Mostly Ghosts

keeping busy

Lately I’ve been chatting with my dad on the phone. We text, too, or he emails me something and I email back. This is new. For over a year after the book was published, he wouldn’t speak to me. He didn’t read it. He was mad because my mother was mad. I would call and he wouldn’t pick up. I was devastated he’d left my life like this, without warning. I was worried something might happen, that I wouldn’t get to speak with him again. He is 75 years old. It had happened before, the not-speaking. But now we’re talking. He’s been sending me information about saws, mostly. I hope to set up a little wood shop and another space for ceramics in the basement, and so I’ve been trying to give away or sell everything I can to make room, and updating him on my progress. There’s the Mister Steam Generator my parents took out of a building they lost to foreclosure many years ago, never used, somehow in my basement. There’s over a thousand pounds of tile, also from my parents’ construction projects. An almost-new laundry tub my brother left here from another job site, insisting that I change out the sink from the one that was already here. The sink that’s here is fine, I told him, but it didn’t matter, he left this one here anyway. There was a dishwasher here, but I managed to sell that. Some uneven saw horses. Some broken window frames. A roll of flashing, assorted roof tiles. Old paint matching houses where we’ve never lived. I’m trying to empty the basement of stuff, and also ghosts, with mixed results. And I’m talking to my dad, who wants to make sure I get the right kind of tools.

I have a tool bucket and some inexpensive basics, mostly hand tools, a Ryobi drill and impact driver, a little handheld orbital sander that mostly vibrates and redistributes dust to new places. I recently bought a jigsaw from Home Depot, and I’m learning how to use it. I use the multitool to cut out little drywall bits, or the side of a baseboard. That’s also a cheap tool, but a useful one. The fancier tools grew legs and walked out of our house at some point, or else my brother took them. The nice dehumidifier disappeared, and so did a Milwaukee Sawzall, a large yellow bucket dust pan, assorted clamps, a large level, a pancake compressor, hundreds of drill bits, the entirety of our duct work (scrapped), our gutters (also scrapped), a Dewalt sliding compound miter saw, at least a dozen sheets of OSB, one circular saw of indeterminate origin, and whatever else wasn’t nailed down. So now I have mostly junk; I’m trying to get rid of the last of it, but most of it isn’t worth anything. I’m also attempting to assess the tool situation, to see what we have and what I’d like to get in the future. My dad sent a bunch of youtube links for saw reviews, so I can see what makes sense. It seems like there’s a genre of tool videos, and it’s all middle-aged white men in their channel-branded t-shirts with channel-branded hats. They make bad jokes and talk about how they wouldn’t buy a tool just to review it, and then—surprise—they do just that. Over and over again. I just want a track saw that cuts straight and doesn’t chip, I think. I want to make furniture for our apartment I can’t find anywhere else, storage for my ceramics studio. We have a circular saw I use for everything, but it’s hard to operate, heavy and inaccurate, a tool I can only use outside on weather-appropriate days. It scares me a little. At one point my dad calls me on facetime to give me a tour of his shop in Florida, tells me that he’s gotten a new screw container system, that my brother recommended this, from Harbor Freight. That he’s not doing the jelly jar system anymore. “Good,” I say. I don’t remind him that’s because my brother broke the jelly jars when he trashed my dad’s last shop, in Illinois, six months before he burned the house down. Our calls are best when we don’t talk about my brother at all. My dad has offered to go halfsies with me on the track saw, including the track and the dust collection. I am so happy and grateful. Maybe it’ll happen, maybe not; I tell him I need to wait to get paid for a piece to cover my share. Track saws aren’t cheap, especially the kind he thinks I should buy.

My parents are down to eight storage lockers now. Allegedly my brother is helping them renovate a house they bought in Florida, down the street from their townhome, but mostly he just does whatever he wants. Right now he’s camping out in their driveway, sleeping in his truck (he won’t stay in the house; and they’ve stopped covering his long-term hotel stay, after a year) while he outfits his work trailer as a living space, though they still pay rent and utilities at his apartment back home. I try not to think about this either.

It’s better to just keep moving. I go down to the basement and load up more stuff to take to the thrift store as donations. I list items on facebook marketplace for free or cheap, just so they can leave our house. I fill contractor-size black plastic trash bags with anything and everything. I do many loads of laundry. I throw out loose scraps of drywall and then vacuum and demo more and vacuum again. I find my voltmeter and pull dead wire and old Greenfield and throw that out too and run new wire for fixtures in hard pipe. I figure out which leftover paints might mix together and make an ok color for the walls or ceiling. At the end of a day, Ori and I stack over a thousand pounds of tile in our gangway for someone to pick up on the hottest day of the year. There’s still so much to do, but I am trying to make progress anyway. I reassembled my old wheel with new parts and it seems to be working. I will either sell the wheel I bought to bridge the gap while waiting for parts, or my old, now fixed wheel, so I can use that money to buy lumber or tools and build myself a wedging table and basement storage and whatever else.

And sometimes, mostly in the evenings, or early mornings, or in the middle of the night, I’m writing. I write upstairs, in our room, at my desk, or in bed. This book is really sad. I can’t explain how sad it is. Sometimes it is easier to move tile, or think about saws instead.