.
I have to stop to think about the stresses and forces in the new under-structures of the deck and then I have to think about all the carpentry details down to exactly how many of what size nails to use. I have to think about all the hidden stuff and what it will do through the years and decades to come.
I know about how I plan these things. It usually ends up with several months or years of chin pulling and half completed, mumbled sentences, and reaching back into my old experiences. And I'm not really a carpenter.
I know myself and then after all that deliberation, I'll end up building the new deck and the crows nest in about three days. But until that happens, I can somehow feel that old voltmeter my father got for me when I was six. I can feel a need between my shoulders and at the back of my head to want to know something that I can't quite put my fingers on, just like wanting to know what is going on inside the wires I was playing with.
I can't go on with the deck project without that knowing and without my old voltmeter that was given away when my mother's garage was finally cleaned out.
"Didn't you find a new voltmeter that you really like?" my wife asked.
"Yes and they were $4.00 so I bought two of them," I admitted to what I think is just buying toys to try to fill the hole in my soul that was left when I wasn't a kid playing with wires anymore. "And they are so much better than my original voltmeter, too," I said. "But they're not satisfying," I added.
Voltmeters are not satisfying anymore because I no longer wonder about what is happening in wires. My life has moved on and my wondering about what can't be seen and and can't be understood has moved on with age. There is no more satisfaction in knowing about voltage anymore than there is in knowing about 2x4's and nails. As time moves past, the intriguing satisfaction is in the not knowing, in the unknowable, and in the very fact of life, not just my life.
As my wife watches me, I catch a deep, quiet look into her sparkling blue eyes. It's as if it is a glimpse into a dark pool and the very surface of her eyes both reflect the light and recess deeply into the past, into the history of our lives together and into the lives of all lovers.
In that moment I see that if my choice is to sit next to her at that adorable round table on the crows nest corner or to spend another few decades with a stupid close-up view of a deck rail, my choice is as obvious today as it was the day we married.
