Time Fries! (29 page)
Authors: Fay Jacobs
So, we are downsized. Some friends and acquaintances think we are insane for giving up our home on three quarters of an acre in exchange for a partially double-wide, partially single-wide mobile home (trailer) in a community where we don't own the land.
Hey, they do the lawn here. We're happy as clams. I saw the first leaf drop the other day and laughed like a hyena. I drove by my old house and saw the tree service juggling tools at the roof line. I guffawed. The notice that it's time to open up the irrigation system was forwarded to my new address. I crumpled it up and made a three-pointer to the circular file.
I also dropped my gym membership since this community has an exercise room with treadmills, bikes and an elliptical machine. It's just as easy and a lot cheaper for me not to go here as not to go there.
I admit that there were many things that had to be done in the new house to make it comfortable and attractive. Uninhabited for a year when we purchased it, the place was a true fixer-upper. Since I am not a fixer-upper, the work was mostly tasked to my spouse.
In her quest to guild the turd, Bonnie installed ceiling moldings, all new light fixtures, faucets, switch plates and the like. What a wonderful difference! And she painted every single wall in the house, hiding the 1980s floral and speckled vinyl wall covering favored in that era.
Frankly, getting this place put together was such a job she had to enlist me for physical labor as well.
Clearly, you understand how massive the job had to be for her to resort to the nuclear option.
So she gave me a paintbrush, with instructions to finish painting some unpainted furniture for my office. “Put on paint clothes first,” she cautioned. Like I would have any.
Paint roller in hand I went to work with all the gusto of passengers diving off the Titanic. I obsessed over the top of a shelf unit until I realized nobody would see it unless dinner guests included members of the NBA.
First Law of Semi-Gloss: Only after your hands become covered with dripping paint will your nostril itch. Corollary: and then you have to pee.
Okay, so I'm not a great painter. If I'd been using red paint it would have looked like the St. Valentines Day Massacre. Bring on the splatter expert. Bonnie took one look and relieved me of my duties.
Next, she asked me if I wanted to screw, which sounded great until I discovered it meant installing new kitchen cabinet hardware.
Newton's Law: any screw you drop will immediately roll under the heaviest appliance.
I spent quite some time on my hands and knees fetching like a golden retriever.
In one instance I was leaning over the stove, reaching for an errant screw, when my shirt tail caught on a knob, turning on a burner. Luckily it's an electric stove. If it was my old propane stove I would have immolated myself.
Dumbo's Law of Averages: The chance of being watched while you work is directly proportional to how dumb the thing is you are doing.
At that point Bonnie told me to get down and find her some real lesbians to help.
We'd been in the house 23 days and to Lowes 27 times. Mostly me, searching for the one thing Bonnie forgot to get for the project already in progress. We're there so often the hot dog man knows us by name and we are welcome to use the employee lounge.
And we've made friends with Ellen from the paint department. Relationships develop quickly when a clerk has to be the arbiter between people arguing over Latte Semi-Gloss vs. Desert Beige Satin.
When our new appliances were delivered, we found that one half inch of counter top obstructed installation of the new fridge. Bonnie promptly revved up her reciprocal saw and, to
the amazement of the delivery guys, sliced off the offending formica.
We met our waterloo at the Microwave. Installed with the original cabinetry, it would have hung down so far we could only have cooked flat food in frying pans. Steady diet of flatbread and fritattas, anyone?
For this project we hired pros to tune-up our kitchen. The two gentlemen were great, improvising a cabinet on its side to hang the microwave and figuring out an ingenious method of venting it out. Yes, they were here for days, and we were beginning to think of them like Eldin the painter-in-residence on the old
Murphy Brown
series, but they did a great job.
For a while of course, Bonnie, who was out and proud from the moment of birth I believe, was a closet case. She spent at least a week in the master bedroom closet installing various closet stretchers, closet helpers and closet do-dads trying to buy us more space.
And by today, deadline day for
Letters
, we have been in the house exactly 32 days. We are pleased with the progress and pooped at the same time. Somebody on the internet coined a word that describes our condition perfectly. Exhaustipated. Too tired to give a shit.
But we love our new home. Out the corner of my eye I just spied the landscape brigade heading our way. Oy, I feel smug. Don't exhaustipate yourselves, fellas.
O
CTOBER
12, 2013 885
PLACES TO SEE BEFORE
â¦
I follow Suze Orman's advice. If you are going to spend your money, spend it on people first, experiences second and things third. Words to live by. And we are.
With the sale of our humongous sea of grass with the little house on the prairie on it, and our move to the “manufactured home,” which I am getting used to saying instead of “trailer,” life is good.
Like Susie says, we're spending on us, and in some cases our friends, first. Experiences, like an upcoming trip to the Galapagos Islands second. And stuff third, although we are trying to wean ourselves off Lowes and Bed, Bath & Beyond.
When the travel folks at
1000 Places to
See.com
recently came out with a list of the top 100, Bonnie and I had already managed to scratch off 33 sites on the list. Our January cruise to see penguins and Blue-Footed Boobies will get us to 34. If all goes well, and we accomplish our planned 2015 cross country RV adventure, lots of numbers will fall.
Back when my first book was published, and I started to get notes and e-mails from readers from all over the map, I said I hoped that someday we could go cross-country, visiting. That day is approaching. I would love to see how our tribe is doing in various places around the country. I am well aware that life in Rehoboth, or Gayberry RFD as we call it, is unique. Sometimes, when I hear sad tales from other parts of the country I know we are in a diversity bubble, unlike much of the nation. Goodness knows, I never expected Delaware to be in the vanguard like it is. Strange and wonderful things have happened here.
And while this book is putting to pasture the Frying Series (unless I can't stifle my urge to write a prequel called
A Kiss Before Frying
), I suspect I have not used up my words yet. As
we set out in the RV, or on a plane, train or in the car, I think there will be stories. After all, we're seriously considering a puppy come spring.
In the meantime, thanks for reading. It means the world to me. I look forward to seeing you on facebook, at book signings, in P-Town, in Rehoboth Beach or anywhere our travels take us.
Most of all, here's to our ability to laugh rather than moan.
Just last night I opened a fortune cookie that said “you will soon be surrounded by good friends and laughter.”
Who could ask for anything more?
I thought I was done as a trilogy, but no, many people urged me to keep going. Thanks!
Naturally, thanks, again, to my wife Bonnie (who, this year, is finally, my wife in the eyes of the IRS and other federal agencies) for willing, so often, to be represented in print, despite the remarks or questions publication may produce at Happy Hour.
Thanks once again to Steve Elkins and Murray Archibald, of CAMP Rehoboth, who keep me in ink. They work harder and become more selfless each year as they give back to the community in Rehoboth Beach. They are both so incredibly talented it's ridiculous. And I love them more every day. Thanks, too, to Terry Plowman and all my new readers at
Delaware Beach Life
, and Maribeth Fishcher and my friends at the Rehoboth Beach Writer's Guild â they encourage me.
Gratitude goes to my perceptive and speedy draft readers, Kathy Galloway and Fran SneiderâI can always count on you when it comes to comments large (“You don't really want to say this in print, do you?”) or small (“you never met a comma you didn't love.”)
To Eric, the man who permits me to be a Jewish mother, all my thanks and love, always. Diversity are us, kiddo.
And, once again, a very special nod to my dear friend and new neighbor Stefani Deoul for telling me, mostly via international calls, when my tales go awry and being perceptive enough, not to mention willing, to suggest how to fix them.
I really do get by with a little help from my friends.
Lastly, to my
Letters from CAMP Rehoboth
readers, I love you for still being there even after all these years. We're closing in on two decades. And 2013 has been a doozeyâfor me personally and for all of us as a community.
An enormous hug to you all.
Fay Jacobs, a native New Yorker, spent 30 years in the Washington, DC area working in journalism, theater, and public relations. Her first book,
As I Lay Fryingâa Rehoboth Beach Memoir
was published in 2004 and is in its third printing. Her second,
Fried & TrueâTales from Rehoboth Beach
was released in 2007. That book won the 2008 Golden Crown Literary Society Award for non-fiction and was recognized by the National Federation of Press Women as 2008 Book of the Year for Humor.
For Frying Out LoudâRehoboth Beach Diaries
, released in 2010 won a slew of awards, including the American Library Association Over the Rainbow nomination and National Federation of Press Women Humor Book of the Year. Fay has contributed feature stories and columns to such publications as
The Washington Post
,
The Advocate, OutTraveler
,
curve
magazine,
The Baltimore Sun
,
Chesapeake Bay Magazine, The Washington Blade, The Wilmington News Journal, Delaware Beach Life
and more.
Since 1995 she has been a regular columnist for
Letters from CAMP Rehoboth
, and won the national 1997 Vice Versa Award for excellence.
She and Bonnie, her partner of 30 years and wife of one year, live in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.