I like to work on my house. I’m not all that talented at home repair, but I really like the process. Look at a room, imagine what it could be and work through from demolition to reconstruction. Our house is pretty old. The main part of it was built as early as 1849 and it didn’t have a major upgrade until 1905. After those years very little was actually done to change the basic structure. We have most all the original woodwork and molding. But it didn’t even have a real kitchen until the mid 1970s. The kitchen was a room in the back right corner of the house with a potbelly stove in it and no running water. In the 70s the owners converted half of the dining room and back hallway into a real kitchen. (Although, my wife hates it and has been pleading with me for 20 years to redo it.) The old kitchen with the potbelly stove went unused after that time. It became a storeroom. It was a mess. The potbelly was gone when we bought it but there was still a hole in the wall where the smoke was vented. There was a hole in the floor where someone had begun to try to remodel, but just couldn’t bring themselves to finish it. The wallpaper was pealing away, there was no heat and the ceiling was 4 layers of plaster board nailed, one below the other. A mess. So when my children were young and when I had some time between shows, I sealed the room away from the rest of the house with thick plastic sheeting and started the demolition. Any red-blooded man will tell you that demolition is the fun part. It’s what children innately do. They break things. And what are men? We are nothing but big children. I ripped out the old ceiling and stripped about half the original plaster walls. Then I turned to the floor. It was made of one-inch tongue and groove pine. But it had not been well preserved. It had been covered with old linoleum. And there were holes all over it into the crawlspace below, which was not insulated. I needed to run heat and wiring into the room and the easiest way was through the floor. So I had to rip out all of it. I decided the easiest way forward would be to cut the floorboards between the joists and knock out the shortened sections of board with a hammer. My plan was working splendidly, but I became bored with the drudgery of getting down on my knees to hammer out the pieces. I began to search for a shortcut. This is never a good thing in the carpentry business. I soon found myself (as if it just happened by accident) stomping down on the boards to dislodge them from the joists. It was fun. I would stomp and the little section of flooring would spin up into the air. Each piece had a couple of nails sticking out of the bottom. Not those modern round nails, but the squared off nails they used in the 1800s. I had been working all afternoon. I was sweaty and dirty and tired and I was not paying very much attention to what I was doing. I was nearly finished and stomped down on a board close to the back door. It spun up into the air and smacked against the side of my inner right calf. It made a loud slappy sound as it hit me….and then it just stayed there, hanging onto the side of my leg. I thought I’d performed a miracle, or, at least, a kind of magic trick. I laughed a little. I imagined that my leg was so wet from sweat that the board had just stuck there, like a playing card to the forehead. But then I tried to move it. And I realized, to my great horror, the board was nailed to my leg. Oh, the things that go through your head at a moment like that! Wonder and panic and disgust and, finally, the realization that I would have to remove it. I sat down on the remaining flooring. Should I use the claw-end of the hammer to pry it off? Or should I just rip it off like a band-aid? I chose the latter. It was a neat little hole. It really wasn’t bleeding that much. And I really didn’t feel much pain. “I’m going to be fine”, I thought. Then I looked down at the nail. It was long and rusty. It had buried itself a good inch and a half into my calf and I tried to stand. The muscle began to quiver and a sharp pain crawled up and down my leg. I sank back to the floor. “Honey!”, I cried, “I might have to go to the hospital.” Three hours later I sat in the emergency room trying to explain to the nurse what I’d done to myself. “Have you had a tetanus shot in the last ten years?”, she asked. I’m sure I had, because of an unfortunate episode with a box cutter a few years earlier. (Only four stitches required.). “Well, I’ll still have to flush out the wound.” She added, as she left the room. A few minutes later she appeared with what looked to me to be an old-fashioned turkey baster. Just bigger. It was a long, clear glass tube that tapered down to a little hole. There were little lines marked off all along its’ length with corresponding numbers over each line. It had a big pink rubber bulb on the other end. And it was filled with a clear liquid. “What are you going to do with that?”, I asked. I remember feeling panicked. “We have to clean the wound.” She said. And more quickly than my mind could process the information she shoved the end of the baster into the little nail hole on my leg. It surprised and disgusted me how neatly it fit into the wound. But it didn’t hurt. So far so good. This was going to be a breeze. And then she squeezed the pink rubber bulb. Have you ever imagined what a balloon must feel like? The pain was surprising. It felt as if my foot, including each individual toe, was swelling with the pressure. In fact, that is exactly what was happening. My leg was being blown up like an old, rubber inner tube with saline solution. My skin burned. My eyes bulged wide. I gasped and my face drained of color. The nurse said, “You feel alright?” I did not. “You don’t look so good,” she added. I’m sure I didn’t. “I’ll get your wife.” Good idea. I awoke with Diana standing over me. “You passed out.”, she said wryly. “It hurt.”, I said. She shook her head. She had birthed babies. My little puncture wound did not impress her. They checked my blood pressure, bandaged the wound and sent me home. If I am completely honest, my struggles in this world have been minor. I wish I could say that I’ve lived the martyr’s life, but I can’t. He hung there on wooden beams, pierced by crude iron spikes, slowly draining away, making the world’s failings His own. No matter what I experience in my life, I will never be able to imagine His sufferings.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Jun 2013 02:15:48 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015