JUL-A-2
A RAPID VISIT AND “WHOLESALE APPLIANCE
SHOPPING” WITH DESIGNERS’ SUGGESTIONS
AND A CONTINUING HOT DUSTY JOB OF PACKING UP
OVER HALF OF MY LIFE’S MEMORABILIA IN
STRIPPING THE HOUSE IN DERWOOD WHILE PACKING UP
FOR INDIA AND ALASKA
June 29—July 3, 2003
It is quite a way to celebrate the US’s birthday party in the center of the patriotic hoopla of the fourth of July and its fireworks celebration. I am sweating in the hottest part of the year hauling boxes now packed with over three decades of my more productive years, and putting away souvenirs from every corner of the globe. I am also finding memorabilia from Michael’s early years, from our earliest years together, to trips around the Shenandoah, the Potomac, to Kenya to Japan and Hong Kong, through Redland, Magruder, and the House Ways and Means committee, to the JMU graduation to the FDA to the wedding in Vienna.
It began with my packing up for the moose hunting trip for Alaska (for which my new Weatherby .340 must still be shipped back from Vail, Colorado where I had left it for the elk hunt I cannot go on this year because of the Sikkim trip—but it has to be shipped from one gun dealer to another, and Chester Jones will receive it to get it packed up with Craig’s for our September trip.) I put all the other hunting gear into two packs, and drove out to rendezvous with Craig in a “candy store for adults,” I had never visited. It is the newer Outdoor World in Arundel Mills just below BWI airport (where I would be the following two days) with Bass Pro’s 138,000 square foot outdoor shop.
Craig and I had gone there to look over the breathable waders, and we each bought an Orvis set of waders with which to take on the stream crossings of Alaska’s moose marshes. We also picked up a bunch of little things and toured around this candy store to see what we could admire. We were met by Cindy, Craig’s oldest daughter, who will produce Craig’s first grandchild in January, and had come to watch us gawk at all the outdoor gear before we brought her around to the maternity shops in the mile-long A/C corridors of the Arundel Mills. We stopped for lunch at a microbrewery, in which along with the crabcake sandwich, we got a “sampler” of their six standard beers with three of the seasonal brews. On a hot summer day, trying to stand up after such a lunch and go shopping some more did not sound like a good idea, so I parted from the Schaefers after transferring all of my packed up Alaskan gear to Craig’s truck, and drove down toward Bethesda.
Joe Aukward had called, rather eager to see me and to go for an afternoon run when he was relieved of his babysitting his three kids when Betty came back from her shopping run. They are leaving on July 3 for two weeks at a traditional Rehoboth Maryland beach house they are renting, so this would be the last run we would be able to make until late fall—missing our traditional pre-dawn federal holiday long runs, as we have for each of the last many years. We ran around the surprisingly re-developed NIH campus which has a brand new Children’s Hospital and Children’s Inn as well as more Ambulatory Care Facilities. But, we had to hop around new construction for high security gates preventing easy access to this federal facility. Despite the sunny heat, we made a brisk run to finish at his house, where we had stopped the last week when I had mown the grass after our longer run down Rock Creek Parkway. I showered up there, and then helped grille up turkeyburgers before going home. We have one more rendezvous planned—the day after they come back from the beach and the day before I go to India, when they will have an outdoor picnic in Derwood on the picnic table outside, since I believe that will be about the only things still standing at that time and not packed away for an indeterminate period.
A DERWOOD DAY, LOOKING OVER AND ORDERING ALL
THE APPLIANCES AND FIXTURES OF FOUR NEW BATHROOMS,
AND A NEW KITCHEN
I picked up Virginia at BWI where she landed at almost the same moment her grandmother, coincidentally also “Virginia Croskery”, died in Tulsa Oklahoma. She had been weary of life at age 89, and had taken care of her husband Gilbert through his later years when he had Alzheimer’s disease. She had announced to the family the day before that she had heard Gilbert calling her home, and she simply died. That meant Virginia Croskery the younger, would be scrambling to obtain flights at bereavement rates, and contact the Phantom Company to get the three days bereavement leave, before going back to the heavy sequence of weekend Phantom performances for the next week at Dayton Ohio, before moving on to San Francisco on July 15 where she will be until September first. So, this would be the one brief visit we might have and all of it for a rather brisk business purpose. Megan from D. G. Liu came over to Derwood on a beautiful summer day, and carried us over to the new showroom of Ferguson’s, a wholesale appliance distributor, where she had once worked in their previous place. She knows every fixture and appliances and I would rather just have her tell me which ones to pick, which, in essence, is what she and another Megan, a rather mature looking transplanted Californian who was only 22, discussed between them and came up with the design and allowances for one fixture after another, one room at a time. The whirlpool tub was one big ticket item for the new master bathroom, but the little ticket items also add up, when four new bathrooms are being constructed. Probably the jewel of that collection will be the “powder room” off the den, which is a work of art, as it is designed and as the special vanity etc is being custom made to order.
The kitchen will probably involve a double electric oven with a separate gas cook top stove that will be supplied by a tank of bottled gas outside. All of the tiles and furnishing had already been designed by Sandy Shelor in the previous opportunity I had had to go over what some one else had chosen for me, since they could tell that I was a rustic type who lives in the country, and wanted to blend a bit with this for4est setting as opposed to trying to compete with Martha Stewart in frou-frou.
But the surprise to me about this whole process is that it is actually being done now, and despite glitches like missing last week’s appointment to do the same thing, that all the component pieces are falling in during the very brief two weeks I have before disappearing, and that the two week process of securing a home equity loan for a mortgage, the lead time on the appliance ordering to come up with the fixtures, and the demolition which will be proceeding in my absence, is all contingent on the meeting I will have with Dale Kramer on July 10 AM when I will get the final architectural plans for the modified additions, and with that clearance, the plans are “handed over” to the teams of 13 subcontractors, and it proceeds as if on auto pilot. This means that all that remains is what I have to do alone—that is, sort out, pack up, dispose of, and seal away the household in the next weeks before the demolition begins.
So, I started in right away. I began throwing away the stacks of unfinished projects in paper piles on the floor and had organized the two guest bedrooms that will remain unmodified after they are sealed up with plastic for what ever time it take to redo the house It is hot heavy and dusty work, and rather lonely to be looking over the decades of adventures and their mementoes, and tossing out half of them, carefully packing away the balance, which would reemerge at least a year away with “four seasons” of interval change here in Derwood, let alone the rather widely scattered places I will be throughout most of the early days of the construction.
THE EVE OF THE FOURTH OF JULY,
WHICH LOOKS AS MANY OF THE NEXT FEW SUMMER SUBSEQUENT HOT HOLIDAY DAYS
WILL,
BEGINS WITH A LOUD INVASION OF MY NEIGHBORS YARD (FORTUNATELY ONLY THE
YARD) BY ONE OF MY BIG TREES
I have been hard at work. I spent one day at the office on July 2, trying to catch up and get ahead on a rainy day, then scurry home and resume the hot dusty struggle to sort out, toss out, and store away most of my adult life which had accumulated in a rather organized, but overly abundant series of collections. I worked until late, moving all the stuff from the closets on the north end of the house into the closets of the two bedrooms at the south end of the house, in which I will fill them up with what I hope I will not need for the next year. As soon as the closets are filled and the shelves are stuffed with the labeled boxes, then I must start putting the furniture and books and everything from the rest of the house into the room flush to the closet doors and from floor to ceiling, after which it is sealed in plastic wrap to keep it from being invaded by dust and freezing or boiling conditions over the next year as the rest of the house is gutted.
I got the northwest bedroom and its closets emptied out by late in the night on the July 3 early AM, and went to sleep exhausted. I did not hear what my neighbor Ed Luber said sounded like a freight train coming through the house. At 1:30 AM one of my big trees, with a “Y-fork” trunk had gathered up so much water from the incessant rain that it split and fell with a crash into his backyard, missing the house where they were sleeping by less than two feet. It impacted into the ground and only then crown touched the deck behind his house. The most minor damage was to a couple of boards of the deck, whereas it would have been a disaster if it had hit their house, at minimum putting them in a hotel for weeks if not a hospital.
He tried to call me, and used the old number, and –would you not guess—Mary Vander Hart answered. She did give him my phone number so that he did reach me, but as quickly she insisted that Dave would be coming over immediately since he loves to chop[ down big trees. It is also a chance to prove that they are a good neighbor even when they are not here in the neighborhood, and another chance to snoop on the property on which they had other designs. Ed insisted that he was going to have it taken care of by a professional, but the Vander Harts would not hear of it, and by the time Ed got to work where I reached him by phone, Dave had already been over to check things out and started making plans. Ed again called him off, since he got another person to come over and look at it for chopping it up and hauling away. He also wanted to check on insurance, and I said I just happened to be coming from the homeowner’s insurance agent’s office, the first time I had ever met her. I made an appointment for the morning of the 3rd of July since I wanted to discuss with her several issues.
She was Wendy Rose, having just changed her name from Louder by marrying another State Farm Insurance agent. She was intrigued about what I do and my very different life from the one she imagined, and was fascinated by the medical missions and the plans for the new remodeling and modernizing of the house. I had received a notice that the insurance rate would be going up by almost 100%, with a suggestion that I should raise the deductible to lower the premium rate, so that is the first issue we addressed. I then showed her the plans for the remodeled house and the fixtures and appliances just picked out two days before, with the Sandy Shelor interior design. She told me that the hose was built in 1957, and has 1460 square feet on the first floor, with a comparable amount on the second floor, but that they don’t count the basement and attic, but now that the basement is being partly finished and the attic will include the cedar closets, it may expand the square footage more than the 1200 feet that I had heard would be the new additions. I increased the liability coverage, and also found that the builder’s insurance would cover most of the risk in the interval year. But, I also gave her the ADT contract for the security system now registered with the fire and police, with the windows sensored, and heat, smoke, and motion sensors throughout the house with a “dog gate” at the floor level, which reports directly to the fire and police. This gives a 10% discount on the raised rates, which means that despite the higher deductible and security system, it will still be 150% higher in the coming year and much higher as the property value is immediately appreciated with the modernization.
Wendy was really excited that I had come to her office to visit to go over all these changes, but she had taken over the office and account from Buzz Hogan who had retired, and she is now going to go over my Home Page and call her husband and tell him that she has just “met the most interesting person she has ever met” …a bit of hype that sounded amazingly familiar to me recalling that on this same day of the millennium year I had met someone who said something very like that.
I left the State Farm agent’s office to get home through the rain and saw the big tree in The Luber’s backyard. I called him, and talked to him while I walked out back to take pictures of it. He had found out from his insurance agent---also State Farm—that it is entirely his responsibility, but he was happy to hear from me since I had said I would contribute to its cleanup. He had heard also that there was a single lump sum from the insurance agent, which is $500 for damages, which are minimal, but the estimate from the agent they had recommended for simply chopping up and hauling away the tree is $1200. That was after it was discovered that Ed coaches his granddaughter in softball, and that he lives on Redland Road. He first said that he was too busy, since there had been a big storm that hit Potomac two weeks ago that they have not yet caught up with the wood work from that event. But, he said he could get right to it, as soon as Saturday and maybe even on the Fourth of July morning. He would have to be quick about it to get around the insistence of Dave Vander Hart who would not let go, but came over again, to opine on the condition of the tree remaining, which the wood working guys had said would still be standing long after everyone here was gone.
Meanwhile, while it was raining, and the games were being played around a downed tree, which had fortunately not injured anyone or any property except a hole in the lawn and a cost for its dismembering and hauling away to which I will contribute, I kept on plowing through now gone eras of my life and putting some of their residua into boxes. So, as the 227th birthday of these US of A is celebrated across this Grand Old Land, I am sweltering in 95* humid rainy heat stirring up dust and packing boxes, stuffing them into the only tow rooms that will be sealed as the rest of the house is disassembled as soon as I leave two weeks from today, when the neighbor I may be helping (if less intrusively than previous residents) may be keeping an eye on the property for me.
As I am doing this lonely chore, Virginia is on yet another trip, this time through Chicago on the outbound to Tulsa, where the whole family has reunited for her grandmother, Virginia Croskery’s, funeral. Her ordained sister Kate is conducting the funeral and her father, Virginia’s son, is contributing. Rick, Virginia’s brother from North Carolina, read a letter he said he should have written and sent her when she was still alive, and Virginia sang the Lord’s Prayer for her namesake’s funeral program. Then the family got together for the wake, and to visit together, despite the bereavement and the recent back pain that Virginia’s father had been having since his knee replacement. This was the first occasion we had to talk directly, since he had wanted to seek advice about its management just long enough to get him back and forth to his mother’s funeral, but he also has Bob Jones, neurologist, Kate’ husband as a consultant, as well as his internist son Rick from Greenville, North Carolina in attendance. He is rather annoyed with the turf quibbles about medical specialties, none of which were available for him when he had need of them
Joe had called me on the second of July when he knew we were busy making up for the lost appointment the week before. I had suggested they could come over for the last time possible for a picnic before the house was disassembled. They were packing up on the second of July and leaving on the third to be at the beach for the fourth of July, Joes’s favorite holiday. So, he had suggested that they would like to try for the picnic the day after they are back and the day before I leave for India, when I will have almost nothing but a picnic table. Joe and I have usually made a very long run in pre-dawn holiday Rock Creek Park which is closed on holidays. We would not be able to do that because of his beach vacation, but he will see me once more before I leave for India. He was very glad that I had gone on the run on Sunday with him since he needed that at the time, as he has been struggling with some issues that always resolve on the run together.
So this Fourth of July has not been like the most recent ones—a matter of meetings and getting to know—but a parting, and a packing away lives that have already run a long course, and gathered up many things along the way---from insurance liabilities, to clutter of souvenirs, to memories of kids growing up in a house leaving marks behind them that are soon to be changed, to friends and family who also eventually slip away