One Grumpy Old Man's Opinion

Is it just me, or does anyone else out there hate home renovations ? Someone once told my wife that first-time home renos are hard on a marriage. The second one will usually send the couple to counselling and the third time will find the lovebirds locked in divorce court.

This is our sixth time through home renovations.

Reno #1 was in my second house, our first mutual home. My first home ownership was shared with one of my brothers, and as two single guys home maintenance was limited to see who would remove the Hallowe’en pumpkin from the front window before Christmas. Brenda and I were married in 1987 and we promptly moved into a two bedroom house, a cottage really, on Sturgeon Lake, between Bobcaygeon and Lindsay, the town where we both taught.

“The kitchen is big enough, but we need to take down the wall between it and the front room. That way we can look out over the lake while we eat breakfast. And the breezeway at the back between the carport and the porch has got to go.” I was a rookie husband, none too sure of my footing, and I was a complete babe-in-the woods when it came to both marriage and renos. Hell, cleaning the bathroom was still a big deal. It was only a few years later that I received some marital advice that came a little too late. My friend told me to keep the bar of your wife’s expectations set low from early on in the marriage, so that your spouse learns never to expect too much.

The previous owner had been a bachelor named Bruce who lived with his Newfoundland dog named Mike. Mike slept by the woodstove in a shed-like room off the kitchen, and for all I know so did his master Bruce. At least that could have been the situation, by all appearances. We took down the old wallpaper and got to work painting. We had a woodshop teacher  named George at our high school who had taken down a wall in his own house and assured us that the roof had not caved in. By this time I was preoccupied with constantly pushing the lawnmower around our 1/3  acre lot and  painting the white  picket fence that guarded our backyard from the angry seniors who ambled by on the lakeside road between us and the lake. It was also the end of the school year and we were busy planning a six week trip through Yugoslavia and Greece.

We left George on his own to get to it. It was the beginning of a long series of frustrating experiences with home renovations and those who do them.

A marriage counsellor would have a field day with this, but my wife Brenda and I have always entertained ourselves on summer holiday road trips by casually cutting up the other’s home province. I’m from Quebec, she’s from New Brunswick, and we each think that the other has provided us with plenty of fodder for uncomplimentary observations. Brenda’s sister Diane, a phys.ed. teacher, had just moved back to N.B. after fourteen years in Bermuda and provided me with a warehouse of ammunition.

“Can you believe that cruise ships actually stop in at Saint John”, she marvelled during our visit back in July as we cruised through the Irving family’s hometown. “Here they are, probably on a trip to a tropical isle like Turks and Caicos, thinking about drinking pina coladas in a tropical bar, and these unfortunate people are dumped in the Saint John Market in the middle of a cold fog which never seems to lift and have to drink Alpine beer out of a can beside a toothless redneck who’s drowning his sorrows after just getting laid-off from the Irving Shipyards. You call that a cruise?”

Diane was not yet done. “Then my sister Susan can take them up to Horsefly Beach, where they can cut up their feet on those sharp, small rocks while wading through a small brook and swatting horseflies the size of bullfrogs that have landed on their ears and up their nose.”

I had a good laugh at that one, cackling and slapping my knee just like I had seen my grandfather’s old friends do while sitting around the woodstove to warm up after splitting firewood.

The very next day, on our way to Prince Edward Island but still in New Brunswick, we had to stop at a red light in a small town whose name now escapes me. Also stopped was a muddy pickup truck, with a character at the wheel, wild beard, missing teeth, who would have looked right at home as a cast member of that classic seventies movie, ‘Deliverance’.

“Would you look at that hillbilly”, I needled Brenda. “Right out of the backwoods. And that woman sitting beside him is probably his wife and his cousin.” I was really enjoying myself. But then I noticed that he too was laughing and pointing over at me. My attention drawn back to myself, only then did I realize that I was sitting right under the red light, blocking traffic with my car, which was as misplaced and awkward as a Baptist preacher at a college frat party.

Oops. Brenda would be marking up one point for New Brunswick with this one.

Please kick me upside of the head if I ever agree to play in one of those co-ed hockey tournaments again. You feminists out there may crucify me if you want, but I feel there are some activities best left same -sex. There’s a reason that our cavemen ancestors went off on the hunt and the women stayed close to the cave; equal but at the same type separate, you might say.

To be sure the tournament was for a noble cause. It was called ‘Puck You Cancer’ and of course it was a fundraiser for, I later found out, breast cancer only. I didn’t score any points with Jill, one of the organizers, when I suggested that some of the money raised could be sent to an organization fighting prostate cancer. After all, only two players on the ice at one time had to be female. Why not throw us guys a bone ? Jill glared at me and replied, well, maybe next year.

As my karma would have it, I had a collision or two with the women on the ice. I have a habit of making sharp right turns right around the net and if contact is the result so be it. (Some) women have difficulty with that. (Note that I am now enlightened enough not to generalize.) My second collision, in the semi-final game, was with Jill.

“You f—— prick”, she gasped at me, sitting on the ice.

Oh my.

Jill wasn’t finished yet. “I’ve heard about you”, she went on. She didn’t say what she had heard. Wife abuser ? Serial killer ? I was clearly guilty of something. Sigmund Freud and I have at least one thing in common. Although I spend little time in Viennese cafes and don’t ingest cocaine, the old father of psychoanalysis and I have some similarity. .Clearly, neither of us understand women. Either my wife or daughter is angry or upset with me about seventy-five percent of the time. For absolutely no reason at all.

Later on in the game, this same Jill wanted our best defenseman thrown out of the game for an incidental collision with one of her teammates. Then, after our win, she complained that she was going to make an official protest, which of course would nullify our victory. I’d had enough. “What a whiner”, I proclaimed loudly in our dressing room.

“Oh no, she’s not a whiner. She’s usually very nice,” one of my teammates said in her defence.

Of course. “If she’s whining all the time, then she’s a whiner”, I countered brilliantly. “If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then I gotta assume it’s a duck.”

All’s well that ends well. We kept our trophy and I was upstairs in the arena bar having a post-game beer with a couple of the guys on the team. The subject of poor-sport Jill came up and it turns out that she’s the wife of a fellow I play hockey with twice a week. We’re having a team party next weekend. Spouses included.

Oh my.