WHEN WE ALL GET TO HEAVEN

 “When you close your eyes at night and think about Heaven, what’s it like?”

The sidewalk preacher smiled at my question. I was resting on my bike on the quadrangle of the University of Oregon. The sunny fall day was aflutter with fresh-eyed students rushing about their business. A perfect ambush for the Jesus hustlers. I had been eavesdropping on one for long minutes as he explained to a passing coed all the perks of his particular persuasion.

I learned his name was John, which seemed to fit, as I could see him – curly graying hair, lean build, intense gaze – all bedecked in desert garb and preaching in the Holy Land.

“How do you see yourself getting to Heaven?” had been John’s opening line, and he and the coed yammered back and forth for, like I mentioned, long minutes. I waited because I just had to ask him my question.

 “Excuse me,” I said, when the coed finally walked away and he turned my direction. “May I ask you a question?” I thought about adding “John” but concluded that would be too familiar.

“Sure.”

That’s when I asked John to describe his picture of Heaven.

He paused for a moment. I think he was quickly deciding whether to be real with me or stick with the company line. He chose the latter. “Well,” he started, “the Scripture tells us that God is surrounded by angels, all singing endless praise to Him.” He added a few of the streets-of-gold-type touches to his description.

“And you’re looking forward to that?” I asked.

“Oh, yes. No more pain. No more death. What could be better?”

“And you don’t think that would be incredibly boring?”

But John would reveal no more of his personal Elysian Fields fantasy and turned the question back on me. “How do you picture Heaven?”

I smiled and told John, with unintended double meaning, “I’m not going there.”

He smiled back and handed me a million-dollar bill with Barack Obama’s face printed on the front. On the back, in tiny-little letters, was a lengthy treatise on the wages of sin: “It will hopelessly condemn you on Judgment Day.”

“Have a nice ride,” John added.

I didn’t get far. Atop a low wall was another fired-up preacher – imagine a young George Costanza in cargo shorts, t-shirt, and little back cap – loudly preaching his path to the Promised Land. He seemed quite proud to be offering free stuff to people – brochures with secrets of the Universe, I suppose – but attracted few takers.

Next, under a little awning, sat a sorry collection of anti-abortion fanatics, blathering endlessly at passers-by, to the backdrop of that fiery preacher on the wall.

But it was the anti-gay guy that caught my eye. Though obviously an immense homophobe, most of his seated bulk was hidden behind an equally large homophobic sign. It cautioned: “Remember God judged Sodom and Gomorrah!”

A doughy, ugly man peered at me from behind the sign, scowling over the top of oversized sunglasses, his balding pate a thinning field of pube-like curls. I was taken aback when he put down his sign. A balloon-like belly completely encircled his body, straining against a green UO t-shirt. It was like he was wearing under it an inner tube – for a tractor tire, maybe.

Most of his sign was taken up with red circles with slashes over a very queer assemblage of anti-gay icons. An icon for two men. For two women. An icon for one man and one child. One man and one dog. One man and one car. One man and one question mark. And lastly, an icon for three women, which seemed hastily drawn, perhaps an afterthought.

As I was leaving the campus square, I spotted a young guy walking down the street in my direction. He was wearing a sandwich board that read, “Zionists Are Coming.”

Oh, for the love of God, I thought. Now what?

But as he got closer, I saw that his sign actually read, “Zombies Are Coming.”

Thank you Jesus!

Onward to the prize before us!
Soon His beauty we’ll behold;
Soon the pearly gates will open;
We shall tread the streets of gold.

When we all get to heaven,
What a day of rejoicing that will be!
When we all see Jesus,
We’ll sing and shout the victory!           -Eliza E. Hewitt

~ ~ ~

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FASTER INTERNET – IN JUST 25 EASY STEPS!

Need a faster Internet connection? We did, so we gave up our DSL connection for the promise of 30X faster service with the Charter cable company. They made it sound so easy. Ha! Here’s how that worked out:

1. I visit Charter store to get pricing and availability info for adding new phone and Internet (but keeping our DirecTV).
2. Talk over options with my wife, Eva.
3. Call CenturyLink (tick-tock, tick-tock…) to see if unbundling our phone and DSL Internet service would disrupt our DirecTV. (It wouldn’t.)
4. Return to Charter office to order service, interact on their phone at length with a government computer-voice to okay changing telephone service providers, and schedule Charter installation.
5. Two weeks later, Charter truck with 2 guys shows up. Guys inspect the situation. Long story, short – there’s no buried cable from street to our house. Guys map out route to get to nearest pedestal connection – not the one directly across the street (requiring city permit to bore under pavement) but one on our side of street and 300 feet down the hill and past two neighbors’ paved driveways.
6. “Miss Dig” shows up and marks underground utilities.
7. I receive a mysterious confirmation in the mail from CenturyLink claiming that we’ve added Internet service to a name and local address I don’t recognize. I call CenturyLink (tick-tock, tick-tock…), assuming it’s something Charter messed up in changing our service, but all CenturyLink can tell me is “It was done on a commercial account which I can’t access,” but was cancelled so shouldn’t be an issue.
8. I return to Charter store and show them the strange confirmation letter and they are zero help so I give up.
9. One day, Charter’s contractor shows up (unannounced) with truck and 2 guys to dig and lay underground conduit and cable from distant pedestal to our house. After inspecting the situation, and getting specific direction from me that the conduit and cable need to go under the sidewalk to the garage, not just to the closest spot on the house as they hoped, they conclude it’s too much for 2 guys and leave.
10. Contractor returns a day later (again, unannounced) with trucks and 5 guys. I’m not home and Eva has to tell them, “No, whatever my husband told you, you do it that way.”
11. Contractor returns next day with original 2 guys to finish the job. I watch them bore a small tunnel under my first neighbor’s driveway but not the second one closest to the pedestal since there already is underground conduit from that point to the pedestal. (Bear with me here, as these details turn out to be stupidly important.) No longer active, that old cable once connected to my next-door neighbor’s house. So they just cut him off and pull new cable through the old conduit. I ask why that cable is smaller than the fatter cable going into the new conduit to my house, and they explain that is all that will fit through the old, existing conduit and assure me it will be just fine. They splice the bigger (RG11) cable to the smaller (RG6) cable, then wrench the splice back inside the old conduit and bury the whole thing in dirt. Looks a bit shaky to me, but what do I know? Finally they’re all done and we have new coaxial cable to our house and I wait for a call for an installation schedule.
12. I spend a day patching lawn and hillside over the newly-buried orange conduit and cable.
13. Charter calls with installation time: Monday between 8 and 10. Okay.
14. Monday morning – I wait in vain, then call Charter (tick-tock, tick-tock…) and reach an automated message informing me that my installation is scheduled for Wednesday between 3 and 5. I call back and get live person who tells me my delay was because Charter “was having trouble porting your phone number” and I should call this number. I admit that means absolutely nothing to me, but promise to call the number.
15. I call and reach “Charter pre-install” and am told that all appears fine from their end. Okay.
16. Next day, I get phone message from Charter saying our Wednesday installation has been delayed again since CenturyLink has “not released” my phone number to transfer to their system. They promise to try again.
17. I call Charter (tick-tock, tick-tock…) and this time talk with Phillip, who explains to me the situation and how it might be another week or two. I bluntly explain to Philip my situation and finally he says, “Well, there is another option.” We could start Charter’s service with a new, temporary phone number, he says, and then switch back to our current phone number once CenturyLink “releases” it. I say I like that option, and now we’re back on schedule for Wednesday installation.
18. Charter’s installer, Ben, shows up on schedule. He assures me it should only take an hour to finish. He does a nice job, and several hours later he wraps up. Ben has discovered, however, that the signal coming to our house is weaker than it should be, so a crew will return another day to install a “booster” in that pedestal two houses down the street.
19. After Ben leaves, we discover we’ve lost our DirecTV connection. I suspect that Ben has incorrectly reconnected some DirecTV cables.
20. Once again, I call Charter (tick-tock, tick-tock…) – but with no local phone number posted anywhere, I end up talking with Lisa in North Carolina. I just want to have Ben come back the next day and see if he can fix what he screwed up with our satellite-TV cable connections. It takes all of 10 minutes to explain this, repeatedly, to Lisa, who finally puts me on hold, presumably to talk to her supervisor. Eventually she returns to explain that, no, Charter can’t send someone out to work on DirecTV’s equipment. “But I just want Ben to fix what he screwed up!” I fume. “I’m sorry, Mr. Wayne,” (she insisted on calling me that, despite my explaining that was my first name), “I’m just the messenger, Mr. Wayne.” “OK, Lisa. Thank you anyway. I give up,” and I hang up.
21. In the garage, I find a couple of loose DirecTV cable connections, but that doesn’t fix the TV. I go online to see how the “SWM” power gizmo should connect with the other cables, but it’s about as clear as hieroglyphics to me. I call my son-in-law and try a couple of his suggestions, then give up and call DirecTV and schedule a $50 service call for 3 days later.
22. Next day, we return home mid-afternoon just as Charter’s 2 big trucks with 2 guys are finishing up work installing the signal “booster.” I roll down the window and they explain, proudly, it seemed to me, that we’re all set now. Okay, and we pull into our garage. “Why didn’t you ask them about the TV being out?” my wife asks. So I walk back down driveway and chat with the Charter guys, who agree to take a look and promptly spot the two switched cables and fixes our DirecTV problem. Thank you! All appears well in our electronics world.
          I walk them back to their trucks and we talk about what a huge job this has been. I marvel and how much work it has been to get the conduit installed from way down the street, and I point down that way and suddenly they exchange funny looks. “No, your cable comes from right across the street,” one explains. It dawns on me that our new cable installation just got even more complicated. “Did you install the booster in that pedestal?” I ask, pointing across the street. “Yeah, and we replaced the pedestal with a brand new one,” they say. Both have a hard time believing me when I explain that our newly-installed cable doesn’t even go to that pedestal and, hence, they just wasted a whole lot of time and money. But when we walk the 300 feet downhill to the correct pedestal, the truth is obvious. Moreover, after a bit of digging in the dirt they discover the makeshift underground RG6 to RG11 splice and declare it “completely unacceptable.” Next, they find that their signal “booster” won’t even work in that pedestal.
          So they call up Ben, who quickly arrives in his Charter van, but can shed no light on the cabling since he wasn’t involved. I overhear the guy who seems in charge talking on the phone about their contractor’s slipshod work. “Do not pay them for this job,” he orders. I get a chance to show Ben how he messed up our DirecTV and how his mistake got fixed.
          Before the guys leave for the day, I give them a short version of this sorry history. “Seems to me,” I say, “Charter has a problem with communications.” One replies, “Well, we used to be Charter Communications but now it’s just Charter. We dropped communications,” and we all laugh. I conclude, “We’ve got our Internet and our TV is working again so from this point on, you’re on your own,” and I head home.
23. Next morning I find the Charter guys down the street and hard at work making things right. Eventually, we’ll be getting our own Charter pedestal and the underground cable splice will be eliminated and our connections to the Internet will be a good as it’s possible to get. So they say.
24. I call CenturyLink for the last time (tick-tock, tick-tock…) and cancel our old phone/DSL service. We decide to keep our new Charter phone number, not wanting to risk any more “porting our number” complications. The junk calls already have started.
25. I go online and add our new phone number to the Federal Trade Commission’s do not call registry.

Although Charter still isn’t done more than a month after we first ordered our new phone/Internet service, the rest of its work shouldn’t affect us. The good news (at least for us): Charter has a set price for new installation – about $30. I figure with what this has cost Charter to hook us up, they should break even in about 20 years. But best of all – our new Internet connection is even faster (at 65 mbs) than Charter promised. In just 25 easy steps!

~ ~ ~

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NOT JUST ANOTHER FISH

Sometimes a fish is not just another fish. Last week when a big salmon smashed my Halloween-orange plug dragging in the river’s current, it satisfied a 10-year quest. And at the same time, atoned for a fishing flub that has haunted me for 34 years.

ZZZZ-zzzzz-zzzz! To a fisherman, there’s nothing like it – the scream of a fly reel’s drag. It means you are hanging on to a truly big fish – on a fly rod, a rare event. Yet here on my home water, I finally hooked a big one. ZZZZ-zzzzz-zzzz!

It had been pitch black when I got to the river. Getting my boat ready to launch by flashlight, I heard a familiar disembodied voice from the darkness: “Hey, Wayne.”

“That you, Don?” I answered.

As usual when the fall salmon run is on, the parking lot already was busy with a handful of fishing guides and their clients, readying for the day. Don was one of the guides I’d swapped fish stories with for years. “So how’d you do the other day?” he asked, walking over. We’d last chatted two days earlier at the same pre-dawn spot.

Profanities spewed from me of their own accord: “Goddamned fish. I can’t get a fucking bite to save my life,” I fumed. “I swear, I’m cursed this year.” I paused. In the worst way, I didn’t want to ask but knew I had to: “How’d you do?”

“We got ten.”

I understand why guides almost always boat more salmon than me. After all, they do it every day for a living. They’ve got two clients with lines in the water or three lines when the guide also fishes. Even more important, they can shuttle their vehicle and boat trailer to a take-out point far downstream and ride back to their starting point in their clients’ car. That means they can cover miles of water in their shallow-draft drift boats, navigating rapids that my boat can’t handle, and never have to motor back upstream.

So I recognized Don’s big advantage, but still. Ten salmon? I grabbed my heart. “Don, you’re killing me here.”

The last thing Don said to me before I backed my boat trailer down the ramp was, “Don’t be afraid to use plugs. Drag them in that shallow water in the rapids where you fish and they’ll grab it.”

Anchored in my spot, I thought about Don’s advice. I’d already spent several early-season days fishing the method that had worked for me in prior years – drifting gobs of fish eggs in the current. The best ones emit a trail of stinky, white “milk” that salmon can’t resist. Except that they had, not counting a few “jack” salmon I had hooked – the small ones that inexplicably return from the ocean after just one year, instead of the usual two to four for the big adult salmon returning to spawn.

Why not take Don’s advice? After all, over the years I’d caught plenty of salmon on plugs with my spinning rods. But how about a radical twist? This was the year I had vowed to catch a salmon on my special fly rod. Why not tie a plug on the end of my fly line? It’s not something I’d ever read about in fishing magazines, but why not?

I call my fly rod “special” because it was a gift from a friend precisely ten years ago. It was the year before we moved west from Virginia to Oregon. I had travelled that fall to attend David’s wedding in his home in far-northern Vermont. That was when he handed me a rod case with his favorite Sage, graphite, four-piece, eight-weight, nine-and-a-half-foot steelhead rod. “I want you to have it,” he said. “You’ll get more use out of it in Oregon than I ever will.”

And I have, especially with smallmouth bass and shad. But a decade later, I still was waiting for that first really big fish to test my special fly rod. I figured I owed it to David. Now that his ten-year wedding anniversary had arrived, it seemed only fitting that I catch something worthy of his gift to me.

Fly rods, however, are designed to cast weightless fluffs of feathers, not big hulking salmon plugs. Picture those lovely scenes in A River Runs Through It: a brightly-colored fly line arcs through the air behind a wader-clad angler, water droplets on the line sparkling in sunlight, the cast straightening at just the right moment, then shooting forward to deliver a tiny fly silently on the water – described by author Norman Maclean as “an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o’clock,” referring to the imaginary clock that defines the position and movements of your fly rod.

Flinging a heavy plug with a fly rod is far less poetic, though not entirely bereft of grace. Standing in the back of the boat, coils of loose fly line at my feet, I swing the long rod in a pendulum arc in front of me to carry the plug and some 15 feet of line to one side, then power the rod in the direction of the cast and let all that loose line zip through the rod guides. On a good lob, the plug will sail 50 or 60 feet, plenty far enough.

When that salmon grabbed my orange plug wobbling in the current, the violence of its strike was shocking. Fishing that way, you retrieve line hand to hand, pointing the rod tip nearly straight at the plug, so when a fish strikes you feel the jolt of its savagery almost as if the rod wasn’t there.

As the reel music played – ZZZZ-zzzzz-zzzz! – I scrambled to the front of the boat, rod held high with one hand, to throw overboard the anchor rope (tethered to a float) and chase my fish headed downstream. The 90 feet of fly line was a distant memory and the backing line was quickly disappearing, too. My chase was powered by a foot-operated electric motor; the fleeing salmon was powered by… by what, exactly?

I have a good friend who loves marine life and believes that sport fishing is cruel and unusual punishment for innocent fish. I always reply, compared to what? A salmon that gets gill netted and thrown into a commercial fishing vessel’s hold – is that a more fishy-humane outcome? How about eaten alive by a bear or an eagle? Or, if among the lucky few that survive the battering migration upstream for hundreds of miles to spawn, then slowly becoming the swimming dead, aimlessly adrift while being consumed by white fungus? It just seems to me that a short battle with a fisherman, then a quick bonk on the head, might not be seem so bad in comparison. Of course, that’s easy for me to say.

Through long minutes, my very-much-alive salmon surged back and forth across the river, repeatedly pulling line out, which I’d then furiously crank the fly reel handle to recover. This is what I’ve been waiting for so long, I told myself. Maybe finally…

But anything can go wrong when you are fighting and netting a big fish, especially doing it alone. Hooks pull out. Lines break. Knots come undone.

Which is what had happened to me 34 years earlier, the last time I had a really big fish hooked on a fly rod. David and I were fishing a remote river in British Columbia. We had figured out how to catch the resident trout and whitefish. But we also had seen occasional silvery, heart-racing flashes of big, sea-run fish – salmon or steelhead, we weren’t sure which. Then one morning one of them grabbed my bait that was hanging in the current far downstream. At that point in my fishing career I’d caught lots of fish – even a few big ones – but nothing had prepared me for this fight with a wild steelhead as long as your arm. I splashed clumsily downstream in my waders trying to recover line. For memorable minutes I felt the fish’s power. Just as I started to believe I might actually land this monster, the steelhead leaped high as your head, and the line went dead. Nothing.

“What happened?” screamed David, who was downstream and closer to the fish than I ever got.

I reeled in my slack line. The curly-cues at the end of my monofilament leader – the place where the hook should have been tied – told the sad tale. My knot had failed. Would I ever live down such a rookie mistake?

Months later, an acquaintance of the fishing persuasion spotted me sitting in a business conference and seemed unusually glad to see me. He made his way down my row and plopped next to me, handing me with considerable fanfare a small brown sack. Inside, I found some hooks, leader material, and a little brochure on how to tie fishing knots.

Thirty-four years later on an Oregon river, I was finally able to wipe that smirk off his face.

My salmon tired after its berserker runs and was soon netted, whacked on the head, weighed (14 pounds), and put on ice in the cooler. As is typical with fishermen, after you catch one good fish you figure you must know what you’re doing. After using my off-beat plug-on-a-fly rod method to boat one salmon, I just knew I could catch a second. I stuck with it for another seven hours. That’s right, seven more hours fishing with absolutely nothing to show for it. That’s a lot of casts.

I cleaned my salmon riverside. The vultures arrived almost immediately. Like magic, first one appeared in branches above, beady eyes in its bald red head staring patiently. Then a few more birds showed up, the whop-whop-whop of wings sounding like distant helicopters. Eventually, there were two dozen black shadows of death soaring overhead or looking down from the trees, jostling with noisily flapping wings over the best place to wait for the inevitable feast of salmon head, guts and scraps. I’ve learned the hard way to be sure there are no perching branches directly overhead when I’m cleaning fish. There may be worse things to land on you than a stream of shit from a bird that eats fish guts and roadkill, but offhand, I can’t think of any.

As soon as my boat left the shore, the vultures moved in, arguing over the salmon carcass with loud hisses, then grabbing choice tidbits and flying off to dine in peace. By the next day, nothing would remain but a skeleton. The fish filets, of course, went home to my freezer and the fish eggs, since it was a hen salmon, got cured as bait for catching more of her kin.

Near the end of my fishing marathon, a guide with his clients motored by, intrigued by my unorthodox fishing technique. “It’s not really fly fishing. What do you call that?” he called out, watching my plug swing back, then fly forward.

“It’s not pretty but it can work. It’s quite a thrill when one hits,” I replied. All three men in the other boat smiled and nodded in understanding. I didn’t mention that it could be 34 years between thrills.

We compared notes. They had caught several fish early, then, like me, nothing more. I expressed sympathy for our mutual long, dry spell, but the guide was having no part of negativity: “It was a beautiful day to be here. No place I’d rather be.” Amen to that.

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OBIT FOR A FRIENDSHIP

Who, me? When a 25-year-friend calls you an “intolerant ass” and flushes away your friendship – in an email, no less – it makes a fellow wonder.

Ironically, the occasion for Gary’s outburst was a reply to my invitation to join a rafting trip that my wife and I are organizing a few years out. We had been together on a similar trip last year and everyone seemed to have had a great time. My blog stories tell of our mutual adventures and my impressions of other rafters (including one minor kerfuffle between Gary and me) in Grand Canyon Rafting – A Dozen Little Stories.

Would he and his wife like to again join a group for “eight days immersed in one of the grandest spectacles on Earth,” I asked via email?

HELL NO!

You acted like an ass Wayne, and have no tolerance for people and Arlene and I want nothing to do with you. The last thing we need, is for you to start another story about our family.

What happen (sic) or didn’t happen with our grandson and Arlene’s brother [Fred] is no ones (sic) business but ours, and certainly not yours. This is our family and you had no right to go into detail about the doings, and send it out to everyone. Whether these things were the truth or not is incidental. they (sic) were very hurtful to all concerned.

Please do not trouble yourself self (sic) to respond to this email.

Gary

Walking the line

My blog stories about our shared rafting, though truthful to events, as Gary conceded, did reveal flaws in his less-than-picture-perfect family. So what? Every family is dysfunctional in its own way.

I guess I can see why he might be less than thrilled with my story about his brother-in-law, Fred’s Lizard, but how can you not write about an overweight, out-of-shape retired bail-bondsman from Bullhead City nearly killing himself in the wilderness from a simple fall onto some rocks along the Little Colorado River? I was sympathetic to Fred, however, and intended that my story read that way:  

“Fred struggled, and as the week progressed he grew more content to relax on the beach while others took hikes. For all his challenges, however, here’s the thing about Fred. Not once did I hear him complain about anything. Not the heat – even though sometimes I pictured his reddening countenance on the raft as a giant kielbasa broiling under the sun. Not the sand, not his frequent falling on his butt when getting on and off the raft. Not even when he came real close to killing himself.”

As for my brief mention of Gary’s grandson in another story, what teenager camping on the river with only adults who are drinking heavily each evening wouldn’t sneak into the booze?

Regardless of Gary’s virtual shit-fit, these events were my “business” because they happened in my life. I share my life openly in my writing (see Bare Naked Wayne). Which is not to say that there is no line. I left out a number of gossipy stories because they may have made people look bad for no good reason or because I heard them second-hand. Nevertheless, I learned a long time ago that good intentions are no excuse for hurtful writing.

Nearly 40 years ago I wrote a magazine story about an environmental battle in rural Michigan where I described an elderly couple whose farm was being devastated by the project. Intending to evince empathy for their salt-of-the-earth lifestyle, I noted in passing that they had never even been to a McDonald’s. I later heard that they were embarrassed for everyone to know that. I had crossed the line.

So did I also cross the line with my Grand Canyon rafting stories? The beauty of the written word is that everyone gets to decide for themselves.

My little kerfuffle with Gary that I mentioned earlier had to do with cigars. One would think that anyone smoking anything in the Grand Canyon would find a distant beach locale. But several on our trip, including Gary, insisted on lighting up each evening right in the middle of the camping area. Which meant everyone got to inhale their stogies’ fart-like fumes. Who wants to spend thousands of dollars to visit one of the most pristine places on Earth and choke on cigar smoke wafting across your campsite?

It was the third evening of our trip when I quietly complained to Gary. I expected that he would be apologetic, having not realized how offensive others found his pleasure. To my surprise, however, he got all huffy. So later I wrote about that odd encounter, including my attempt to patch things up:

“I approached him again to clear the air, so to speak: ‘Gary, are you going to be grumpy with me the whole trip over the cigar thing?’ Of course not, he assured me, and that was that, and that was about as close to a bad moment as I witnessed in eight days on the river.”

Except that, obviously, that was not that. Months after the trip ended, I heard he was still grumbling about my intolerance.

What was he thinking?

How pissed off must you be to put such a tirade in writing? And email it to a writer of the very blog that you are indignant about? Gary asked me not to trouble myself to respond. Yet asking a writer not to respond to such a raw story – well, it would be like asking me not to breathe. Writers write.

It’s not like he and I ever were best buds. Nevertheless, we do go back a long ways. In the 80s and 90s, I managed a land development company in Arizona. Gary and his wife owned the real estate company that marketed our residential lots in Bullhead City. Together, we grumbled about the crazy guys who owned my land development company, shared the pleasures and pains of building communities from the (Mohave Desert) ground up, and made a fair share of money until the economy tanked.

Our connection wasn’t just about work. Gary’s daughter is my wife’s childhood friend, which makes him indirectly responsible for the best thing that ever happened to me: meeting my wife. He organized the first rafting trip I took through the Grand Canyon 25 years ago. He gave me the finest day of snow skiing in my life at his condo in Utah. A few years back we shared a quiet drink just before his granddaughter’s wedding in the pine-clad mountains outside Flagstaff. He and his wife are lovely people, gracious hosts, and much fun.

No doubt, Gary could be a bristly pain-in-the-ass to work with. But he always had a sense of humor and we always worked things out. Until now. That nasty email seems pretty final. He was my friend, and now he’s not, and especially at our ages that’s too damned bad. All over some trifling little stories. Go figure.

~ ~ ~

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KITTIES FROM HEAVEN

It would be easy to conclude that our new kitties are a gift from God. After all, with impeccable timing, they fell right out of the Arizona sky and into our hands – kitties from Heaven. They say He works in mysterious ways.

We had driven a thousand miles from our home in Oregon to Bullhead City in order to get two kitties from a wild momma cat who had decided to have her litter in our friends’ desert patio.

Why would my wife, Eva, and I go to such lengths to get the same kind of kitties you could find in a local shelter or a give-away box in a supermarket parking lot?

We Were Not Worthy

For nearly a year we had been trying, unsuccessfully, to buy a new cat. After nineteen years, our beloved old cat, Lucy, had given up her ninth life. Thinking about filling our pet void, we had gone to a couple of cat shows and it was the big and charismatic Maine Coon Cats that caught our eye. We wanted one. Maybe two.

We quickly discovered, however, that when it comes to buying a Maine Coon Cat, it’s a sellers’ market. The breeders have waiting lists, so it’s not as simple as handing over the going price of $1,200 and driving home with a kitten. Each breeder first must determine if you are worthy of owning one of their precious Maine Coon Cats. It seemed a lot like trying to adopt a kid – prying questions about what kind of parents we would be. Apparently, not good enough since no one would sell us a kitty.

In a last-ditch effort, last winter we went to a cat show in Portland, certain we would find a breeder who would put us on a waiting list for their next litter. Lots of Maine Coon Cats and several breeders were there. Eva dutifully smiled, bought their home-made cat calendars, and promised that if only they would consider us, their darling ball of fur would be given a dog-free, kid-free, smoke-free, indoor castle as a home. We offered to put down a deposit. When one breeder insisted that a sole kitty would be too lonely, we said we would consider two. “Stay in touch by email,” was the typical response.

So we did, but our entreaties went nowhere. We started to feel like rejected supplicants before Those-Who-Would-Bestow-Cats, apparently not worthy of such a noble creature as a Maine Coon Cat.

That’s why when we saw on Facebook that our old friends, Ray and Ann, in Bullhead City were looking to give away wild kitties born in their courtyard, driving a thousand miles just seemed like the thing to do. Besides, with their palm-shaded pool, good wine, and spectacular desert sunsets, why not? The kitties would be a bonus – a timely gift from the cosmos, warranting the long trip to claim them. To hell with those uppity Maine Coon Cat fanciers.

Gone Kitties

“They’re gone,” Ray said to me on the phone, just a week before we were to leave.  “Momma took them over the roof and into the desert and they’re gone.”

He explained that Momma Cat had gotten nervous about the increasing attention people were giving her cute progeny. She had no patience for people handling her babies so had carried them off into the wilds, Ray had concluded, one kitty at a time.

After giving me the bad news, he paused to let it sink in. “We’re coming anyways,” I said. Ray seemed relieved.

Kitties in a Palm Tree

When we got to Bullhead City, we stared at the empty olla lying where Momma Cat had birthed her babies. The quiet, enclosed patio is dominated by an immense canary palm tree – to ring arms around its trunk would take two people – and its great fronds drape the house’s tile roof. The palm tree and desert shrubs gave Momma Cat easy access up and over the roof to the surrounding Mohave Desert. We marveled that she had so quickly vanished with her brood.

It was Eva who heard them first, that faint but unmistakable mewing of kittens. As we stared up into the palm tree’s impenetrable tangle of sword-like vegetation just a few feet beyond reach, Momma Cat’s face materialized like Alice’s Cheshire Cat – but no grin here. Her eyes burned with maternal savagery that said, “Put a hand up here and I’ll rip it to shreds.” She had moved her kittens only as far as the palm tree.

Over the next few days we learned Momma Cat’s routines, which consisted of nursing her well-hidden babies in the palm tree, coming down when the patio was deserted to eat and drink from the bowls provided by Ray and Ann, and heading into the desert for evening carousing and hunting. It was during one of her absences that we first spotted several of her kittens out exploring the palm’s canopy.

Maybe, I thought, maybe we could catch one of them. So we placed ladders in strategic locations around the patio. I headed to the Bullhead City Walmart to buy a long-handled fishing net.

An Infestation of Cats

“Fisherman?” asked the Walmart checkout lady as she rung up my net.

“That would be a good guess, but no.”

“Cat?”

“Bingo!” I gave her an abbreviated story of our kitties in the palm tree.

“Oh, you should get pictures. Put them on the Internet. Or Facebook, or something,” she said.

I smiled.

As other customers in line waited patiently, she proceeded to tell me all about the litter of cats in “the abandoned house trailer next door.” She didn’t know what she was going to do about them. Apparently, the city was being overrun with an infestation of feral cats. There was talk of trapping, spaying, and releasing the females, but nothing had come of it.

“Well, one thing for sure,” I said as I took my receipt. “If we catch these kitties, it will be like them winning the Kitty Jackpot.”

Timing

Back at Ray and Ann’s, now armed with my net, we waited and watched for the kitties to venture out again. But the week sped by with no more sightings. On our next-to-last evening, we decided to have dinner at a sushi restaurant. It was Ann's birthday.

After a less-than-memorable meal, we sped back to house in hopes of catching the kitties out and about just before sunset. Plus, I had some pressing business to attend. Eva took up watch in the patio while I sped to the bathroom to deal with the impact of our less-than-memorable meal, missing the drama unfolding in the palm tree.

It seems that Momma Cat had chosen just that moment to lead her litter out of the palm tree, onto the roof, and into the desert for somewhere she felt was safer for her kittens. As I returned, Eva pointed to the roof and I sprinted up the ladder, Walmart net in hand.

When Momma Cat spotted me, she ran to the ridge of the roof where she stopped to wait for her kittens toddling along the roof’s edge. But the leading kitten lost his footing and slipped over the edge, landing with a soft bounce on the patio pavers. Below, Eva, now joined by Ann, scooped up kitty number one. I moved gingerly over the roof’s clay tiles, hoping to net at least one of the other kittens. Momma Cat yowled in horror. That’s when kitties two and three slid off the roof, landing shaken but uninjured.

We knew there were two more kittens in her litter, but there was no sign of them, apparently still impossibly hidden in the palm tree’s tangled fronds. I retreated from the nearly dark rooftop to the patio.

There they were. Three kittens, two of them now ours – a calico female and a cream-colored male. Ours. Winners of the Kitty Jackpot.

Had we returned from dinner a few minutes later, they would have vanished into the desert night without us ever seeing them. Had we returned earlier, Momma Cat probably wouldn’t have risked leading them from their palm tree haven until after dark. Strange, how the timing worked out so perfectly. Divine providence? If, as the gospel song claims, His eye is on the sparrow, then why not kitties, too?

Sonny & Skye

We spent a good share of our two-day drive back to Oregon trying out names for our new kitties. Sonny & Skye fit. They now are about nine weeks old (we’ve had to guess about their exact birthdays), healthy and happy, and living a life of cat luxury. Grain-free kitten food, wet and dry. Toys and more toys. A cat play tower that I built. You might even say they’ve landed in a cat’s Heaven on Earth.

Kitties from Heaven

We don’t know the fate of Momma Cat’s last two kittens. Since Ray & Ann have observed Momma Cat already behaving again like the cat slut that she is, I’m guessing that those kittens won’t survive Bullhead City’s searing 115 degree summer.

If it helps, you can believe that those kitties “have gone to a better place.” Or, “God wanted them in Heaven.” Or, “they’ll be reunited with their family one day.”

The trouble is that we really don’t know if they were Christian cats. They might have been Buddhist cats. If so, maybe God will send those lost kittens back to Earth, one day to fall out of a desert palm tree into a life of cat luxury. Kitties from Heaven. It happens.

~ ~ ~

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BUILDING OUR DREAM KITCHEN

Eva and I just finished building our dream kitchen. Here are pictures, plus a few narratives about how we did it.

We started with a clear vision of what we wanted and, thanks to the creative team that we hired, got exactly that. It was harder and more expensive than we expected. Yet completely worth it. At one point early in our project, I realized that we were creating not just a new kitchen but a work of art. You can be the judge.

I wrote this primarily for readers who might be contemplating their own custom kitchen remodel. It’s a candid view of what our project was like from a homeowner’s perspective. Parts of my story may seem to dwell too long on a few details, but that is the nature of construction – details, details, details. If you don’t care, then just enjoy the pictures. (Click on pics to see full-screen.)


Before & After:

Rainbow Dreams:

Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true

Everyone seems to know a horror story about getting screwed by an unscrupulous, over-worked, or incompetent contractor. It happens so often that there are TV shows devoted to it – Mike Holmes, for example, who seems to relish fixing botched home construction jobs, while rescuing couples who have been duped by charlatans. Here’s what we did to avoid such a fate with our own kitchen remodel.

For starters, we took our time (waiting until we could afford to do it right), going regularly to home shows and checking out the work of local architects and builders. We liked what we saw of the Eugene firm of Rainbow Valley Design & Construction. Quality was evident in the elegant, clean esthetic of their work.

We also liked how they structured projects as “design-build,” meaning, they serve as architect and general contractor, working routinely with a stable of trusted subcontractors. That meant, we hoped, one point of contact for everything, start-to-finish, with tight control of the schedule and budget.

We didn’t even get bids from other contractors. I’m not sure what bids can tell you; to a considerable extent, you get what you pay for. What can a bid show you about a firm’s quality standards or design skills?

There are hundreds of choices in a kitchen project, each linked to quality – more of it or less. That's linked to cost – more of it or less. Good design – from custom architecture to plumbing and lighting fixtures to door hardware – carries an extra premium .

The best cabinet carpenters use the best materials and build the best joints. So you have to decide. Then there are more choices: cabinet locations, dimensions, configuration, interior layout, material, finish and color, do you want to pay extra for self-closing doors and drawers?, range hood height, trim, glass fronts (where and what kind of glass?). What about the reveal dimension between doors – quarter inch or eighth inch? A pantry? Hardware. And cabinet lighting (an unpleasant little story deserving its own telling, later). If you want cabinets to be perfect, every small decision matters.

Detailed cabinet plans come after you decide on appliances – each with its own seemingly endless choices. Even if you can afford it, do you really need to spend $12,000 on a SubZero refrigerator? Although we drew the line there, we did splurge on a Wolf range, plus a second wall oven and microwave. And a nice, under-counter wine cooler.

At our first design meeting with Scott, our Rainbow Valley architect, we stressed one point – this was a kitchen for a serious cook, not just a showpiece. Like most couples, we spend a good share of our time in the kitchen. Unlike most couples, however, one of us is a spectacular chef. Our kitchen is built to be used. With wine.

Over the years, we had met several times with Rainbow Valley’s architects to discuss possible projects even before we settled on a custom kitchen remodel. I can say “the chemistry seemed right,” but what does that really mean? I think it’s about trust – trust regarding judgements in overall design and details, in recommendations about things like flooring and insulation, and trust in an honest tracking of costs. If you have secret fears that your contractor is cheating you, how much fun can that be?

Despite the inevitable headaches from any construction project, I vowed that our project would be fun for us, as well as for our design and construction team. Mostly it was, though there were moments, usually involving sub-par work by subcontractors or suppliers.

No construction project can be any better than the skills of its subs – the gaggle of guys (and all our subs except one were guys) who do the plumbing, electrical, ducting, cabinets, counters, tile, sheet rock, flooring, and so on. Keeping a project on schedule and within budget means riding herd on those tradesmen who lately, given the economic recovery, are stretched thin and over-committed. How can you know that the subs you hire are good ones? We relied completely on Rainbow Valley.

Eva and I have more construction experience than most people. Over the course of my checkered career, I managed for several years a land development company building subdivisions in Arizona, and directed construction of a big office building near Washington, DC. Eva worked for many years writing construction loans for mortgage companies, and was vice president of bank construction loan departments in Michigan and Virginia. So we pretty much knew what we were getting into with a custom kitchen remodeling project. Nevertheless, some things still surprised us and some of the glitches were frustrating.

Nothing in home building is more complicated than a custom kitchen remodel. Here’s one measure: How many people would you guess worked on our project. I tried to count all those I came to know, at least briefly, on a first-name basis – the designers, carpenters, tradesmen, appliance sellers, and building inspectors – and that’s not counting delivery guys, receptionists, dump workers, and probably others I’ve forgotten. I stopped counting when I got up to 60. Sixty! And that’s with me doing some of the work myself – all the up-front demolition and painting.

I was happy that our project manager, Andrew, was fine with letting us save some money by me doing that work. It’s an example of what I thought was one of Rainbow Valley's best qualities – they are client friendly. “Every client is different; we meet each one where they are,” is how Andrew explained it.

Bottom line, would we recommend Rainbow Valley to others? Certainly, yes, but with the caveat of being sure you know what you’re getting into.

Picking a Plan:

We have a lovely home, well-designed and constructed by a talented builder some 20 years ago. Except for the kitchen, which always seemed like an afterthought. We decided it was time for an upgrade. Unfortunately, there would be no easy way to reconfigure or expand the existing cramped space. Rainbow Valley’s Scott visited and came up with a handful of options – from working within the existing footprint to bumping out exterior walls.

We settled on a plan that involved shrinking the utility room and half-bath by moving a bearing wall several feet. Although it would add only a modest amount of new kitchen space, the impact would be dramatic. Where the refrigerator stood, there would be a new window (looking out on our chickens). New cabinets would extend to the ceiling and we would eliminate cabinets under the counter peninsula. Nasty vinyl flooring would be replaced with dark bamboo hardwood extending through the dining room and entry foyer. The net effect would be an open, inviting space in harmony with the rest of the house’s design.

Over the course of a year, that’s what we agreed to do. Construction would start right after the year-end holidays. In the meantime, we had shopping to do, starting with countertops. 

Granite:

There’s something about granite. You take this rock that was formed as molten magma deep inside the earth – its colorful quartz and mica and feldspar distorted and crystallized over millions of years – then it gets mined, sliced, polished, and shipped across oceans and cut to fit your kitchen counter.

A year before we would start our project we went granite shopping – first in Eugene, then in Portland where we found the choices overwhelming. So many colors, so much stone beauty. The weird thing about buying granite countertops from a showroom is that you pick out your slab without knowing what it’s going to cost. All you see are relative prices – one to five stars on the tags. The shop ships the slabs you select to the installer, who measures your cabinet dimensions and determines exactly how much stone you need, then tells you the price. It’s an unusual retail model.

When our construction was about to begin, we made a second granite shopping trip to Portland. After looking at hundreds of choices, when we saw the slab of Brazilian “Aquarella” granite, it was love at first sight. Actually, second sight, since Eva recalled this four-star granite also had been our favorite on our earlier visit.

The store had just two slabs, and we needed both. The shop’s workers hoisted each of the 900-pound giants out on forklifts so we could better view them.

Ka-ching!

The heart wants what the heart wants.

After our cabinets had been installed, our countertop guy (Stone Works International – Making sure your dreams are set in stone!) came to the house to precisely measure how to cut the granite. He created template patterns of the countertops and taped them to our two slabs, showing exactly where cuts would be made. We spent several hours in his warehouse, studying the stone and moving his templates around in order to capture our favorite parts of the slabs.

 

Along the way, we also selected a remnant granite piece (“Sienna Bordeaux”) for the countertop in the utility room – cheaper, but lovely still.

 

Kitchen Art:

Once upon a time when our new kitchen was just a fancy, Eva and I spotted some art tiles in a gallery on the Oregon coast. We vowed then that if we ever redid our kitchen, we’d put at least a few of those tiles in our counter’s backsplash. I got in touch with the artist, Matthew Patton in Seattle, and ordered a sample of his 6” x 6” tiles. We settled on three.

For weeks, I thought about how to place them – how to get the right feng shui – and during a long bike ride one day, stopped and sketched on paper the layout in my mind. Eventually, that translated into a full-scale cardboard mockup and then the real deal.

It was when Jack Frost came into the picture that I started to think of our kitchen remodel as a work of art, not just a construction project. A tall, wild-haired, English-accented artist, Jack works in metal from a ramshackle shop in nearby Springfield. Scott found him while looking for someone to create for us a unique column to support the granite peninsula – destined to be the focal point of our new kitchen.

“He’s different,” was how Scott tried to prepare us in his understated manner.

We saw Jack’s drawings before we saw Jack. We had suggested that the column echo the sensuous curves of the forged iron chandelier in our dining room. His sketches looked perfect.

Over the next weeks, Scott gave Jack some minor design guidance. Each time there was a question from Jack – should he do something this way or that way? – each time Scott made the right call. I was thrilled; it’s an example of why we came to so completely trust Rainbow Valley’s design sense and judgements.

 

Demo Days:

It was the hardest I’ve worked in years. Maybe ever. To save money, I volunteered to do the demolition of our old kitchen. Owner work is well-named: “sweat equity.” I took everything all down to bare studs, including prying up the old subfloor and (rough-estimate) 10,000 nails. 

 

We turned our garage into a temporary kitchen and laundry room. I took the old kitchen cabinets and re-mounted them in the garage. Moving absolutely everything – dishes, food, appliances – out of the kitchen was ugly. It felt way too much like moving. Yet, after a week of torturing my muscles and surprisingly little bloodshed, demolition was done and the real work ready to begin.

Construction:

First on the scene were Rainbow Valley’s carpenters, Kevin and Phil. Over the next several months, we would all get fairly well acquainted. Since I’m retired, I was underfoot nearly every day.

As it turns out, both had grown up in Michigan not far from where I did. So we shared stories about favorite memories (Go Wings!) and least favorite (winter). Phil is about a decade younger than me, and a patient, wood-working perfectionist. Kevin, several decades younger, a highly talented carpenter. Whatever the construction surprise, they could solve it. Not once did either of them say, “I don’t think we can do that,” or suggest we would need to revise our design to accommodate some unexpected problem.

I can’t be sure, but I think they liked having an audience, particularly one as appreciative as me of their skills. Like all of us, they had good days and off days, but when they were in their zone and the work was flowing and the saws humming and the nail guns ka-whacking, it was a beautiful thing to behold.

Rainbow Valley did its best to curtain off the construction zone, while Eva and I scurried between garage-kitchen and living quarters. But let’s just put it this way: it’s not an experience you wish to extend one day longer than necessary. There’s dust and noise. Your privacy is re-defined. There’s stress and pressure and an endless string of decisions.

Suddenly, for example, you’re looking at a heating duct to the upstairs master bedroom that was hidden in the wall right where the new kitchen window is supposed to go. They could re-route the duct this way, or that way, or change the window, or eliminate the duct and add a baseboard heater, and what do you want us to do?

It’s not like they could just start right out putting in the new stuff. Because the kitchen wall being moved was a bearing wall, it was complicated. First, a temporary beam had to go up to keep the upstairs from becoming the downstairs. Next, two big holes were cut in the floor to access the spidery crawl space below so new concrete footings could be poured beneath the house, one wheelbarrow load at a time. Hefty posts were placed on the footings, holding the new laminated beam that was notched into the kitchen ceiling joists, which were affixed with hangers to the new beam. Only then could new construction begin.

Meanwhile, there were heating ducts, wiring, and plumbing to be re-routed, and a string of problems to be solved – like that hidden water line Kevin punctured with his nail gun. Nevertheless, it all got fixed. One day at a time, it all got done. Sheet rock went up, plasterers did their thing, flooring got nailed down, the unfinished cabinets got installed, appliances were delivered, cabinets got spray lacquered (the fumes nearly driving us out for several days), counters installed, backsplash tiles meticulously placed, sinks and faucets, toilet, lighting fixtures…

 

I was on a mission one day to the local hardware store, this time for a single rubber grommet so Phil could finish installing the range hood. He got paid by the hour so I was always happy to run errands or handle other mundane tasks like daily construction cleanup. The grommet was needed to protect electrical wiring where it came through a hole in the hood’s sheet metal.

I found the tray of rubber grommets only after direction from the hardware guy, who then offered me a short lecture on how the vast selection of nuts and bolts and grommets, handy as it may be, was a money loser. “From theft?” I asked, trying to be polite.

“That and it costs more in staff to help customers than we can make on small stuff.” When I didn’t reply he added, “We can only hope they come back to buy the bigger things, too.” What he didn’t say but was implied was “instead of getting it cheaper at the big box stores.” An interesting sales tactic, I thought. Guilt-tripping customers. But he had a point.

That range hood had been a challenge, perhaps the most serious glitch of the project. As soon as the cabinets were installed, it was obvious that the upper cabinets were too tall, meaning that the range hood would end up too close to the top of the range – just 24 inches. It turned out that the range hood specifications do, in fact, recommend a clearance of exactly that. Specifications for our Wolf range, however, call for a clearance of 30 inches, which was what we had envisioned. No one caught the 6-inch contradiction, and it was a detail on the cabinet drawings that I had missed when okaying them.

So the dilemma: do we uninstall the huge upper cabinet component, truck it back to the cabinet shop for revision, and pay the many hundreds of dollars for the change? And if so, who pays? Or do we live with having the range hood lower than we wanted, which would mess up placement of our art tiles?

There really was no question that we had to fix it, and we did. Rainbow Valley agreed that it was a shared mistake and we shared the extra costs.

I then realized that the hood vented out the top, not straight out the back, as we had expected. After investigating options for a different hood, we agreed to Rainbow Valley’s proposed fix – a duct elbow inside the upper cabinets, then venting to the outside. That worked fine and our carpenters enclosed the duct in plywood to match the cabinets.

The next challenge was finding an exterior vent cap of the right size. Kevin sent me chasing unsuccessfully all over Eugene, eventually ordering it online from Home Depot.

Once installed, we discovered that the hood’s light switch was defective. But that glitch was almost worth it. Our appliance store sent a repair guy out right away.

“Would you like me to take off my shoes,” an unusually large man said at the door.

“If you don’t mind.”

Donald (we'll call him) kicked off his shoes, which fastened with Velcro straps instead of laces.

In the course of his short visit, I learned about Donald’s other job as a rural volunteer fireman and that keeping toasters plugged in is the number three biggest cause of house fires. With a genuinely curious audience, Donald broadened his social commentary to decry Oregon’s pending legalization of weed: “They sure named it right: dope!” He also feared that a proposed hike in the minimum wage would make hamburgers too expensive. “And then where will we be?” he demanded. While summing up that today’s society is, in general, going to hell, he struggled mightily with his shoes, finally jamming his feet in.

Donald promised to order a new hood switch and return when it arrived. He stood on the sidewalk giving me his final Tea Party-ish views of the world. I tried to stay interested but, really, I just wanted him to go. I had been entertained by construction guys for three months and Donald was about the last of them. Enough was enough.

I had heard bits and pieces of the life stories of tradesmen as they had worked and we had chatted. Like the plumber who was into bird watching and tried hard not to be distracted from his work by the constant flurry at my bird feeders. We talked birds.

Or Bill, the electrical inspector, who explained why he didn’t drive one of his company’s mini-trucks: “I only ask two things in life. One is a truck roomy enough to wear my cowboy hat.”

“And the second?”

“A house where I can piss off the front porch.” He quickly added, “Not that I do that. I just want to know that I could. I’m entitled, don’t you think?”

I laughed in agreement, “Bill, if those are your two biggest issues, you’ve got a happy life.”


How We Paid for All This:

I’m not going to reveal how much we spent on our dream kitchen. It’s fair to say, however, that it was a shocking amount, based on reactions from the few people with whom we’ve shared that detail.

But here’s the thing. For us, it has nothing to do with resale value. We’re not going anywhere. This is home forever; why not make it exactly what we want? And what I want is a life surrounded by beauty every moment.

As we chatted one afternoon, Phil asked me Eva’s age. Earlier, I had shared with him an article I’d been reading in the newspaper about how to retire successfully. “Marry a younger woman was how I did it,” I had told him. I gave him my age as 69. (Later it dawned on me that I'm “only” 68.) He seemed astounded at how well preserved I seemed to be for such an advanced age.

Apparently, that conversation had got him thinking, and he was curious for more details, like asking about my wife’s age.

I couldn’t remember so tried to do the math in my head. I pictured “2015” in my mind, subtracting Eva’s birth year, which I do remember, and gave Phil a number for her age that I thought was close enough.

As Phil worked, I watched him doing that math in his head, subtracting Eva’s age from 69.

“Luck,” he said, without looking up from his saw. “You’ve been lucky,” referring to my much-younger wife, who I was pretty sure he thought was hot and, even better, self-employed with enough success to be able to pay for this fancy kitchen.

“That’s true,” I admitted.

Then I added, “You’re right, Phil. I’ve been lucky. But there is luck and there is luck. This is my second marriage.”

“Twice to get it right,” said Phil, a lifelong bachelor, to the best of my knowledge.

I smiled and gave him a thumbnail sketch of my Wiccan white-witch first wife who had been married five or six times before me depending on whether you count the time she temporarily married her cousin so he could get a green card. As I said, there’s luck and then there’s luck.

The Last Day:

Good Friday was supposed to be our last day of real construction. Just two tasks remained – electricians would install the cabinet lighting and Phil would install the special pull-down screen for the new pass-through window between the kitchen and the deck.

I thought I would be sad to see it all end. It was fun – bantering with the crews, making decisions about details of construction, and watching our dream kitchen take shape.

For nearly three months I had been up every weekday and ready for construction to start at 8:00 a.m. I had put in yeoman sweat equity – demolition, installing insulation, and hauling debris for recycling and the dump. I also had done all the painting and staining, including first sanding the trim and baseboards, often working until late in the night. I was beat.

Moreover, I was tired of dealing with stupid glitches – like the range hood problem I described. Or door hardware not getting ordered, as promised. A new window too hard to open. Flaws in the ceiling plaster. Unexpected construction complications to be solved.

And electrical snafus. It was the one time in the project that I came close to losing my temper. The electrician, let’s call him Larry, had made a site visit weeks earlier. Working from the architect’s drawings, we had identified every possible detail regarding outlets, dimmer switches, fixture locations, and so on. Everything.

So when Larry’s two crew guys showed up on a Monday morning to install wiring with virtually no idea of what we wanted or where, no knowledge of our walk-through with their boss, and with the wrong color fixtures and not nearly enough dimmer switches, it was definitely a WTF moment. Eventually it all got worked out, of course, as these things always do. Except for the cabinet low-voltage lighting, which somehow hadn’t gotten ordered. Nor had Larry or his crew looked at specifications for the cabinet lighting we had selected, so had to guess about what kind of low voltage wiring to install in the walls. (As it turned out, they guessed wrong, but we made do.)

Anyway, now on this Good Friday, the very last day of construction, I was not looking forward to another visit from Larry’s crew to finally install the cabinet lighting. I summoned extra willpower to get out of bed that morning in time to greet them ringing my doorbell at 8:00 a.m. sharp.

We went over exactly how the cabinet lighting, which consists of a thin tape of tiny LED lights, would be installed. We agreed on precisely where the tape would be placed inside and under each of the cabinets. Since it was a lovely spring day, I went outside to mow the lawn as the crew went to work.

I knew they had the right supplies – including the correct length of LED tape, transformers, and special wiring connectors – because I had ordered it all myself. After learning that the original order was messed up, I had gone to our lighting store (Brighter Homes Lighting) and sat with salesman Dave for an hour, going over every detail. I had measured and re-measured. What could possibly go wrong?

I was just finishing up with my yard mowing when one of Larry’s crew signaled that they were done and did I want to come in and see their work?

The first thing I noticed was that the lighting inside the first set of cabinets wasn’t taped precisely as I’d instructed. It was only matter of a half-inch, but I had been so explicit. Yet as I looked closer, I concluded it actually looked better where they had taped it. Whew!

But then: “We ran short of tape lighting for inside the cabinets.” He pointed to the far cabinet; its top shelf was dark on one side. He explained that they had divided up what tape lighting they had left on that cabinet; both sides were short, and by different amounts. The lighting was all wrong.

I retrieved the lighting invoice. There it showed what I had ordered – 14 feet of in-cabinet tape lighting. I did the math again. Yep, 14 feet should have been more than enough. I took a tape measure and added up the actual lengths of lighting they had installed. Oh-uh; 12 feet.

I told the crew I would sort it out later and sent them on their way. I sat there at our new granite counter, concluding that I would try to get the lighting store to replace both of the too-short sections of tape lighting since they had made the mistake. That’s when I noticed the wiring coming from the wall to the under-cabinet tape lighting.

As I mentioned earlier, the crew had assumed incorrectly that the low voltage lighting required more than two wires (e.g., speaker wire). So they installed CAT5 wiring instead, which includes five wires encased in a bright blue cover. I could see that ugly blue wire extending under the cabinet, joined to the tape lighting with a bright red splice, all carelessly stapled to the underside of the cabinets. It would not do.

* * *

And as for that second task for the day – installing the special pull-down screen for the pass-through window. This had been a feature near the top of Eva’s new-kitchen wish list – being able to pass food and dishes from the kitchen directly outside to the grill area on the deck.

We had considered the simplest solution – taking off the screen of an ordinary window. Not very elegant, and how do you keep out the flies? Same problem with expensive windows that open like French doors to an outside shelf. Bugs. After much searching, Rainbow Valley found a window that would work, with a screen mounted inside that pulls down like a blind.

I had been up late the night before putting the final coat of paint on the newly-mounted window so the screen could be installed. Phil seemed to be having trouble figuring out how it worked; there were no instructions included. Moreover, the trim pieces didn’t seem long enough. We held the screen in place against the window and pulled down the screen. It would look good if we could figure out how to mount it properly. Except, the screen had a hole in it. Not a big hole, just one of the little fibers broken, but a very obvious hole, nonetheless.

“Phil, for what we’re paying for this window, I’m not going to accept a screen with a hole in it.” He agreed, of course, and a new screen got ordered.

* * *

To conclude our cabinet lighting fiasco, a week after our Good Friday woes I drove into Eugene to talk to our lighting store about how their shorting us tape light had messed things up. I took a deep breath, pushed open the door, and asked for Dave. He was out to lunch so I explained to the nice woman behind the counter how Dave and I had sat for an hour putting together the tape light order – “Right there,” I said, pointing to the table we had used.

“Oh, yes. I seem to remember that,” she said, a quizzical look on her face.

“Well, the order was messed up.” As I explained in detail the problem, the sympathy in her face went cold when I said, “So because you made the mistake on the order, I think you should replace the two 40-inch segments.”

I could picture her feet whirling like the Roadrunner’s as she backed away. “Oh, I’ll have to get Elias for this. He’s in the back.”

Several minutes later, they emerged together in conversation. Elias had me explain the issue again. He suggested splicing additional tape lighting to the short ends, but I expressed skepticism that the adhesive backing, once the old tape was pulled and moved, would stick like new. I told him I wanted new tape lighting. Seeing nothing friendly in Elias’ face, I pressed my point:

“Elias, we’ve spent a small fortune on lighting fixtures here, so I can’t imagine why this would be a problem for you.”

“It’s not a problem. I’m taking care of you.” He didn’t grit his teeth, but might as well have.

We discussed the exact length needed, and he disappeared for a long time into his stock room. He returned with five feet of tape lighting – all he had in stock – and said he would have to order more.

I told Elias, “If you want to argue about who pays for this, you can fight it out with Rainbow Valley. All I know is that I’m not paying for it.”

That’s where we left it. By my estimate, Elias was quibbling over less than $50 (his cost) in materials. I did promise him that if it looked like we could re-use the existing, poorly-installed tape lighting, that I’d consider doing that. And that’s partly what I did; a good compromise, I thought.

I went back a week later to explain this to Elias, but now he was the one out to lunch so I chatted with Dave, who seemed far more empathetic to the headaches he had caused by shorting us on the order. He apologized several times, but said to me in passing, “I’m just so surprised. I’m not saying I can’t make a mistake, but I remember measuring that tape before I sent it out, and then measuring it again.”

There you have the challenge of remodeling: No matter how skilled the workers, no matter how attentive your oversight, mistakes happen and sometimes you can’t really say for sure who screwed up. All you can be certain of is that at the end of the day, you’ll have more headaches and pay more than you expected.

So after all that, how did the cabinet lighting turn out? Absolutely beautiful.

Searching for Perfection:

I watched Phil emerge from the crawl space under the house, bedecked in white, hooded coveralls intended to protect him from the insulation he had been re-installing under the kitchen floor. I had asked him to check how the various crews had left things, certain that the under-floor insulation would be a mess. It was; hence, Phil’s protective gear. I know of few jobs worse than manhandling fiberglass insulation above your head in a dark, damp, buggy, claustrophobic crawl space under a house. Been there; done that.

Phil’s eyes were beet red; his skin crawled with itchiness. Sweat beaded on his face. But it was done.

After weeks of watching Phil work, I knew with complete confidence that I didn’t need to slither into that crawl space to check his work. Phil did things right. Every time.

He’s a perfectionist and a genius with carpentry. Often, he would spot imperfections or misalignments and promptly fix them. When I would express surprise at him picking up things that I hadn’t noticed, he would reply simply, “That’s my job.”

It’s why I knew I could trust his judgement about imperfections in the ceiling plaster. We had worried from the start that invisibly meshing the new kitchen ceiling with the old dining room ceiling would be tough. Architect Scott had even proposed a false ceiling beam to disguise the break, but we had rejected that idea. Rainbow Valley’s go-to plasterer, Robert, had come to our house before taking the job and had assured us that he could feather his work into the existing ceiling to avoid a visible break.

The trouble was that Robert hadn’t done that. Shadows in the ceiling plaster made the break obvious, even after painting. I feared that trying to go back and fix it, however, could make it look even worse, and Phil agreed that was a risk.

His conclusion: “Life’s not perfect.”

It was damned good advice.

Robert had to come back later to finish up a few spots and I told him how pleased we were with the overall quality of his work. I had put at least three coats of paint on every inch of his plaster, so I knew what I was talking about. Before Robert left, though, I told him frankly of my disappointment with the ceiling, but that I had accepted Phil’s advice and didn’t want him to mess with it.

Robert stared hard at the ceiling shadows. “When everything is done, you and I will be the only ones who will ever notice.”

He was right. After the cabinets and lights were installed, there was light and shadow coming from fixtures in all directions; the imperfections in the ceiling’s plaster disappeared as if they didn’t exist. That’s almost the same as perfect.

* * *

I’ve focused here on a few construction glitches as a cautionary note regarding the realities of home remodeling. Unexpected and unpredictable problems are unavoidable. The test is how everyone responds to those problems. The temptation for some subs is to talk you into modifying your dream and your design in order to make their problem easier to solve – things like your insisting the light fixture goes right there, or keeping the window exactly that wide.

Not once, however, did Rainbow Valley’s own staff try to compromise our design to make things easier. Always, “we can do that” was the response.

For every one thing that went wrong, there were a hundred that went right. And a few things that could have been worse. Phil worked sick one day when he should have been in bed, then went back to the shop to cut some trim for the next day and nearly severed his thumb off. Only the saw’s almost magical SawStop, which instantly brakes the blade upon contact with flesh, saved him.

We’ve now had a few weeks to live with our new kitchen. We’ve had a few family events, such as Easter dinner, which proved the kitchen to be as functional as it is beautiful.

There remain a few little details to finish up, but that’s really beside the point now. Most remarkable is how close to perfect we find our dream kitchen. Everything works just like it’s supposed to – the appliances, plumbing, heat, lighting, windows, the air button on the disposal.

We’re thrilled with the beauty of our granite countertops and the bamboo flooring. You’ll not find anywhere a countertop pedestal like our Jack Frost column. Thanks to a master tile man and his partner-son, our backsplash with its art tiles came out just as we always hoped.

Of all the quality workmanship that combined to create our dream kitchen, I think the most impressive craftsmanship is in our new beechwood cabinets from The Cabinet Factory. I know there are a lot of good cabinet makers around, but I just can’t imagine how cabinets could be made any better, the attention to detail any finer, the fit more perfect.

Cabinet installation is one place where Phil’s carpentry skill came into play, shaving the edges of ceiling trim, for example, to perfectly match a less-than-perfectly-flat ceiling. Plus, there was the crew who sealed off the kitchen, encased themselves in protective gear and respirators, and sprayed an industrial strength finish on the cabinets, giving them a rock-hard, smooth-as-silk sheen.

Despite all the glitches and frustrations, in the end our exquisitely beautiful kitchen – everything about it – is perfect. At least for Eva and me. Which is really all that matters, don't you think? 

I hope my little story gives you an idea of what a kitchen remodeling project entails. Perhaps it gives you ideas for making a kitchen that's perfect for you. Maybe thoughts on who to hire. There's one critical element of our successful project, however, that I can't share. This kitchen was my wife's vision, start to finish -- layout, colors, components. Sorry, but Eva already has a job. Good thing.

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