Monkey Truck Goes Gravel

Got a little gravel for the road and driveway today at Consumer’s samd gravel. Went back and forth about whether to buy crushed concrete or half-inch stones with dust. Went for the stones with dust, though it costs more, 8.90 a ton rather than 5.90. One thing’s for certain in Kalamazoo, gravel is cheap if you pick it up yourself. So we had the big truck weighed, at 6748 lbs. with us in it and then we drove out to the appropriate gravel pile, where the guy in the big yellow front end loader would put as much as we wanted in the back. When we were getting weighed, I saw the guy through the windshield of the loader (7 yard scoop capacity), his arms folded over the steering wheel, collapsed-like. As soon as we were out at the gravel pile, he unfolded his arms, stepped on the gas, pointed his scoop and tore out to the four-story-high mound beside us. The wheels of the loader were taller than our truck. He stabbed at the big pile, partially filled his scoop, and then slowly dumped it in the truck, watching the truck and my arms and face, awaiting a signal from either me or the truck. Christopher was on the other side of the truck, watching how far the bed of the truck was sinking beneath the weight---we'd marked a height on the shovel handle for reference. We’d never put gravel in the truck, so we wanted to go conservative, see how the thing behaved under the load (my old truck got squirrely with just a half a ton on it), so we cut it off at what looked like a little more than a yard of the stuff. Chris nodded to me and I nodded to the driver in the machine and he tipped his bucket up, pivoted, returned what was left in his scoop to the pile, drove at breakneck speed to where he had started, then collapsed over his steering wheel again as though folding his wings, going back to sleep until another truck showed up. We got weighed on the way out, and we watched the scale, and it said 10,000 lbs exactly, right on the nose. That was something, we figured. I paid inside the cinder block shed, and I promised we'd tarp our load like the sign says, but I didn't. The truck drove beautifully under that load, if slowly. Brakes were strained on that steep hill on Nazareth, but they didn’t go out or anything; as we descended, taking in that view of the railroad tracks and river and the truck yard, Christopher's foot pressed an imaginary passenger side brake. Once home, the real work began, with shovels.

Mike's Heart

The rusted white boat of a car was parked at my mom’s house for four days, T.C.’s car. That meant that T.C. was fighting with his wife, and he was sleeping on Mike’s little couch. Or all wired up and not sleeping, which meant that he was keeping Mike awake. The problem with Mike having company is that his friends, who are often in the process of fighting with their wives, wear him out. They bring him liquor, which is not good for him. I’ve seen Brian, for example, just keep refilling Mike’s shot glass. Left to his own devices, Mike just drinks beer and goes to sleep. And you say that people should be responsible for how much they drink and of course that’s true, but after a few beers and not much sleep, a person like Mike might drink more than he should, and there’s not much to Mike these days, him being so skinny and all since the botched heart surgery. The sewing-in of the pig valve went okay, but then there was the sponge they left in here and then that raging staph infection went on for half a year, and he was flat on his back, and then a long recovery after that. And now he has the hole in his chest that starts weeping periodically. It would probably be better if he didn’t smoke (he rolls his own to save $), and if he didn’t live in my mom’s workshop, but he’s got no place else to live, and he’s been waiting almost two years to get his social security disability approval. (He’s 58 and his heart defect is congenital---it prevented him from joining the military when he was a kid, which is too bad because then he'd have V.A. benefits now.) He’s got a lawyer helping him, a lawyer who will get a good chunk of change when the S.S. settlement comes through. He gets $64/week from the state, some sort of Michigan disability, and that’s his only income, and then he’ll have to pay all that back out of his eventual social security settlement. And two times this year Michigan has accidentally cancelled him for the month so that his money never came and there were no arrears—they just apologized and started him up again the following month. Mike worked all his life in paper companies and whatnot, and most recently at a sandblasting company, and I don’t think he’s got any pension down the line. He’s about the nicest guy you’d want to meet, which is why all kinds of other guys want to go talk to him when they’re having a hard time with their wives or whatever. Though he would never complain about any thing, overnight visitors can be hard on him. He never even complains about the sponges and infection, says he was grateful for the care he got without health insurance.

The Dojo

It always surprises me that I have a black belt in Okinawan weapons training. I’m the last person you’d expect to see in a dojo. I mean, I’m tall and blond, and beyond that I have no respect for authority or formality and I don’t particularly care for Japanese culture or artifacts, not even those cartoon movies or comic books. I’ve been ambivalent about the martial arts ever since the first day I walked into the dojo (all that bowing, for crying out loud, and these stiff outfits!), and I cried when I took my first test (why is everyone looking at me?), and yet somehow I’m still here. Now we have to move to a new dojo and we have to raise huge amounts of money, like $66,000 by next April. Fund raising! Help me! Get me out of here! What the hell was I thinking with swinging those sticks? Slicing with nunchaku down through the face and back up through the face? Stabbing throats with sai? Today I gave the karate class a pep talk about raising/giving money. Folks tell me I sounded sufficiently positive, that I did not sound weary or desperate, that I did not sound as though I wanted to crack open my own breast bone, spread my bloody muscled ribs with my hands (powerful from wielding weapons) and allow myself to flow as a gas or blow like a wind right out of my body, or run like a river, or burn like a fire.

Holiday specialties

I make chocolate fudge candy around the holidays, and sometimes brown sugar fudge, using my great-granny’s primitive recipes, so about now I’m thinking about my pans (on Norma VanRheenen’s suggestion I got a new Caphalon pan for candy-making) and silicone spatulas (does the little red one smell like garlic?) If time allows, I also make candied orange peels, but that is secondary. I spent this past weekend in Chicago, in order to attend Mary & Nancy’s cookie decorating party. Nancy spends a whole week preparing the refrigerator dough, cream cheese dough and gingerbread dough. The Saturday before the Sunday party, Nancy spent the whole day baking the cookies. On the day of the party, I came early to find a woman in the kitchen slicing the spiral ham off the ham bones and stacking it on silver tray. Mary said, "This is Susan, she always comes over and cuts off the ham, then cooks pea soup with the ham bones and then gives us some." Just before the party started, Melanie Kubale showed up and made frosting for folks to use in decorating the cookies, and she had tricks she used for mixing colors (put globs of frosting in ziplock bags with the food coloring, squish, then trim off a corner) and she continued to make frosting for several hours. A tub of pink and white candy-can shaped cookies arrived with the message that the neighbor Margie was sick, but here were the cookies she always provided. One gal showed up at the party with a big bowl of cookie dough and, with her sister, began rolling the dough into balls and putting the balls on cookie sheet and baking them at 350. Snickerdoodles, she told me. Her grandmother used to make these, she explained, and then a few years after she died, her father brought one home from a bakery a few years ago "and all kinds of memories of my grandmother and of Christmas came flooding back to me." She has made them every Christmas since. On the train home from Chicago, I ran into Jaimy Gordon, and I asked her what she made special on the holidays. I forget the first thing she told me, but it sparked a discussion about how it was difficult to make treats for people since so many of them were trying to cut back on sugar. Then she asked me if I’d ever seen her "naughty angels." She said they weren’t really edible, but they were made of dough, and they were, well, naughty.