I promise you trouble is getting ready to walk through the back door and into the room where the ties are draped in groupings. He loves his ties. True to form, his reaction will be instant. The garage door has gone up. And I hear him, now on the back stairs, opening the door.
No, he has changed his mind and is surveying the opened garage flooded with sunlight which is falling on the six bags of cement he intends to use up this weekend. The five hundred pounds of flagstone, which he transported last weekend in the back of my car, are neatly stacked in the backyard. Even a sheet couldn't protect my black trunk from tiny pieces of rock and dirt scuffs. I will say this. When he arrived home that afternoon, he didn't stop lifting rocks out of the car and into his blue wheelbarrow, rock by rock, pushing the heavy load around the corner and down the steep side of the house until the car was emptied. This is the point where I try not to hover but ask him, gently, "Does your heart hurt?" It is a smiling joke with us now. But there was one time when a similar stack of stone literally saved his life, most likely.
The older they get the less they want to take anyone's good advice. If I meekly tried to suggest that maybe building a rock wall with an accompanying flagstone walk, while a lovely gesture he could surely accomplish, was possibly out of his changed skill set, he would have to prove me wrong and right to himself. And he did, in less than a year because of winter. And his heart didn't hurt. He's known blessings in the middle of rock hard. As his fortune cookie said, many years ago, You have a strong will and iron constitution.
He has mixed concrete in the blazing sun until he announced he would wait until the sun had headed on the west side of the pine trees. That just gave him more time, while hunched over in the driveway, still in the blazing sun, to fashion the pieces from Sharpie marked stone as his leather gloved hands danced around the electric saw rattling the wife's nerves. In the summer heat. He had plenty of time to play with the idea of a purposeful, beautiful walk leading guests to the front door, leaving behind the scorn of rainy days and ice on a slip of land that wouldn't grow dirt.
When begged numerous times, he would finally sit in a metal chair and agree to water and Coca Cola. But he wouldn't let me turn the hose on him. That made too much sense. But I came out regularly with water and cold bandanas. I begged him to eat and asked the question, occasionally.
The week of college graduation of one and only and one month before the wedding of same. I have kept but have not found the ticket from the stone shop we had visited a couple of days earlier. We picked a pallet and the rocks were loaded into the car. The pinch, the discomfort. Not much mention. Really. Just rocks to place a path I wanted for the backyard going to the playhouse.
Is it a miracle when something which could have killed you saves you? Before moving the stone, only excitement over the upcoming occasions. But no clue of the terrible secret sneaking up on you. Until you move the stone.
And that is why I ask the question all of these years later, after an eventful few days of the miracle of modern medicine and a stainless steel piece of art tying it all back together and the best color in his cheeks beaming as he dances with his beloved wedded daughter.
He goes back to what he likes best. Building. Even with cement and heavy stones. Can't stop him. He will walk into Home Depot with the disintegrating straw hat held together with sweat and powdered stone, dirt covered baggy shorts, his favorite tie-dyed tee, the bandana and his knee pads and ground down topsiders along with a friend just stepped out of the garden in his overhauls bringing me the best tomato of the summer. Purchase to make.
Now he is home from work. Yellows and blues and paisley greens and dots and stripes are laid out - too short, too narrow, too wide, spots and picks. When the tie spinner fails it's a good time to check inventory. The reaction was almost as I expected. But glory, the tie turner has been saved. Alas, not all of the ties will spin again.
He is more lost in his thoughts of what work he can get done by sundown of this late autumn afternoon. The time change has tinkered with his inner clock. He knows every rock by number, mapped out in his head, the beginning of a patio. And because it has already snowed once this month, winter will break in and halt the production. By spring, after rain, he will be leveling the land, planting stones and stirring cement with his hoe. Breaking in new Christmas leather gloves, hunched in the driveway cutting rocks into the shape he needs. Always figuring out the puzzle to work the best fit.
