What Shall I Write About?

“Hardwood flooring” you say.  Well I love a challenge, but you’re my target audience.  “No really, what do you want me to write about?”  I was thinking more along the lines of some deep probing insight that would inspire the youngest of my progeny to overcome some overwhelming difficulty.  Nope, you just threw the gauntlet on the kitchen counter.

Well then, I will tell you a Christmas story.  Once upon a time, when you were still dead, your mother and I got married.  I was a student and part time carpenter and she was working as a teller at a local bank.  We lived in a very small apartment with two front doors downtown.  The adjacent church owned the apartment complex, which we affectionately referred to as the Ghetto.  Now, there were in those days interns abiding in the church, and a long progression of us served as apartment managers.  If you were a less contrary child you would have asked me to write about my adventures as a slum lord, which would be much more entertaining, but you didn’t.

 Christmas is a great expression of God’s nature because he gives gifts on his birthday.  I believe that Christmas trees and gifts should reflect His nature (aka HUGE).  Think about it, God is by nature huge.  Your tree should be huge, it should touch the ceiling, even if you have to put it on a table and get an extra tall angel for the top.  Gifts should also be as big as possible.  You are so contrary, I can hear your response “but jewelry is small”.  Yes and how big would you like the diamond to be?  Yes, that’s what I thought “Huge’, so pay attention.  Gifts should be big.

 Our first married Christmas was a test for the hugeness factor.  We were paying our own way through college and we were a part of the informed poor.  Many people tell stories of their youth in which they are happy and poor, “but we didn’t know we were poor because we had love”.  Well, we were happy and in love.  We did however receive invoices in the mail each day that burst our bubble of oblivion and informed us that we were poor.  So, when it was time to impress my bride with a huge Christmas gift I had to give it some serious thought.

 One day in mid November I was on a job gutting a home in preparation for a major remodel.  We were to take the place down to the studs and replaced every surface.  Now this would be a more interesting story if you had asked me to write about adventures in carpentry, because I could tell you about the time we tore out a kitchen by mistake; but you didn’t.  Anyway, I was just breaking stuff so I had time to consider my conundrum of getting your mom a huge gift while possessing insufficient resources. 

 As I began to remove the windows of the home I noticed that they had that wavy ripple that characterizes old glass.  It impressed me so much that I stopped breaking them and saved a few, thinking that perhaps I would make something with them.  What could I make that would be both huge and impressive.  One of my fellow college student carpenters, and my partner in ‘Moonlight Construction, we work while you try to sleep’ was your Uncle Bumpy.  By happenstance, he was working on a similar project where he too rescued various materials. 

 And it came to pass that I did stare at a pile of used building materials and ponder; “what can I make out of that stuff that she will love?”  ‘She loves China’, came the answer.  I capitalized this by mistake, she does not love the country of China, she likes plates.  I could tell you the story of her childhood in China and her escape from the communist regime.  This would of course be a highly entertaining prevarication, and you could have asked me to write about that, but you didn’t.

 You did ask me to write about hardwood flooring, of which I now had a truckload.  Bumpy also added to my old window collection.  Thus inspired I began lying to your mother (for the first and only time that year) about needing to study at the seminary library.  I worked in the church maintenance shop for a number of nights to complete the project. Then on Christmas Eve while your mother worked by candlelight as a teller in the counting house I moved the gift into place. 

 The old windows and oak floorboards were crafted into a huge china cabinet that successfully impressed my little collector of dead person’s tableware.  So, next time you suffer the existential angst that is the habit of you youngsters these days just remember that you could have asked me to write the secret solution down for you.  But you asked me to write about hardwood flooring instead, and I did.