This is something I never thought I'd ever say: we're having our garage door replaced.
Who has garage doors that belong to them? Who thinks to themselves, "When I grow up, among the things that I will own will be a garage door"? I guess when I was a kid, I might have imagined that I might one day own a house, or at the very least a car I slept in as I kept a few steps ahead of the law, but a garage door?
The home we currently live in, my wife, my beagles, my cats, & myself, this house which we can say "we own" even though we owe way too much money on it to use the word "own," this house we live in was once owned by a person who was apparently a "slumlord." We have discovered, piece by piece, the corners he cut to get the cheapest possible things to keep the house warm, dry, not on fire, up to code (but just up to code). One of those corners was a (possibly self-installed) garage door opener that had been, in its years of use, so poorly & cheaply put together that it was curving & about to split. It made a horrible racket whenever it opened. When its innards went bad & we had to get someone in to fix it, the garage door specialists (because there are such things) said that it needed replacing pronto.
Luckily, I was in no way involved in the purchasing of a new garage door. Frankly, anything having to do with the house, I let the wife choose. I have no aesthetic opinion about the color of walls or the arrangement of furniture or whatever choice one has to make about garage doors. (For the record, she chose sandstone.)
Why don't I care? Because there are far more important things to argue about. I save my energy for those arguments, not ones about the color of garage doors. In high school & in college, I put things on the wall - mainly music-related posters - as a way to inform the rare visitor that these were my interests. I don't care to do that anymore. It's probably a relief to the wife.
We also have no photos, professionally made or otherwise, of us or the animals on the wall. I find those weird, like you need to remind yourself that these people are, in fact, related or married to you. We put pictures on the fridge, but really, if we didn't have them, I wouldn't care. Time already buries us; one doesn't need peripherals like photos & mail & stickers & magnets to weigh down the already suffocating memories.
As I write this, & listen to music for Friday's show, there's all kinds of knocking & banging noises. They're almost done. I'm a little worried, myself - the old, falling-apart garage door was noisy as hell. This one probably won't be. & while I'm not a guilty person, & I can't imagine what I'd be doing that the wife can "catch me" at, I did like the noise that indicated she was returning. That will probably be gone.
Maybe I should make her wear a bell around her neck.
Update: it's a pretty quiet garage door. Damn.
No comments:
Post a Comment