By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
October 20, 1963
NOW I KNOW WHAT I'll do after retirement--devote full time to leaf raking, painting, gardening, window washing, roof mending and junk hauling and see if it's possible to catch up. This isn't as exciting as taking banana boats to the Caribbean or playing checkers in St. Petersburg but I yearn for the answer. And I want my epitaph to say, "He got his work done."
It'll be nip and tuck, but given 10 years, with only an occasional Sunday off and no sick leave, I think I can make it.
Always in the back of a man's mind is the realization that there's a lot to do that isn't getting done. This is brought home each fall when you're buttoning things up for winter. Then you come face to face with the ravages of wear and decay.
I'm now exchanging screens for storm windows and am acutely alive to--and ashamed of--all the work I'm passing over. I can let the puttying go for another six months, I tell myself, but a complete job will be a must next spring. Not one piece of storm-sash is weather-tight.
THE WINDOWS NEED paint, too. So do the ledges So do the porches. The whole house could stand a couple of coats. And the backyard patio, partially installed in May, remains partially installed.
Discouragement strikes each time I climb a ladder to clean a window. This is but the immediate, surface chore, not the basic demand. It takes time to paint and putty, though,
and there is too little time. And if you linger too long on anything but the bare essentials cold weather may catch you with your storm windows down.
and there is too little time. And if you linger too long on anything but the bare essentials cold weather may catch you with your storm windows down.
It takes time, too, to wash windows--more time than it should. It's been my conviction for years, unsupported by my wife, that people expend needless effort trying to make windows shine when they should be content with removing the dirt. Streaks shouldn't matter.
You can rub glass until blue in the face, with everything from chamois to winter underwear, and it will, when the light strikes it right, resemble a map of the Missouri watershed. And even should it sparkle to your wife's satisfaction, it will sparkle only until the next rain. Then it again will be a mess.
My wife and I spend considerable time in billing, cooing and smooching, but every October we have a row about the dining room windows--after I've washed them. The top half of these heartbreakers consists of six small panes, each one determined to remain smudgy.
"JUST LOOK AT THOSE dining room windows!" my wife exclaims. "I never saw them look worse. Those two corner panes at the top obviously haven't been touched."
These are fighting words. "What do you mean, they haven't been touched? What do you thik I was doing on that ladder for half an hour, fanning the glass with my hat?"
Such exchanges are quite exhausting and unless my soul mate quits being so finicky about how the glass looks I'll quit wahing windows after retirement.
It's barely possible that seeing so much of each other will make both of us somewhat touchy. Wrangles about windows might be just too much.
Copyright 2013 StarTribune. Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune. No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.
