A House
My landlord Ed Clement was changing the faucet in the garage, felt faint, sat down, called Mrs. Clement. She walked down, found him unconscious. A hospital, a surgery. The faucet job he had left finished, that’s Ed.
A couple of days prior Ed and I were watching a Lawrence Welk replay. When the program ended, Ed gazed at the turned-off screen, then said:
“Did you know that since 1948 most European Americans voted for a Republican in the presidential elections? Except when Kennedy was shot, most European Americans voted then for Johnson.”
The convo happened in 1998, and actually Ed didn’t say that. He did not know. Even though he liked to read and read a lot (beside newspapers the biology stuff, his hobby), nowhere had he found the above statistics. He hadn’t also heard it on the radio nor seen on TV or in the movies. He hadn’t, because the free media didn’t talk about those things. What for, so the Ed Clements of America would, perhaps, start thinking along these lines? Or – now, that would be swell – doing something about it?
When we were hanging out on the porch, or fixing something in the workshop, or, like the last time, watching Lawrence Welk, Ed would drop that “something” was wrong with the country. That America wasn’t “the same.” He’d speak in a noticeably apologetic tone, as if someone stronger, perhaps much stronger, was standing behind him and might get angry, if Ed Clement dared to break the untouchable spell.
I have been meeting other likewise discontented denizens in Montana, Wyoming, the Midwest. The old ones, the middle-age ones, and some youngsters, too. So it couldn’t be simple the nostalgia of the older generation, or not only that. Rather, like Ed, they were sensing some trouble America has been in for some time. And yet, they seemed sincerely unable to name it, to put the finger on the cause. At the most – and then their faces would brighten and the voice would lose the apologizing tone – they would come up with the belief in the political pendulum bouncing back and setting the country straight again, like Dan of one of my gigs.
After Ed had gone to the hospital, I took care of the flag. Not Mrs. Clement, you kidding, everybody knew she had an inner ear problem. Fastening the flag onto the pole in the morning and taking it down at the sunset while balancing atop a stool-ladder was my job now.
Ed had a surgery and after recovery he and Mrs. Clement flew to their son in West Virginia. I started fixing their Acacia Street house. We had already made the deal before Ed’s trouble, and we upheld it before their taking off.
I had painted apartments for a living. I did carpentry, bricklaying, metalwork. But I hadn’t done a whole house yet. This was the first. The experience, turned out, could be quite spiritual, as some call such animation. A supermandala, of sorts. Our mandala, European, in the sense that we don’t deal here with laying of images with mosaic glass, or drawing lines on paper, or in the sand, or abstractly gimmicking in the head…
…but playing straightly and directly with the elements of life. So it would not be mandala so much, but more like a Mass. A Mass of life.
There are two main ways of repairing a house: starting inside moving outside, or starting outside moving inside. I started inside and was just finishing the outside, when the spirit, as it’s been called, began filling me up like I didn’t remember since. Since the First Communion day, perhaps. And it ought to be noticed that when I was working inside, redoing the rooms, the bathrooms, the hallway, the stairwell, the cabinets, the doors, the windowsills and the frames, and when I had done all those, I felt nothing special. It was just work. It was enjoyable when going well, and also when one space was finished and I could move on to the next, but only that.
But by the end of the summer — because I started in June and it was already mid-September — when I could now calculate on what day and almost by what hour it would be all done, when even the storm windows stacked in the basement were gone through, and the new sections in the roof gutters fitted in, and when the house exterior walls began shining with the final haystack yellow, and the porch, the pillars, and the roof after a spatula job here and there and pointed touch-ups began acquiring eye-pleasing contours – an all-encompassing energy began rising in me. Which with each new day when I was waking up in the morning, drinking coffee and going to work, and working all day, and fixing dinner in the evening, and falling asleep, and even when I awoke at night, would grow. And grow. And grow.
What was it?
Mandala it was. Our European mandala. A Mass of life. A house.
