Dismissal

       Nothing pisses me off more than when someone wants to pull the string on my “Speak and Say”, and then refuses to listen when I go on to tell them what sound a cow makes. Rejection, in general, is something that is easy to handle but when people dismiss me altogether I really burn up. Paul Jensen used to say that the best thing that happened to him was when his hair fell out and his gut distended. It wasn’t until then that people started to listen to what he had to offer in the residential construction industry. Myself, I am not waiting for that. For one thing, my hair will thin only lightly and my stomach will always remain trim. All of the Lindner men, (my mothers side of the family), had a youthful appearance and never became overweight. They also died before their mothers. I suppose, with all of the skills and mindset that I am hated for, I will be hated for that too but that’s okay because there are too many things that I dabble in to let it really get to me. And I fear that I too will be dead before my mother, which is why I am frantically working on things I feel I need to do before that happens. Working on my mothers house, in Conklin, was not on the list.

Conklin is a small town just a few miles south of the Muskegon County line. My mother purchased a run down house on the dead end of Miller Street as part of one of her retirement investments. The home was in a shambles but then again, so was the rest of the town. A town it barely was, only kept alive by the fifty or so residents whom lived there. Today, in the whole of Chester Township’s 65 square miles there are about 2300 people. It has a very small U.S. Post Office, one small grocery store that rents videos and sells alcohol with the exception of Sundays when a person has to go five miles north to Ravenna- just outside of Ottawa County. There was an old train route that was converted to the Musk-Ottawa Trail, an asphalt pathway for bicycles and family strolls.

The town of Conklin got it’s start as a Railroad stop for the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad. A United States Post Office was opened in June of 1887. It was, and may still be, kept alive by an agricultural Co-Op, where local farmers sell and purchase grain and other livestock supplies, as they need them. An Irish Pub sits across the street that had, and may still have, authentic Celtic music Jams where people came on Saturdays from miles around. Fenian’s Irish Pub was quite well known and may have been the chief reason the town hadn’t completely dried up- other than the Co-Op. Many of the buildings that held businesses are in such terrible states that they cannot be rehabilitated for anything other than demolition and repurposing of the lots they occupy. It may be a very long time before anyone takes an interest in any of the properties there for any reason at all.

The project, with respect to myself, began while Sandy and I were still together, and ended abruptly because of Sandy. Or rather because of Sandy’s discovery of some very personal items which were none of her concern, although she made them her concern. This concern of hers was the final beginning to the end of her and I- a bit of a blessing in disguise though I didn’t realize it at the time.

After taking up residence again with Danny, I continued to try helping finish the project. That is up until I became involved with Julie, which happened to be a three-year distraction to my life’s path. Or was it?

It became that I resided there on the property while helping my mother complete the renovations to the home, and the fact that I had no other place to go. My long deceased Uncle William Russo and Aunt Bernice, (Uncle Bill and Aunt Bern), had an old camper van that my mother had acquired somehow. This was parked behind the house, and was where I slept with my dog Dusty.

The project went on for quite some time. It had started with her now ex-boyfriend Stan spearheading the work. No matter what I did on this project I felt my efforts were useless. Stan had pumped so much spray-in foam insulation that the house trapped the moisture that seeped out of the ground. The perimeter of the property was marked by a ditch on three sides revealing the water table at about three feet down. The seepage kept the sump pump running almost non-stop and the moisture built up continually on all of the windows in the house. This made it so that every piece of wood fabricated to finish the windows maintained to be wet which ruined my woodwork efforts and caused for a great deal of anxiety and frustration for myself that didn’t help my mental health at all.

My mother was from the old way of things. Everything that was removed during the demolition process was kept and earmarked for re-use no matter how much work was involved in doing so. That is, everything except for the addition that joined the garage to the house. This was all new construction that was done by a bunch of drunks other than me. They made a drinking spree out of the project- spending the money my mother paid them at the Conklin grocery store on beer, just as fast as they could drink it. The fact that I was insulted over her paying them real money instead of me was grating, especially since every time I tried to work on this particular part of the house there was an obstacle because of them and the piss poor work they had done. To begin with, the walls were all set on top of a layer of fiberglass insulation instead of sill sealer, and there was not one single piece of flashing anywhere, so every time it rained in the least the water came inside of the house. My tongue proved to be tough since I bit it quite often throughout my experience there but I did as my mother wished and used every single thing from the rubbish heap that I could make work, scraping glue from boards and re-milling it into trim material, cutting up the old doors to extract material from them, and practically re-engineering each and every situation along the way. What a nightmare. From the road the house was beautiful. The smoothest part of the project was when she and I stomped the ceiling with crow’s foot texture. As for paint, well, she didn’t waste money on primer. We used a two-coat roller head. The flooring in the kitchen was a snap-together scratch resistant floating floor system. The Kitchen cabinets were prefabricated and went together fairly well. The countertop was a bit of a different story altogether. We were back to “mission highly improbable.” She had a bunch of oak trim she acquired from somewhere- trim that was designed for library panels and chair rail details. It ended up being that I had to assemble two pieces stacked and offset to make the width work, which ended up looking really nice but was a huge amount of extra work. The laminate for the countertop was pretty nice. I can’t imagine what she would have had me do if she hadn’t actually purchased the stuff to be installed like I was accustomed to. The only router bit I had was a forty-five, which is about how many miles worth of cutting I made it do to detail the place where it needed dressing up. That was the kitchen, the bathroom, the window and door trim, the entire staircase system- the whole damn house was a forty-five degree bevel finish. Uniform throughout- continuity is about the only thing the place had, which matched the corner tub and matching riser that I had built for it.

The sump pump crock in the basement corner was a convenient place for my mother’s boyfriend to urinate, since the toilet upstairs was too far to walk when drunk. He had been pissing there for who knows how long.

The pump seemed to run non-stop due to the ground water seeping in from around the footing, and had become in need of replacement. Frantically, I worked to remove and replace the pump before my work area inside the crock became filled. My utility knife had a fresh edge, dressed with the sharpening stone I kept in my bag along with antiquated items- like a rasp, that I was routinely criticized for by other persons I tried to work for. It saved me quite a bit of time and money to drag it across the stone a few strokes. In my haste, and without much needed assistance, I lost control of the knife, slipping from the mass of electrical tape that Stan had used to wire it in, and cutting deep into my left thumb. Quickly, I squeezed the flesh together in an attempt to stop the blood flow as I dashed over to the utility sink to clean the wound. Both, my mother and her boyfriend were there but as soon as I said that I had cut myself they just ducked out. It was one of those situations where you needed an extra pair of hands. Flabbergasted, what could I do? What could I say? They were gone out the door so fast that they didn’t have a chance to hear a single syllable. It was as if I had lit a stick of dynamite. Blood kept gushing, and all I could think about was the bacterial infection that I could lose my thumb over. The cut was held together with my fingers as though I had taken over pinching the penny. Had I not been used to doing everything alone I might have ran across the street to have the neighbor help me. The struggle of washing, drying, and preparing the wound with a triple antibiotic ointment was a real trick. And struggle, to say the least, is what I did. A roll of duct-tape and some paper towels near the sink area was all I had to work with, so that’s what I used to bandage my hand with. From that day on it was difficult to work with the wound- not to mention the wound in my mind that I was once again abandoned in a serious time of need. A carpenter cannot work without a thumb, and I was already too handicapped as it was.

By the time my thumb was completely healed I was burnt out on the project. The bathroom still needed grout for the tile. The faucet needed reinventing in order to install it on the sink, and the place needed carpeting throughout, as well as the various inspections for an occupancy permit. The building inspector never did show up to this day, no matter how many times my mother called him. I think he eventually just sent her the permit.

Now, it’s June of 2008 and I finally received word that I won my disability claim. My sister, her husband, and their five children had taken up occupancy in the house. She put the grout in the bathroom but they never did put in carpeting. My mother figured it wouldn’t need to be replaced if it was never there to begin with. And with several kids and a slew of animals the carpet becoming ruined was inevitable. For all the things in this project that went on that didn’t make any kind of sense, holding off on the carpet installation was the one thing that actually did. Several animals and children could destroy carpet in no time, no matter how hard a person worked to keep it clean. My mother was always over thinking and maybe that’s where I get it from but I only have half of a brain. Is it possible to over think with half of a brain? I’ll have to try and think about that one. Maybe that was a family trait because when my first grandchild was born he only had one complete brain mass- no split hemisphere’s, and died forty five minutes after his birth.