Some Instructions Are Just Too Stupid

    I don't think I am growing more prickly (some might argue that would be impossible) but I increasingly chafe at being told what to do by people who have no business doing so. There are enough people who are in a position to tell you what to do, and who often insist on your doing stupid things, but I am not talking about them. Them I avoid as much as possible and grudgingly comply when there is no alternative.

    No, it is the more mundane things that set me off.

    Like the envelope from someone who is trying to sell me something that states prominently "Do Not Discard." Naturally, those envelopes go directly into the waste basket; I'm thinking of leaving an all-weather waste can by the mailbox.

    The marketers don't like to be ignored, though, and they get more insistent. I am holding an envelope that, in addition to my name and address, includes these phrases: "Official Documents Enclosed." "Official Notification." "Requires Immediate Response." "SECOND NOTICE." "Time Sensitive Communication." Well, duh. Guess where that envelope is going?

    Maybe tossing their missives isn't the answer. I am considering saving a stack of the envelopes -- unopened -- until I have a large stack and then mailing all of them back to the sender. With luck, I'll open one of the envelopes and find a postage-paid reply envelope and use it to send the accumulation back.

   Almost as annoying is the recorded message that urges you to hold for an important message. I used to hang up immediately, but now I just lay the phone down and go about my business. I like to think I'm using enough of their time to save someone else from getting a call.

   At least in the above situations, I have the choice of whether to open the envelope or hold for the call.

   One night recently, I had a choice of whether to respond to a stupid instruction, but exercising my choice saved me no time. I was trapped.

   It was an event that  included a talent segment. The mistress and master of ceremonies took turns introducing each contestant and then going offstage.

    The contestant performed. The audience applauded. And the master/mistress of ceremonies returned to the stage with the instruction to give the performer another round of applause, even as the original applause was fading. Not once, not twice, but every single time.

    Excuse me, but isn't applause like a tip: something that is earned.

    I sat on my hands thinking that if it weren't for all the phony enthusiasm, the contestants could have more time to show off their talent. And the applause would have been truly earned.

Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com

Time for a new adventure

To everything there is a season, and
a time to every purpose under heaven:

    It is a little after 6 on a gray Saturday morning. Downstairs one granddaughter and her friend are sleeping. Later today, another granddaughter and three of her friends will arrive. It is not a promising weekend for outdoor things, but I am sure the young ladies will find plenty of things to amuse themselves with. They are at an age when their grandparents do not have to spend all of their time being recreation directors.
    I have been sitting in the little reading room just off our second-floor bedroom looking out at the lake. A slight breeze has the water in motion – most often it is as still as a millpond this time of the morning – and I haven't heard any manmade sounds. Soon, even with the possibility, even probability, that rain could come at any moment, personal watercraft will be roiling the water. After all, how many weekends are there in a summer?
    I have watched the day develop from this vantage point almost every morning since we moved to the lake full-time nine years ago and on as many mornings as possible in those years when we were only part-timers.
    I have never tired of the view nor unmindful of our good fortune in being able to experience every day that which so many people get only to sample.
    My morning view is about to change.
    We have lived in this house longer than we have lived in any house since we got married, and it is the first house that we have had designed and built just for us. Like us, the house has its eccentricities, but I hope that soon some other family will enjoy this house as much as we have.
    As much as we have loved the place – and, as importantly, our neighbors and our neighborhood – we have recognized for several years that the time for change would come.Simply put, the house is simply too big for the two of us It has too many steps;. Adelaide counted the steps from the dock to the widow's walk; there were 105 of them. When the children and grandchildren are here, the house is just right, sometimes even cramped, but those times are increasingly rare, and that space is heated and cooled and cleaned year round.
    So in a few days a sign will go up offering our half hill for sale. We hope that someone will think it is as right as we did when we first saw this spot and visualized putting a house on it.
    I am, at least for the moment, curiously unmoved by the prospect of making some other house our home. I think that we most liberated we have felt was when we returned to the states after spending the better part of a year on a self-styled sabbatical in England and Holland. We had sold most of our belongings before setting out, and having only a few possessions made us feel, well, less possessed. That was many years ago, though, and as long as you have a place to put things, things pile up.
    We have decided that we need considerably less space – and far fewer things – and that this might be the time to make that change.
    We would love to stay on the water and in this neighborhood if that is possible. We don't know how that will work out, because like most folks, we cant really look for another home until we have sold this one. (I'd hate to fall in love with a place only to see it sell before we sold our own home.)
  &nbsp Whatever happens, it will be an adventure.


Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com

Trying to change a genetic instruction

There is imprinted in my DNA a basic instruction. It says: Never throw away something you might be able to use later.
I am trying to rewrite that instruction, which I have followed all too well, or at least to redefine it. I am locked in a mental battle that parallels disputes over interpreting our constitution: strict construction or loose construction.
I have been a strict constructionist of my genetic instructions. If there is any conceivable possibility that I might be able to use something later, I've kept it. (And it has occasionally paid off: just the other day I used a piece of metal tubing left over from a boat shade, a bail from a five-gallon bucket and a hose clamp to repair a colorful little wind-driven whirlygig down by the patio.)
I am trying to accept the notion that I should keep only those things that there is a reasonably good chance that I will need. I'm not sure the bail from the bucket or the piece from the boat would qualify.
I have been given some impetus in my quest because we are thinking about downsizing our home.
I have already tackled my library and my closet, though much remains to be done in those departments.
But those have been minor forays compared to the task now at hand. Confronting stuff in general.
So, there I stood in the middle of a storage building, confronted with the reality of my resolution.
Various tools from past projects: a tile cutter and a grout float I bought when I remodeled the kitchen of an old house we owned in Montgomery.
A pipe flaring tool.
A gear puller.
I couldn't recall why I had acquired some of those items.
But realistically, would I ever use them again?
And the smaller things: screws and nails and bolts, all of differing sizes. Would I ever have or take the time to sort them out. An electric motor from a food processor, hinges from a glass door, things that I couldn't identify but which I obviously thought I might use for something.
Cans of paint that, even if it isn't a lump inside the can, probably wouldn't cover anything I started painting and which probably could not be matched.
I divided the stuff into two piles -- keep and discard.
Some of the stuff migrated from one pile to another more than once. After disposing of what I could bear to, I took the rest home and put it in the cave, the name we give to a part of the crawl space. There's standing headroom and lights, but now it is dense with the stuff from the storage building, and I still have a lot of decisions to make. If do sell the house soon, I either will speed up the decision process or carry a bunch of stuff on one more trip.
Sorting through the accumulation, I think of my grandmother. She saved everything: the string that closed a 25-pound bag of flour, the empty 10-pound sugar sack, the gallon syrup jug.
The difference is, she knew the end use of the stuff she was saving. I have yet to get there.

Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com

Spring Has Made Me Manic

    Spring has made me manic.
    Spring always makes us a little bit manic, but this year my case is extreme. Ordinarily an early riser, I find myself awaking even earlier and waiting impatiently for the sun to rise so I can be out and doing. (It is before sunup now or I probably would be doing instead of writing.)
    I think there are a couple of reasons for my mania. The winter of 2010-11 seemed to have more consecutive days of unrelieved dreariness than most.There were not as may of those brief breaks when it was really pleasant to  throw the kayak in the water and paddle or to take a long walk without bundling up as if for an expedition.
    It wasn't just the past (I hope it has passed) winter that has fueled the mania. Medical adventures in the past couple of years, the heart thing and the cancer thing and then the unfortunate incident with the table saw left me more absorbed with self than with nature.
    Helping with the restoration of the Smith Mountain Fire Tower and carving out hiking trails on the mountain have absorbed a good deal of outdoor time, but that's a whole other column. Around home, I managed to replace the decrepit steps leading from our dock down to the lake bed before the water got too high. I've raked dead leaves that have accumulated way too long and picked up fallen limbs; I finally got the shredder-mulcher running, so a lot of those will be reduced in size and returned to the earth. I got the lights on the patio working again and replaced the screen wire on the door to the porch. I wonder how long it will be before another child pokes his hand through the screen. Based on past experience, it will be before the summer is out.
    I have been making some terraces with stones gathered from my neighbors country land = he says rocks are his principle crop = and planning more elaborate schemes to keep the dirt from washing down our half hill and into the lake.
    Even as I work away, my project list grows longer. Dirty work clothes are a perplexity for my wife.She insists on washing them; I try to hold onto them for another day = or two.
    "They're filthy," she says.
    "I just put them on (meaning two or three days ago)," I insist.
    She wins.
    I have learned that I enjoy physical labor far more than I did when I was younger. The rhythm of labor frees the mind to wander all over the universe. The other day I found myself thinking of A.E. Housman's poem about the beauty of cherry blossoms, especially the line, "now of my threescore years and ten, twenty will not come again. And take from seventy years a score, it only leaves me fifty more. and since to look at things in bloom, fifty springs are little room, about the woodland I will go to see the cherry hung with snow."
    Callow youth. I have reached my threescore and ten, and I expect to welcome a good many more springs.
    There's one last reason for this spring mania: Before we know it, it will be so hot that the outdoors is most comfortably enjoyed by looking at it through a double-glazed window from an air conditioned room.
    Meanwhile, the sun is about to come up; time for another cup of coffee and then out the door.

Contact the writer at billatthelake@gmail.com