7767. BELOW THE WATER LINE (pt. 152)

BELOW THE WATER LINE 

(pt. 152)

The one thing that this entire house expansion

undertaking opened up for me, as a kid  -  the ideas

around the things I noticed  -  was how, really, nothing

is fixed. I don't mean 'fixed' as in repairs, I mean

instead as static or unchanging. Things just 'are,' and

it's all for a moment. It can all be changed, and

nothing really has any meaning. One day blue, the next

day green. Enlarged. Shortened. Round. Square. That's

a lot for a young person to take in. It seems you're 

led to think that the world you learn about is what

it is, as described and just the way you learn it. But

that's not true at all. All these families and dads along

Inman Avenue, they had somehow trespassed with

their thoughts along areas where, on any sort of a

whim, those houses they'd purchased could now, 

after a few years of trusting, be changed, altered,

turned about. Simply put : they did not HAVE to be

the way they were, nor the way they'd been built. It

seemed to hit all at once, and then the hammers and

saws were suddenly everywhere. Perhaps that's the idea

behind starter homes and do-it-yourself projects. (That's

what this all used to be called, though you never hear or

see that phrase in use any more. Probably because now

everything's done by code and inspection and all that,

and it's really just the professional product-men, with 

their insider knowledges of how things work and how 

to get passed for inspection, etc., who can get it done

correctly and easily). What I saw it as was a difference

of fluidity and flux  -  things are always in transformation.

What appears solid now is just a vapor later. Even Physics

has proven me right on that count. For now. That too will

probably change soon, when someone posits that there 

really is no such thing as 'knowledge' or 'information'. I

only know that whenever I stood on that long, open floor

of what was to become our large addition of a room to the

rear of our house, I saw things differently  -  it was as if

a new horizon was stretched out from right there in that 

very spot where I'd been hammering nails. The world was

a wooden ship, floating here, through the sea of our own

backyard, there, and we were  -  day by day  - changing 

both the limits of that boat, and the sea it was upon. 

Maybe it was then I realized that I'd been introduced 

to 'My Father, the magician.' Funny stuff, thinking 

back on it all, now.

-

No one else ever said a word. Other men would come 

over to look at things now and then, time to time. They'd 

crack open a beer, my father and the visitor, and just stand

there looking at things, talking about the plans or whatever.

Conceptually, whatever either of them saw, I couldn't really 

see. I just didn't think that way, still don't. I wrote earlier 

about how a felicity for hammers and an ease for construction

seemed to run through my family  -  uncles and fathers and

all. It never rubbed off on me. I never shared that; I've always

been hammer-clumsy, and my end-products are usually wobbly,

 ill-fitted, or just plain done-wrong. There is a time, yes, when

you just have to recognize that and move on, get a professional.

But at other times, for the sorts of silly little projects I do, I

can fudge the deal well enough to get by with it. As my own

Michelangelo, carving a poor Pieta  -  certainly not perfect,

but you'd get the gist well enough. I always envied the skill 

and the dexterity that some people have for construction, for 

making things, for projects. They can seemingly take a hammer

to shit and bang out gold. An alchemy to be envied, for sure.

-

In later years, this idea even grew a bit more intense. Studying

Science, and some of the concepts of what went with it, I

realized that everything is nothing more than a long series of 

components, smaller and smaller components. The more you 

take things apart, down to the smallest and most incremental

aspect  -  the tiniest screw and nut, the smallest metal fold

tucked into another metal crevice designed just for it, the weirder

and weirder the world gets. The weirder it can be seen to be. Even

the largest items  -  a huge engine or turbine, or a building, is

nothing more than a multifarious collection and constructed

composition of smaller and smaller objects. They can be found, 

and inspected. And dismantled. I found that to be extremely 

useful as a writer -  it's a magnificent means of deconstructing

a situation, dismantling an emotion, say, and writing about it.

It's almost quaintly scientific, in the most un-scientific of

endeavors. Like finding a whole language in the dissected

throat of a mute.

-

I used to roam Avenel, completely at will. On foot or by

bicycle; just to see different sections, places I'd not been 

before. It was the sort of place you could do that  -  I guess 

everywhere is, really, but in many other locales you always 

know specifically where you are because there's a business 

district, parking, town structures, and all that. In Avenel,

there was none of that  -  here a grassy, weedy lot, there

a house from the old days, there a bunch of new stuff. The

few centralizing places, as mentioned, were always the

underpass, the central passage of Route One, essentially

separating the town, and the other terminus, along St.

George Avenue. Which was really Route 35, that could

take you to the beaches eventually, lame though they 

may have been. Down at the bottom of town were all those

vague and mysterious swamp areas; the fens, where the real

odd folk still lived. Route 35, like I said, was a named-by-

number highway, but in town the only reference was always

just St. George Avenue, though in Rahway and Linden,
on the street signs and maps, it suddenly changed to 'St.
Georges Avenue', with that addition of the 'S'. Not a possessive,
not a plural, but just odd. At the Railway Bridge in Rahway,

where Route 27 met it, and ended, it was always confusing.

Route 27 was famous, once, as the 'Lincoln Highway', an

early coast-to-coast highway, a project of the auto era, and a

once-proud link that united the country. Now it was nothing

much at all, and it ended at the Rahway Inn; a bar and 

drinking hole of local notoriety. Pick-ups, fights, arguments 

and brawls, and even once or twice a dead person. You could sit 

there, at that light, at the very terminus of one of the early 

twentieth-century's great endeavors, the building of this

 'highway',  and watch the wobbly people as they entered or left 

the Rahway Inn. Their own 30 seconds of fame : trying to locate 

their car, and get to it with that uncertain gait of a drunken sailor 

who knows at any moment he could quite easily be walking

off the edge of his ship. The Rahway Inn  -  one of the area's 

once-finest, corner, factory-bars. Everything like that's all 

gone now; people are even afraid to drink. Old Avenel

was a place where smoking and drinking rivaled, probably, 

sex and conquest. Those things were everywhere, and no one

cared about the niceties. You 'worked hard', and at the end of 

your day or week, you deserved it, deserved something.

It was a grand old, wild and wiry place. For me to get around

through there, and to any of the near and local places around it, 

was an eye-opening achievement,  and I loved it. There was some 

rocking, solid adventure at most every turn  -  tire-shops, 

metal-guys, mechanics and gas-stations, factories and 

warehouses. A few guild halls, and truck lots. Everything 

a'jumble, all over the place. When things got really boring,

there was always the tracks and the prison-farm yards.

You have to rue its passing, but it's all gone now.