If I Had a Chair

“If I had a hammer, I’d hammer in the morning, I’d hammer in the evening, all over this land.”   Pete Seeger and Lee Hays

I sent a welcome home email to Cele a few days ago. It said, “If I had a table, you could come over and play Mexican Train, if had a chair.”

Thanks to a conversation with Travis, I became aware that this was a theme for my blog-week here in San Pancho. It started when the electricians (or “electricos” as they’re called here) finally returned late Friday evening. They began their putzing. I walked up the stairs to check on a new fixture.

If this light switch here was wired, I could see how that fixture looks, I thought, if I had a light bulb. 

I went down to the kitchen. If I had the lampara for that spot in the ceiling, I thought, they could install it, if we had the piece to hold it.

I wandered back to the casita, wanting distraction from the pounding and drilling. If there were sockets installed in the baño, I noticed, I could hang the new clay lamps, if they weren’t still in Guadalajara.

I left the house for a while.

The next morning, I noticed that a puertita, one of the little doors in the big front door, was flopping open. I stood on my tiptoes and attempted to slide the ancient bolt into the rusted eye. No way. I got my new stepstool and my new can of WD40 and sprayed the bejeezus out of it. The bolt slid, but not into the eye, which apparently was too high to admit the bolt. I wondered when and how that had happened. Was it like that when I bought the doors? Was it like that in the convent 200 years ago? Wouldn’t that sort of piss off the nuns? Or did the eye just up and relocate?

If I had a really strong screwdriver, I thought, I could unscrew that rusty old thing and move it...if I had a ladder, which the electricos had purloined. 

I decided to garden, instead. I walked out the kitchen door and looked at the planters nicely terraced beside the stairs. Pretty. If I had my white ginger, I could plant it, if I had some dirt.

You’d think, after moving a zillion truckloads of it off this property, that I’d have some dirt, right? But that was Bad Dirt. We’re talking about Good Dirt here. For some reason, people here (maybe it’s only gringos) import dirt to plant in. It’s how it’s done. Now, looking around at the verdant hillsides virtually exploding with gargantuan green things, one wouldn’t think that was necessary, but apparently it is. And I was clean out of Good Dirt at the moment.

(The Good Dirt arriving, days later.)

"Aha!" I thought. I have my brand new Smith & Wesson drill I smuggled down on the airplane. I could put in those new door pulls I bought. I took them out of their bag. Cute. I unscrewed a screw from the back of one. I held it up to the old door I wanted to use it on. It was about half long enough. If I had longer screws, I thought, I could install them, if I had a drill bit for wood instead of only my masonry set.

I got in the car to go to the hardware store. I brought the screw with me. I showed it to the teenage girl who was the only one behind the counter. She knew right away they had no screw even sort of similar to that one. To prove it, she brought out a couple of boxes of the screws they did have. Night and day.

I left. When I got home, I added “screws” to my Vallarta/La Peñita list, which is now approximately eleven pages long.

Of course, if they’d had the screws, I could also have installed the drawer pulls on all the drawers and cabinets in the house which I’ve been opening with my fingernails or not at all...if I had the drawer pulls, which I ordered some time ago but which (surprise!) have not yet arrived.

By now, I was hungry. I needed comfort food. I had an egg and some bread. If I had some syrup, I thought, I could make French toast!...if I had a plate. I made do with my new little Rachel Ray pan and strawberry jam. Thank the goddess they have Smuckers down here.

I dribbled strawberry jam on my last remaining clean shirt. If I had a washer, I could wash some clothes, if I had a dryer...or even a clothesline. The last time I tried to wash clothes at Judith’s I got so busy I left them in the washer for two days and had to start over. 

If I go right now, I thought, I’ll just have time to put a load in before Francisco Iron Guy gets here to measure for pot racks and curtain rods. I toted my red plastic bin of laundry down the stairs to the garage, put it in the car, opened the garage door, and a truck was parked in front of it. I shouted to Archi. Archi shouted to everyone else. The guy whose truck it was had walked down to the market to buy lunch.

(Archi's excellent solution to not having appliances.)

I turned around and went back upstairs. I rubbed the spot of Smuckers off my shirt with a paper towel, which left little pills of shredded paper all over my chest. The paper towels down here disintegrate before you can even rip them off the roll. Paper goods are not Mexico’s strong suit. If I'd had Kirkland paper towels, I could have cleaned that whole tanktop twice, and then polished the bathroom counter...if I’d had time to get to Costco.

After Francisco Iron Guy came and went while I was busy doing something else, Arqui explained to me that the iron screen door I want for the back kitchen door can’t be built. This is because the tile roof that Palapa Guy built over the door is too low and there’s not enough height for a door to swing outward, and the old wood doors already have dibs on swinging inward.

(The offending roof, just outside the kitchen back door.)

He took me out back and showed me the problem. He had a solution, though: we were going to rip off the roof and rebuild it higher.

“Whaaaat??!” was my response. “NO we’re not!! Rip off the ROOF?? No, we’re not!”

Arqui’s voice, always soft, lowered a few more registers as it always does when I have one of my fits.

“It won’t be that much, they can use the same materials. We can patch the holes. There’s no other way to do it if you want the door.”

I stood back and glared at the whole set-up for a few minutes. I picked up a two-by-four that was lying nearby that turned out to be metal, no idea what they use it for, but it was heavy as lead. I handed it to Arqui and asked him to hold it up there even with the top of the door and the offensively low beam supporting the tile roof, kind of like a Mexican jobsite level. It wasn’t easy, but he did it, and the solution became apparent.

“Instead of tearing the roof off,” I ventured, “if we make the frame for the screen door two inches wider at the top, that would make the door two inches shorter so it would clear the beam.”

Arqui was taken aback. “Ohh...because...well, maybe...I think that would work! Yes, that is how we can do it.” He stood there nodding and beaming. He was so proud.

If I weren’t here, I thought, but did not say aloud.

                                                    ✂

Throughout that day, I had been vaguely aware that the tune to “If I Had a Hammer” was running through my head on an endless loop.

Just before sunset, when Arqui and the workers were well out of the way, it returned again, more clearly: “If I had a hammer…”

Then I remembered. I do have a hammer! I took that hammer outside and climbed up on the fountain wall and scoped out Lupe’s perfectly rounded edges. 

(The fountain so far, which I designed out of miscellaneous pieces of found cantera, and to which Lupe added the concrete back, following a hastily sketched and happily asymmetrical pattern.) 

 

I started chipping away at those perfect smooth edges.

Don’t worry, I told Lupe I was going to do it.

For a minute or two, I used a cool chisel thing I found in Lupe’s stuff that looks like a huge nail,

but soon I discovered just how much concrete one can chip off with just the claw end of a hammer.

At first, I was tentative. But the whole week had been pretty much just like that day, so I was storing a bit of stress, and I got into it quick enough, loosening up and letting go. My technique evolved as I realized that a combination of enthusiastic whacking followed by energetic scraping gave just the aged look I wanted in the week-old concrete.

After a bit, I stepped back to examine my work so far, and peeked around the corner just in time to admire the end of sunset, the sky streaked a delicious cherry-popsicle red. Then I went back to my hammering in the dark (it gets dark here immediately when the sun goes down), relishing the sparks that popped from the claw every now and then.

By and by, I realized I was entering that mesmeric state that happens when I have pruning shears in my hand (many gardeners are familiar with this condition) and figured I’d better stop before I chipped away the entire fountain. 

Also, I’d forgotten to put my beer back in the refrigerator and it was probably getting warm.

So I climbed down from the fountain, swept away the evidence, retrieved my cerveza, and sat down to watch the moon. It was a mere sliver, backlit just enough to see the completion of its black roundness -- the kind of moon that is so obviously a ball, suspended low above the junglescape. 

I watched it for a long time, until it tipped into a smile as crescent moons do here and slipped away behind the hillside.

If I had a bed, I thought...and it turns out I did.

 

                                      zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz 

 

Comments

[Jeanne]

Great job on the fountain. And great post! I too am in suspense about the Queen coming!

[Gretchen Goodliffe]

What-to-do, what-to-do, what-to-do...... you had one of THOSE days, I love this day you had, I love the way you passed it on to us, I love the pruning-shear state you found yourself in..... it was a good day, in spite of the lack of tools ..... Mothers of Invention was a good group.

[Travis]

This is the saddest story I ever read. Thank goodness it had a happy ending. Nice job on the screen door solution. Creative problem solving....Life in Mexico.

[Char]

Does that mean you actually slept there or are you still at the rental. Love the fountain....love your blogs! So Thanksgiving is two weeks away....and Nina is coming! Is it going to be done!? The suspense is killing me!

xoxo