Plumbing the Depths

On Thursday a VERY IMPORTANT PIPE broke under our house. OK, under our trailer. I called a plumber, who came and had the grace to look sheepish when he said, "I'm not crawling under there. Do you know what's under there?"

Well, yeah. It's the stuff that came out of the VERY IMPORTANT PIPE. And you're a plumber - I could tell when you bent over to look under the - uh - house. Aren't you supposed to deal with this - uh - stuff for a living?

So I hired a different guy to clean up the stuff under the house - let's call him Guy 2, and we won't mention Guy 1 again - and Guy 2 discovered that there is lots of other unmentionable stuff going on under there – more, that is, than just whatever came out of the VERY IMPORTANT PIPE. It's ugly down there, or so they tell me.

Guy 2 made sense, so I agreed to pay him a lot of money to make all of the stuff go away, permanently. Or as close to permanently as I care about. "How old are you now?" he asked.

Guy 2 also said he couldn’t really fix the problem until I hired a plumber to fix the pipe that was producing the stuff. You get the Catch 22 aspect of this story, do you not?

So I hired Guy 3 to fix the VERY IMPORTANT PIPE, which is where we started. I didn't tell him about the stuff. He’s a plumber; let him deal with it. He promises to come Monday morning, which is now tomorrow (unless this article takes longer to write than I expect).

Thursday to Monday was longer than I was willing to go without peeing except against a tree. Not to mention the Lady Who Would Not Be Caught Dead.  So we relocated to the Sunburst Inn, a lovely little beachfront place down the coast a bit. I tried to get the Displaced Persons’ Rate, but it was the weekend, and the oil crisis has not, apparently, driven prices down as far as the newspaper would have you believe.

But the Sunburst is nice, and it fronts on the oil-free Gulf of Mexico. It is easy to forget just how gorgeous the beaches are on the Gulf.

This story has a point – stay with me here.

So, we’re sitting on the beach last night – Saturday – and it’s 82 degrees and balmy, and the Gulf and the moon and Venus and Mars and some other celestial bodies are doing their hypnotically lovely thing. There is alcohol involved, of course, and in my alcohol-induced state of euphoria, I say to the Lady Who Would Not Be Caught Dead, “Isn’t this delightful?” The LWWNBCD just makes a rude digestive noise and goes on tuning me out.

Paradise is different things to different people.

Newt

Shaking the Foundations of Decent Writing

Sugar Creek, which is the mobile home community (read: trailer park) in which I reside, has a salutary rule that the nether regions of one’s trailer, like the nether regions of one’s person, be modestly obscured by some appropriate skirting, which for this trailer park means white bricks measuring 4 inches square by 16 inches long, laid in a pattern that resembles an open basket-weave having congress with a checkerboard, but that rule is so old that no one sells the requisite bricks anymore; so those of us neurotic enough to want to obey the rule must either glue together crumbling old bricks or scrounge not-too-badly-used bricks from some other trailer park whose management has been struck by more modern ideas, which is the strategy I adopted when I recently undertook to fill a sizable gap in my modesty skirting that opened up when I removed an elderly and misshapen oak tree that had grown too close to the trailer, but the leftover stump got in the way and, being made out of oak, could not be removed using conventional tools such as axes or dynamite, so I leveled the area as best I could using a trowel and a bucket of sweat and purchased a couple of long aluminum angle irons – if angle irons can be made of aluminum – and used them to bridge the affected area, allowing me to complete the visually attractive brick-weave that fits in so well with the neighborhood and has helped me create the longest sentence I have written so far this week, although I would appreciate it if you did not tell this to the guy who writes Shaking the Writing Tree.

Newt

You’re living in a WHAT!?

The voice of one of my lawyer friends comes through the telephone: “So now that you’ve relocated to Florida, where are you living? Did you buy a condo? A house?”

Me: “We bought a doublewide.”

Voice: “-------.”

Voice continues: “--------.”

Me: “You don’t know what that is, do you?”

Voice: “Not exactly.”

So I explain in measured, simple-to-absorb terms, that I live in a mobile home park in the Tampa Bay area with a bunch of other 55-plus-year-olds.

Voice: “A mobile … uh, a TRAILER??!!”

Me: “Yes, exactly, although the more delicately constituted of us refer to it as a manufactured residence.”

Voice: “-------.”

This is cognitive dissonance in its purest, most joyous-to-behold form. I spent my legal career – “legal” is not the only career I’ve had – hauling in what many would call big bucks, although I had friends at the rainmaking end of the rainbow who would have starved on my pay. I loved the law – still do – but had grown weary of the more practical aspects of the law business – schmoozing clients, drumming up business, worrying about generating cash flow – in short, all the perfectly honorable stuff that pays the bills. I admire those who are driven by the law because they are so deeply satisfied and because they make the very best lawyers. But I was never driven and did not want to continue plowing that field until I was 65 or 66 or, as some have done, until I dropped in the traces.

With my kids securely launched, my Connecticut home almost paid for, and a modest nest egg – shockingly modest, some would say – tucked away, my choices were retire in Connecticut at 66 with my then-current lifestyle or sell everything and retire to Florida at 60 to a life of genteel poverty. Or at least I hoped it would be genteel. The nuns who instilled in me my lifelong fear of religion and penguins preached to us 13-year-old boys, “If you think it, you have done it.” So, having thought it, I did it: off to the sunny south for me and Judy.

We live in a home made of metal and particle board. My lawyer friends do not live in metal homes or have substantial chunks of their homes fashioned of ersatz wood. They are – though most would never say so – appalled. I have waited all my life to appall people with impunity. In the past, fear of punity has always had its way with me.

Me: “Yes, it’s a trailer park, the kind that draws tornadoes and makes a mess on the front page of the Hartford Courant every hurricane season. Ours is a high-class trailer park, though, insofar as management does not allow junk cars to pile up in what passes for the front yard or chickens to peck around the back dooryard. But it is a trailer park. My house is put together with paneling and staples and bathtub caulk. I love it here.” In truth, I do not like the bathtub caulk, which sticks everything in the place to everything else, but that’s a quibble, and I am learning to cope.

Voice: “------.”

I have opted out. Neither an old hippie nor otherwise disaffected, I nonetheless live a simple existence that satisfies me and Judy. There is money to pay for whatever medical issues may arise in my dotage and for a few luxuries to boot. I write, read, volunteer, and sit on my ass to my heart’s content. I fly or drive north to see my grandchildren when I want, and I bring them here when they want. If I were to sink a suitcase full of money into a house, thereby freeing my lawyer friends from their rising state of appallment, then I couldn’t do those things that have quickly become so important to me. Instead I would stay home in my stucco hacienda, worry about mill rates, and tend what passes in Florida for a lawn

My tacky little doublewide is full of the stuff I have loved since Judy agreed to marry me 41 years ago. (This much-loved stuff does not include the two cats, but they make Judy happy.) Everything that was not much-loved when I left Connecticut, I gave to my kids or sold to my neighbors. Now, when I visit Connecticut, everything looks vaguely familiar. Oh, and I kept my 7-year-old sports car, which is where I store my masculinity. I still love that. The car, I mean. And the masculinity too, I suppose.

A curious coda is developing. Lawyers whom I had expected to one day drop in their traces have called to inquire, oh-so-casually, how I have done this – whatever “this” means to them. I tell them that there is life after law. I am living with that greatest of all treasures – impunity. In a trailer park.

Newt