The last day of September…
I cleaned the studio today with the song “With a Little Luck” by Paul McCartney & Wings playing on auto-repeat. I hadn’t listened to the album, London Town, in years. It brought me back to the summer of 1979, listening to it with Charlie at the beginning of our home renovation journey. We had been working every weekend, trying to make a dent in what felt like a monumental renovation. The bank had turned down our request for a loan that would have, at least, gotten the house livable in a reasonable amount of time. The rejection changed everything. What we had planned to pay others to do, we now had to do ourselves. We bought lumber as our meager salaries allowed, tackling one project at a time, stretching every dollar as far as it would go. Slow motion on steroids. Progress—if I can even call it that—was interminably slow. There was an endless list of things that needed fixing, lumber to buy, many weekends of work ahead of us. The house swallowed our time, our money, and our energy. We kept going because we had to. We were already doing things the hard way when one Saturday morning, we arrived at the house to find all the tools gone. Someone had stolen the tools that C’s father had given us. The means to keep going were taken away. We couldn’t work at all.
We took the rest of the summer off. The work on the house suddenly at a standstill. We were two people stuck with an unfinished house and no tools. We listened to With a Little Luck over and over. I’m sure we drove the other tenants in our building crazy. In the fall, we started over, one board, one hammer one weekend at a time.
And now decades later, the house is a very different place: finished, lived in, and full of mostly happy memories. I am listening to With a Little Luck a few feet away from the spot where the tools were stolen and the distance between those two moments has collapsed. The room holds both versions of my life simultaneously: the unfinished house and the finished one. One moment, Charlie and I facing an uncertain future not really knowing if we could pull it off and the other, knowing that we most certainly did.