Alan the Carpenter Part One

Some people in our family are very skilled and handy. They can build anything. Like Al B., Judy P. (dolls), Mom (cakes) and (great)Grandpa W.

When I was young and we lived on Ravinia Drive in Tinley Park, Grandpa W. would come out from Chicago and stay at our house for a few weeks during his vacation. I still remember him making a small tin box one time in our back yard. He had all of his tools with him including some kind of little stove he used to heat up his old fashioned soldering iron. After he worked on it for a while, it looked fine and finished to me. Not him, he worked on it for another hour until it was perfect.

Then there are the rest of us. Like my dad. When I was very young my dad was building a bookcase in my sisters bedroom. At one point he decided to take a break and sit down to rest, directly on a bag of #8 nails. Seared into my memory is my father bent over in the bathroom with my mom applying bright orange mercurochrome (an old time disinfectant) on each little puncture wound. It looked like a hairy dot-to-dot drawing from Highlights Magazine.

I recently rebuilt my backyard deck. The wood was getting so rotten that I feared one of my tenants might fall through and sue me. I looked at the project and decided, "piece of cake". I was wrong. It took me three hours of hard labor to demolish three feet of the old deck. So I hired one of Marks friends, Willie, to help me and we finished demolishing the old deck in one day. I received one laceration, one rusty nail puncture, and my legs now look like a relief map of the Ozarks.

Yes Mark did help me............He brought me a beverage.