Freight Forwarding
We are in the week after Thanksgiving and it feels, as always, like we are wrapping things up for the year. We are having a few final things done at the house (replacing the flooring in the MBR and Guest Rooms), we are planning our last two trips (one to Joshua Tree for Joshua’s 40th birthday, and the other to NYC to see the kids), Kim is wrapping presents at her wrapping center in her half of the garage (looks like a FedEx shipping center in there), and I am awaiting a few last deliveries for things I’ve ordered.
The most notable delivery that I am working on today is of a sculpture made by brother-in-law Bennett’s sister Madeline. She is a sculptor who works in metal and when I said I was on the lookout for some added additions for the back hillside, Bennett referred me to her website. A particular sculpture caught my eye. To begin with it is red and we are a very red household. While I have placed various cobalt blue accents around the property in the form of ceramic pots (that seems to be the pot color of choice at Waterwise Botanicals, our favorite succulent nursery), we have generally done red accents wherever we can. It is Kim’s favorite color and it just feels like the right accent color for this house because it always feels very Mexican and who can or would want to deny the Mexican influence in this lovely part of California. This sculpture is an abstract that is made of discarded automobile exhaust pipes and then painted red. The title of the sculpture is “Exhausted”. I liked it immediately and felt it might be too nice to relinquish to the back hillside, where sculptures tend to diminish in visual impact due to the large scale of the hill. I just put an eight foot high, five foot wide colored metal rooster back there and I feel like I have to look hard to find it. So, I’ve decided to put Exhausted where it can’t be missed by any of our visitors.
When we renovated our kitchen, we put in a large (12 foot) folding glass portal out to the deck. That would be the deck that I spent four months last year completely rebuilding. The area outside the kitchen portal is a broad open space that is intended to be a space where people can walk out to enjoy the magnificent view over the hillside to the distant chaparral-covered hills and the ocean beyond. All of the seating and the fire-pit table is off to the side under the Epay wood palapa. Right now we have three ceramic pots on that open area of deck. I have filled them with river stones (one can never have too many rocks in one’s life) and three different metal sculpture cacti from Desert Steel. There is a prickly pear, an aloe and an upright barrel cactus, all in sage-colored steel. These are sculptures that are almost as perilous as the real thing and you would not want to accidentally step into any one of them since they would scratch the hell out of your leg. I must admit that I tend to worry about guests accidentally doing just that. Well, the new Exhausted sculpture will provide a natural base around which these metal cacti will sit and the one will frame the other and vice versa.
In this way, everyone who comes to visit will see the sculpture and the complementary metal cacti whether they go out onto the deck or not. I will probably run an extra light from my outdoor lighting system to highlight the sculpture and make it pop even at night. Kim has just reminded me that we need to see how this sculpture will look in this place before we make it all permanent. That opened up an unpleasant disagreement between us that went like this: Why rain on my parade? I’m not raining on your parade! Can’t you just go with the flow and we’ll change it if it needs to be changed? Fine, I’m sorry I said anything.
I can arrange to pick up forwarded freight by getting Handy Brad to go to the terminal with me in his truck. But how do I unpack my own freight? The truth is that I spend time every morning these days trying to make sure that I have enough to do and at the moment, the most go-to place I have is the outdoor landscape and artwork. It is relatively harmless because it is not in the house and usually does not impact our everyday living too much. As it turns out, putting a metal sculpture on the deck, while technically an outdoor project, is a bit too much like an indoor design decision and that makes it a boundary issue that Kim and I have to tread lightly on. I thought I had fully vetted the sculpture both for purchase and for placement on the deck. That all went smoothly, but the mention of installing a lighting solution must have had the feeling of permanence that caused Kim to think that I was taking the optionality out of the equation. I should have understood that and said that once we were sure that we liked the sculpture’s placement and agreed that lighting it at night was a good idea, I could run a line from my low-voltage system and get it lighted properly. Mea culpa.
This is what life in retirement has come to. My “baggage” is one that revolves around accomplishment and feeling as though I am doing things that are appreciated and worthwhile, whatever they may be. I guess I remain that four-year-old boy who got abandoned by his father and needs the reinforcement and approval that makes me feel worthwhile. That is the freight that I carry into retirement. I don’t know what, if any, freight Kim brings to the table. She always seems perfect to me, but I’m sure she would tell you that there are things that matter to her sense of self-worth. I’m sure it goes beyond the stereotypical sense of a woman caring about her appearance, but I will not try to psychoanalyze her here because I am not qualified to do so. The point is that we should all be aware of our own freight and do the best we can to avoid having it flare up unnecessarily for perfectly innocent reasons.
Kim was just giving voice to her lack of certainty about a sculpture that she did not conceptualize and place conceptually the way I had. I have a need to barrel forward with projects for my own reasons and the responsibility I have is to not let that need become an irritant to my lovely wife. Madeline may have forwarded me this freight in the form of a red metal sculpture called Exhausted, but I have managed to exhaust both Kim and me unnecessarily this morning by running out ahead with my planning. Instead, I will go to the freight terminal tomorrow morning. Handy Brad and I will uncrate this beast. And then, unless either Kim or I think better of it, he and I will move it onto the deck so that we can stew on the look and feel as long as we need. Easy peasy.
Of course, I will also order a spotlight right now to light the sculpture and make it permanent once we feel ready to make its installation permanent. I probably won’t tell Kim that I’m ordering it, but that is only a small money issue and I will have managed my freight all by myself.