danajohnhill.org | Hard Times Come Again No More

Merciless time marches on, indifferent to the wishes of men. That is a universal truth. Each year seems to bring its own reminders of my life’s emptying hourglass. I have a high school friend whose own child now attends our former high school. I recalled today that I last attended that school sixteen years ago this month. That, in itself, is insignificant. But today is the first day of summer, and, in the course of pondering the resumption of my “Summer Songs” nostalgia bacchanale, I realized that Bryan Adams’ hit song “Summer of ’69″ was released twenty-six years ago this month. That, too, is relatively insignificant. What made me feel strange was the realization that when “Summer of ’69″ was released, 1969 was sixteen years past – just as 1995 is now sixteen years past.

As I have said before, 1969 seems to me to have had the most interesting summer of the twentieth century. But in 1985, 1969 probably seemed like it took place in another world. I cannot say the same for 1995. Though the same number of grains of sand have passed through the hourglass in the intervening years, 1995 feels like yesterday. Perhaps that’s why nobody is writing hit songs about it.

Filed under: Musings, Nostalgia, Popular Music on June 21st, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Anyone who knows me knows that I love the E Street Band. And I consider myself quite lucky to have been able to see them live on several occasions – most recently on their last tour, when I finally got to see a show with my father. Anyone who has been to see the E Street Band knows this already, but if you never have, you should know that Clarence Clemons, who died last night, was beloved. Any time the Big Man played a note people in the audience would freak out. I witnessed this myself many times.

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But I count myself luckier still because several years ago, at a concert in Orlando, I watched Bruce Springsteen pick a sign from someone in the crowd requesting the band play “Jungleland”, which they did. I got to see the Big Man play that solo and it was everything I hoped it would be.

Filed under: Current Events, Popular Music on June 19th, 2011 | No Comments »

First and foremost: Miriam was right and I was wrong. I doubted that the old vinyl floor in our kitchen was contaminated with asbestos. Miriam, on the other hand, was certain. I guess I didn’t think we would be that unlucky, but she showed me websites with pictures of vinyl floors that looked suspiciously like ours, and argued passionately that we should have the old floor checked before we just went ripping it out. So we put a small chunk of the flooring into a plastic bag, put that plastic bag into another plastic bag, and FedExed that to a lab in Orlando. A day later we learned that the floor did, indeed, have a substantial quantity of asbestos. So, again, for the record, I was wrong.

The floor that was tainted was not the top layer of vinyl. Rather, it was a layer or two below the black and white checkerboard tiles that the previous owners installed – a green-yellow swirl that must have matched the old countertop perfectly. Conventional wisdom holds that asbestos should be removed by qualified professionals, so I began making phone calls. Nobody in Gainesville deals with asbestos, I learned. But a firm in Jacksonville was professional and prompt, and soon enough a white van driven by two men with haz-mat suits pulled into the driveway.

Once in the house they went to work sealing off the kitchen from the adjacent rooms using thick sheets of plastic, and ran an air pump with a special filter attached to a length of hose. From outside I could hear loud banging noises. Then, after about an hour the men emerged, declared the kitchen all clear, and loaded heavy bags of tainted flooring into the back of their van. They had taken away the asbestos floor, the non-suspect floor that was on top of it, and the rotten wood that was underneath it all. Years of leaking sinks or dishwashers had done some damage. I was glad to not have to mess with all of that myself, but it would be one of only two jobs handled by professionals during this whole project (the other would be installation of the countertops).

The asbestos guys left me with a bare concrete floor coated with a layer of old black adhesive. I could certainly have applied the new porcelain tile directly atop the concrete, but that would have left me with a finished floor a half-inch below the level of the parquet in the living room. I didn’t want that. So I purchased nine or so sheets of a cement backerboard called WonderBoard, or something like it. The “wonder” of it is that anyone can pick it up, since a sheet weighs a ton, and the edges are rough and painful. I couldn’t fit these panels into our car. It was a big hassle. The boards were adhered to the concrete foundation with plain old mortar like you’d use with tile. It took hours of grueling work to set all the sheets in place, tape the seams, and seal the joints.

A few days later I set to work on the tile. We chose twelve-inch-square porcelain tiles in a fairly neutral shade, but one which perfectly matched the wallpaper, and looked good with the yet-to-be-installed cabinetry. Miriam selected a fairly narrow width between tiles, and I had spacers to keep the tiles properly situated. I installed all the whole tiles one night, then went back the next day to set the cut pieces. I don’t remember how many cut pieces there were, but it was a lot. Something like fifty. The tile saw I had purchased from someone off Craigslist worked, but was slow as could be. I was outside one night until after dark cutting. But the cut pieces installed just the same as the whole pieces, and I felt relieved to have the whole thing ready for grout.

Grouting a floor is a miserable chore. It isn’t that it is mentally taxing. Nor is it even terribly detail-oriented like, say, trim carpentry or complez tilework. Rather, it’s fatiguing. It requires a decent amount of pressure with a rubber float to get the grout in all the joints. But that’s just the beginning. Once that’s done you still have to wipe it all down with a sponge several times. That’s where I became exhausted, and several times just rolled over and laid flat on my back in the middle of a wet, sandy floor. But after a couple passes with a sponge the tiles looked spiffy, and the whole room looked new.

The next step was installing cabinetry.

Filed under: House on June 16th, 2011 | No Comments »

When I was a small boy I had a collection of books called the Childcraft Library. Among the assorted volumes was one called Places to Know. It was my favorite. Page after page depicted amazing monuments and natural wonders around the world. I looked at the book often, and I imagined visiting those places.

Something had happened by the time I was a teenager, however. I had lost faith that I would ever travel. I remained fascinated by the world’s monuments and natural  wonders, but I doubted I would ever see them in person. I simply couldn’t imagine a scenario in which I would behold the Eiffel Tower, the Vatican, or the Alps. My doubts may have stemmed from my limited experience. While I had, as a boy, been to Atlanta, Chicago, Miami, and even New York City, I spent most of my time very near home. Indeed, years would pass in which I would not travel more than fifty miles from my home. Between 1986 and 1998 I left Florida one time.  So, I was, perhaps, understandably skeptical about my potential for future travel, particularly travel to exotic destinations. I simply couldn’t imagine having the opportunity.

Ten years ago today I stood in the middle of Piazza San Marco in Venice, “the drawing room of Europe”. Before me was St. Mark’s, consecrated in 1071. Nearby were the ancient Doge’s Palace, and the Campanile. Standing beside me was a beautiful girl who, I’ll confess, interested me more than whatever magnificent landmarks surrounded us. I had known her for barely six months that day, and had known her for as few as three months at the time she invited me on the voyage of a lifetime. Together, between May and June 2001, we visited a dozen cities and towns in five countries. Places I had only read about in the my Childcraft Library stretched out before me like a vision.

In Paris we stood atop the Eiffel Tower, and strolled the broad avenues designed by Baron Haussmann in the mid-nineteenth century. We crossed the Rhine and admired vast sunflower fields of central Germany, interrupted only by the occasional castle or village. In Leipzig we listened to the music of Johann Sebastian Bach in the church where he worked for the last decades of his life, and where he is buried in honor. In Munich we gazed with wonder at priceless art, including Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. In Salzburg we saw Mozart’s own piano, stood on the stage at the Großes Festspielhaus, and strolled the indescribably charming baroque streets. In Vienna we toured the gardens of Schönbrunn and watched Tosca at the Staatsoper, which remains among the most perfect musical experiences of my life. We paid our respects at the graves of Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert, Schoenberg, and Wolf. In Rome we wandered about the ancient ruins. In Florence we ate the best ice cream we’d ever tasted. In Milan we dined in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele. In spotlessly clean Switzerland we watched in amazement as a railroad worker scrubbed the track with a toothbrush. We stood atop a high mountain gazing down upon the unbearably lovely town of Chamonix, where one of us saw snow for the first time. In Normandy we walked across Omaha Beach, and saw the evidence of the enormous sacrifices made there, in the form of thousands of white marble crosses. We slogged through the mud around Mt. Saint-Michel. We were constantly in motion. And when we weren’t, we slept in fancy hotels with magnificent views of glaciers, and in run-down dumps with views of other run-down dumps.

The beautiful girl who stood beside me ten years ago today in Venice, and who slept beside me in luxurious hotel rooms and miserably uncomfortable train cabins, is asleep next to me right now. For over ten years she has shared with me nearly every experience in my life, both good and bad, and for the past six years she has shared my name. Today is her birthday.

Happy birthday, Angel. You are my rose, and lily, and dove, and sun.

Filed under: Family, Special Occasions, Travel on June 2nd, 2011 | 1 Comment »