Getting Centered.

Last evening J and I went to a local building on Main Street which serves as the center of Zen Buddhist activities in our city. On the first Friday night of every month, those who like to drum, play flutes or shakers or whatever foregather to exercise their creative muscles.

Symbolically perhaps, the tall old building has a very tall and steep staircase, with a landing half way up for those who may be wish to stop for a while and contemplate the possibilities. There are two: go up or down. To reverse directions would be to give in to the laws of aging and gravity. Onward and upward.

At the top, we entered a room with a sofa, desk and some people from our group. After unpacking J's djembe, I sat for a while thinking about stairlifts and catapults and oxygen masks and pitons while the group discussed its next gig. In the absence of either of the two instruments I usually play (the dundun or bass drum, and the balafon or xylophone) I decided to get up and poke around and discover the Center.

There were two back rooms: one a kitchen with a small cubicle containing an empty cabinet (appropriate) on which a small Buddha sat, a box of matches and some incense sticks. The kitchen proper had a refrigerator and microwave, a huge coffee urn and a poster about how to make donations. A doorway led to the HVAC system/cleaning closet.

Retracing my steps, I passed by the drummers into a very large, high-ceilinged room with large windows facing the street with blinds drawn. A rectangle of mats and beanbag cushions was laid out before the benign gaze of a second, larger Buddha on another cabinet.

No lights were on, but the setting sun provided enough to see a parchment divider screen to the left. Behind it lay a large supply of mats and beanbag cushions.

Like Goldilocks, I decided to try on a few for size. I soon discovered that proper placement of these devices induces a very deep state of meditation, one that some cultures call "sleep". Meanwhile, the drummers beat out a number of patterns, some classic and some improvised. When you lie on the floor like that, the bass beats become particularly pervasive and hypnotic.

Time passed, and we made our way slowly down the mountain.

And from The OaklandNews comes this bit of Zen wisdom: Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me, either. Just leave me the hell alone.

We were taken for a ride

Last Saturday, May 12, 2007, was just one more in a series of anniversaries. This time it was the 12th reminiscence of J and The Old Guy getting married on the beach at Treasure Island in Florida's St. Petersburg area.

So we went out and bought a car.

Neona the Canuck Neon finally croaked. She had transmission problems: couldn't get out of second gear. She couldn't run her engine fast enough to sustain the effort, and even when she got revved up, it didn't last. Slow down and she'd shift back to a more comfortable second gear at 40 miles an hour.

Her steering was starting to falter, and her rear struts had long since been bent out of shape by The Old Guy's habit of carrying too much home improvement material in her trunk. Take her over a railway track and you bent your sacroiliac.

Perhaps worst of all was the total lack of air conditioning. The medical report was that they'd have to remove her dashboard to get at the non-functioning heat exchanger. So to get her to where she could be considered roadworthy again was estimated at around $1900 US.

Well, we did lay out $200 about three weeks earlier to replace a leaking oil pan gasket, but that was where the bucks stopped.

We didn't start out on Saturday to buy a car. We went to look at a Scion, the boxy offering that J wouldn't find fitting, but fortunately, the new models were coming in but hadn't yet arrived. So we moved on, past the Toyotas to the Hondas. And whaddya know: the salesman found a 2004 Honda Accord with a mere 40,500 miles or so on it for us to test drive.

It was love at first flight. I had forgotten what a real car felt like. Power to spare, but a gas sipper, and working air conditioning (an impressive selling point in these parts). Electric windows and, get this, an electric sunroof. So THIS is how the other half has been living all these years!

So now the Honda Automobile Corporation is down by one car, but the Honda Finance Corporation is rubbing its hands at the beginning of a five-year relationship. Or to put it more ironically, TOG has to work for five more years to pay off the car he needs to get him to his job.

And Neona? Well, her trade-in value boiled down to $500 US. I guess that's the floor price they're willing to pay anyone who brings in a junker. So she has been replaced in TOG's heart and soul by a brand new girl: Wanda Honda. How fickle he is.

Even though the new car is a thing of beauty and a toy forever, J topped it when she presented TOG with a small radio-controlled sailboat. That was right on Target! What presents of mine! Perfect fit for the 16-foot swimming pool that has yet to be reinstalled for the summer. On windless days, we can take out one of our floor fans to the water's edge and keep on tacking.

Just trying to keep a roof over our heads

So, yeah. Here we see The Old Guy (TOG) sitting in a nearly-completed “florida room” on the back deck of the house. How did that happen, you ask?

Well, since the dawn of time, we’ve had dining tents or gazebos of one form or another. Each year we have to replace them. The tops rip, or the plastic deteriorates, or somebody stumbles while trying to operate the door zipper and shreds the mosquito netting.

Each year, we go out to find a new dining tent. But alas, this year, none was to be found at an affordable price. This awakened the Spirit of Carpentry in TOG, and soon he was haunting the local Lowes home improvement store. The idea was to reuse the last tent, which was 8 by 8 feet, as the cover for an 8 * 8 dining tent frame made of 1 by 2 inch furring strips.

A couple of weeks and much sweat equity later, a sturdy frame of 2*4s emerged, and screen cloth that was six feet wide by 24 feet long was wrapped around it and stapled down. The tent idea was discarded, as was the tent, when it was noted that it wouldn't fit over the frame.

A door was devised that had magnets embedded in the edge to ensure that no cats could leave the compound. At the suggestion of interested family members, rafters were added, and the entire roof area was first screened beneath them, and then the whole assembly was covered with a retractable plastic tarpaulin.

Back in the day, Dad built various features of our cottage, including putting it together out of a "prefab" delivered kit. We thought prefab meant "pretty fabulous".

Perhaps that was where the carpenty bug bit (followed closely by the black fly). At any rate, trying hard to adhere to “measure twice and cut once” and other tribal memories, TOG made a couple of errors that were mainly inconvenient, and so perhaps a better name for the unit would be “the Leaning Tower of Pizza”.

The main discrepancy is that the original dining tent flared at the bottom, out to ten feet square. So we had 100 sq. ft. to accommodate us. But by making the sides vertical (the way Dad did it, using a level), that total floor dimension shrank to 64 square feet. So the maximum occupancy sign will have to read “Four adults or four cats”. But then, if the sides had flared out at the bottom, the screen cloth wouldn’t have fit. So you see how torn The Old Guy was at times in trying to meet all the group’s needs. And how he now understands how an architect feels at a planning meeting.

Of course, the first night found the Grey Cat Who Personifies Evil up on the rafter, presumably by climbing up the screens. But that was before the top was screened in. Now he is content to lie across the path of anyone who dares to use the Catbana.

The best idea of all came about 75% of the way through the project, from J, of course.

“Why not fit it right up against the patio door, so we can leave the inside doors open and the cats can go out anytime they like and sit in the screenhouse with us?”

And that, Dear Reader, explains the batts of fiberglas insulation between the exterior wall of the house and the abutting wall of the Catbana. We may not have black flies in season but we sure have mosquitoes. As the saying goes, “Once bitten, twice shy.”