Little Miss Do-It-All

Tough getting up today, especially if you're like me and you overworked all weekend – if you can call it work bringing seven male teens to see some Shakespeare, then having supper with them before going to play laser tag until 10 at night. That was all fun, as was going to see the most amazing troupe of young actors perform an original version of The Pied Piper. It was also fun to write my 1000^th post; fun to take notes in a deli for this week’s column, fun to do it all –

If only I had stopped before I began refinishing the furniture.

I notice people kind of hate you if you seem to be organized and 'productive' and have it all together. I know I've drawn some fire in the past from people for being neat and having spices that were alphabetized and all but if they get even a little closer they see: You don’t live this way because you choose to. You live this way because even after all these years you are still pursued by these nameless Hounds of Hell who make you think that it’s not enough to just BE your own little self, you also have to also DO, and serve all the time. So they will love you I suppose. So they maybe won’t leave.

I knew I had crossed the line when I saw myself pulling those two dusty and wrecked old bedsteads out of the attic and starting in on the job of refinishing them, just because one of my kids spotted them in there a few weeks ago and indicated they were maybe pretty nice beds under all those scratchmarks.

Now, on this Monday March 12th, besides working a full day and taking a 91-year-old man to the cardiologist and buying the food and cooking, I also have to finish staining two foot boards, and getting the whole mess out of the kitchen where I was working on the project - which feels like a pretty tall order to me right now.

I bet all our Monday chores feel like pretty tall orders to all of us playing the Daylight Savings game, which is everyone in the U.S. anyway especially when we woke at 6:00 or 7:00 and already felt like we were an hour behind and low on sleep besides.

Ah well. I guess today I’ll just start in again with those mantras I learned in those 12-step Al-Anon meetings, like One Day at a Time, and Easy Does It, and Don’t Just Do Something Stand There.

But gosh the old wood sure looks great. Here's the "Before" with the old finish off but no stain:

And here's the wood with just one coat:

You liberate the living tree when you strip and refinish a piece of wood. If only it were as easy to liberate yourself.

Penance

I did keep silence yesterday. Until the sun went down I spoke not a word and found the experience grimly gratifying. The whole time I was standing over a ten-foot long dining table scrubbing and scrubbing it with a strong solvent and coarse steel wool until the badly dinged and gummy finish finally dissolved to reveal the living wood beneath.It was a good job for the day, though I stood for five hours bent to the task and filling my lungs with those toxic chemicals while just outside this sunny day to the left here bloomed like an Easter corsage.It kept reminding me of Confession, the way you‘d feel on a Saturday when you gathered all your  courage and ducked quick  into that velvet-curtained ‘phone booth’ . I always told not the slight small sins but the biggest and worst ones. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t getting forgiveness under false pretenses.  Stripping off a marred finish really does feel like you're examining your conscience, which is as unnerving a process as searching the back of that closet with the dead-mouse smell. As I scraped and sanded my way through the day I thought about the people I have harmed in my life.I started the day angry – some website lifted my whole post  yesterday and ran it as theirs - and then I thought of King Lear at the height of his poor-me prase carrying on about he was a man more sinned against than sinning. As if that’s ever true.  Anyway it’s never been true in my case, so I was glad to have spent the day clearing away the accretions of greasy diner’s fingers and lemon oil and the wax of a thousand candles to come at last upon the bare wood, as clean and plain and fragrant as ever it was in the silent forest.Now tomorrow some pigment to fire the grain and then a fresh coat of finish for protection.

shriven