Christmas: Part the First

(December 30, 2000)

On Christmas Eve we went to Connecticut to stay over at my parents' house, and I use the term "house" loosely. Louie and JoAnna have pretty much been living in a construction site for almost two years. Doorless doorways, exposed insulation, plywood floors. Wires, tubing, pipes, nails and other mysterious house innards coil and lurk everywhere, threatening to reach out and snag your sweater or fall on your head at any moment. (It occurs to me that if they really wanted to be millenium-hip, they could finish up by covering the whole mess in injection-molded translucent plastic).

My brother was the only one home when we got there. Mike had displayed some ingenuity and cut down a Charlie Brown tree in the yard, and then managed to McGyver it to stand upright in what will someday be the kitchen. He even won a wrestling match with a string of white lights. Though somewhat lopsidedly strung, they cast a cheerful holiday glow over the galvanized steel spot-welded HVAC ductwork.

The walls are a nice thick sheet-rock and would normally be hung with Christmas decorations, but they're outside in a makeshift storage shed (the walls, not the Christmas decorations). The floorboards are a deep natural oak, and look very nice stacked where the stairs are going to be. Despite my mother's best efforts, sawdust coats every surface and within minutes I'm dusted like a piece of Shake 'N Bake chicken.

My parents came home laughing and flushed in a flurry of packages and bouncing, barking dogs. An un-pass-up-able sale at Home Depot had swallowed them for hours, and they came in bearing tile and marble and tales of war among the sconces. Mom showed Hub and I where to stash our Aero Extra Bed (in the future master bathroom, future home of the new marble), and Louie settled on an iron lawn chair reading one newspaper after another by the light of a bulb on a hook. Come hell or Christmas Eve, he reads all the papers every day.

My mother continues to amaze. There's no stove, no oven, and no freezer. With a single plug-in frying pan, a toaster oven, and a Toastmaster single-burner range she cheerfully turned out, without even blinking, a feast that included shrimp cocktail, stuffed shrimp, and a to-die-for Zuppa Di Pesche. When Mike's girlfriend got there, we threw a paper table cloth over a card table and set out paper plates, plastic cups and forks, put on some Marvin Gaye, and had a grand old time. Many shrimp and eight bottles of wine later, I crept up to the future master bathroom, future home of the new marble, and passed out on the sawdusty airbed with a couple of the dogs. One drooled, the other farted. God Help Us Everyone.

Next: Exfoliation Nation (or, How To Shower With Three Dogs, One Towel, and 498 Kinds of Shampoo)