Building Memories
Home improvement by a husband with a
disdain for directions leads to laughter

There is a certain joy in commiserating with people who have had similar experiences, especially if there is shared anguish over a common cause. I had such a conversation recently with Randy Fitzgerald.

The Fitzgeralds have had a recent spate of trouble with plumbing gone awry and falling ceilings, which Randy has written about several times in his column for the Richmond Times-Dispatch. All such problems have since been patched, which left Randy, my friend of more than 20 years, without a thing to tell me—for now.

This gave me the perfect opportunity to share some of my late husband’s construction antics during the years that he, our two sons and I spent refurbishing an 80-year-old farmhouse in South Hill, Va., a small town in Mecklenburg County near North Carolina.
I knew I was in trouble when I came home from work one day, stepped into the foyer and heard a power saw running. Almost afraid to venture farther, I crept into the great room we had previously created by knocking out the wall between the dining room and the living room.

To my horror I saw my husband and our younger son, Jason, hip-deep in a huge hole that they had evidently just cut out in the middle of the two rooms. When he saw me, my husband silenced the saw. Almost unable to breathe, I managed to get out a question: “Oscar, what are you doing?”

With an impish grin, my husband replied, “You said you wanted a fireplace, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I didn’t say where,” came my anguished reply.

“Well, now you don’t have to decide,” Oscar said, laughing outright.

The situation was so absurd, I had to laugh as well. After all, the floor was history. Within minutes, I had changed from my business suit and heels to a pair of jeans and T-shirt, had threaded a garden hose through the dining-room window, and was using a hoe to mix concrete in a wheelbarrow already stationed near the hole. In just over an hour, the three of us had poured the footing for that fireplace and were washing up for dinner.

Telling Randy about that stirred up memories of other unbelievable things Oscar did during the 10 years we restructured our living space, not to speak of our religion. Several incidents rank right up there with Ripley’s Believe It or Not.

“Randy,” I asked, “do you have any idea what it’s like to knock down an 80-year-old chimney while you are living in the house?” I could almost feel him grimace.

At this point, Randy tentatively asked, “Have you ever watched Tool Time or This Old House?”

“Watch them?” I scoffed. “I could have written the scripts.”

Although he was aggravating at times, my late husband, Oscar, who died 12 years ago this month, was truly the most talented man I’ve ever known. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t tackle, whether he had the expertise or not. He firmly believed in one thing: Avoid all directions and do what you think works. Most of the time it did. The only thing Oscar couldn’t do was lay brick. His one attempt at bricklaying left behind a “straight” patio wall that resembled a snake in transit.

Oscar’s construction forays are legion. The boys and I still laugh at his unorthodox solutions, especially the uses he found for a hammer. While he was long on ideas, he was short on patience. There were times when I thought his motto was, “If I can’t fix it, I’ll just break it completely.”

Oscar tried to surprise me one weekend by building me a dressing-room table and bookcase while I was away at a conference. The table was perfect, but the bookcase stretched from floor to ceiling and would have made me feel like Big Brother was watching as I applied mascara. Oscar could tell by the look on my face that his handiwork was a bit off-kilter. Thinking really fast, I said, “Jason doesn’t have any bookcases. This will look wonderful on the far wall of his bedroom.”

Each of us grabbed a side of the behemoth and started up the staircase, where we managed to lodge the bookcase squarely on top of the banister. Without saying a word, Oscar left it dangling in midair and went outside. I retreated to the kitchen. When I heard varoom varoom, I ran back into the hallway just in time to see the top of the banister go flying through the air. Oscar calmly shut off the power saw and gave me a look that dared me to speak. Once upstairs, the bookcase looked perfect, just like the knob of the banister did after the wood putty and several coats of paint were applied.

Is it any wonder that Beau, our older son, bought a copy of Chevy Chase’s Christmas Vacation for the three of us to watch after Oscar died? It was the perfect tribute to an imperfect man who eventually decided to leave the outdoor Christmas lights intact year-round after Jason fell with a thud from the 30-foot magnolia tree one January after trying to dismantle the long strands.

Heading into the baker’s dozen of years since his death, it still seems strange to celebrate Christmas without him each December. Oscar loved laying train tracks and watching How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The boys loved watching him. At one point during the cartoon, Oscar always laughed until he lost his breath, fell over and made this squeaky little sound that sent the boys into gales of laughter along with him.

September is another month filled with memories. My birthday is Sept. 2. Oscar’s was Sept. 3, and our anniversary was Sept. 5, the combination of the first two dates. To keep things even, I guess, he died on Sept. 23, another combination of the two dates.
I don’t think it was a coincidence that our first grandchild, a beautiful little redhead with hazel eyes like Oscar’s, would be born on Sept. 20, 2002. “Maggie” has a habit of spinning her chubby little hands around in circles in perpetual motion. The first time I saw her do it, I decided right then and there what I needed to buy her for her first birthday—a hammer to break something with.

Strange, isn’t it, how life has a way of filling in the hard places in ways you never expected?

September 2003