3.14 Waiting, Waiting, Waiting

1959 • La Habra ~ That summer Chuck bought a boat, bringing an end to our Sunday drives. It was a fifteen-foot, white wood-hulled, mahogany-decked Trojan Chris Craft powered by a 50-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor with a 75 lower end. We didn’t visit missions anymore, now we went on camping and ski trips to the Salton Sea, Back Bay, Lake Nacimiento, and Lake Havasu. The ice chests, canvas army cots, cooking supplies, sleeping bags, grocery sacks, bathing suits and sun hats, zinc oxide, beach towels, and musty brown tent would be packed and ready by the front door. We’d wait for Chuck, who was out in the garage chewing on his dead cigar butt and hunched over the Evinrude, grease up to his elbows, swallowed up by his stuff that was stacked from floor to ceiling. Useful items he might need someday, emerging only to refill his tall frosted Collins glass, then disappearing under the engine again.

We waited, and we waited, and then we waited some more. Sometimes we waited all day. Once we went to bed and got up the next morning and waited half the next day until he was ready.

My brother-in-law spent most of his time hanging out in the garage with Jack Daniels or Jim Beam, tinkering on engines in the middle of his junk. Chuck didn’t throw anything away. He kept stacks of old newspapers and piles of magazines. He saved pieces of wire and lengths of rope. He had drawers of gloves and jelly jars of tacks, nails, and bits, and coffee cans of nuts and bolts and rusty washers, Dutch Masters boxes of small brass screws. He stored oil rags in dented tin buckets. There were small boxes of screwdrivers, medium boxes of rasps, and big boxes of power drills. He had wood crates filled with engine and machine parts along with lawnmower, car, and boat parts. The garage was so crammed with workbenches, toolboxes, and cabinets that his treasured Mercury sat day in and day out in the sun-beaten driveway. When it finally died, it rested on blocks there for years, discarded like last year’s faded orange and black Halloween costume.

to be continued…

© 2018. Catherine Sevenau.
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