Better Than TV

BETTER THAN TV

When the carpenters showed up Alfred and Marnie were sitting in their lawn chairs with a TV tray between them drinking coffee and buttering their toast.

The carpenters nodded and they nodded back and began to work building the two-car detached garage about twenty feet from their kitchen door. The foundation had been installed and the rebar was sticking up from the concrete waiting for the two by eights.

Alfred told Marnie what the men were doing and why as Marnie sat knitting, watching and listening. By noon the men had one wall upright and braced and they took off in their pickups for lunch.

Marnie brought their breakfast dishes in and the lunch sandwiches out which they wouldn’t eat until the men returned. Alfred went in and filled a cooler with ice, water and soft drinks and wheeled it over to the garage with a help yourself sign taped on it.

It took the men two weeks to finish the garage, adding a black shingle roof to match the houses’ and a large double garage door with an auto opener. The foreman had brought his electrician to wire the garage for that and for an interior light and a spotlight. They used clapboards, rough side out, and painted them white and the trim also white, the same as their house.

I passed Alfred and Marnie several times a day going back and forth to my house. They lived around the corner on a busy state road so everyone in our small town got to see them and since they were church goers they held court on Sunday after the service while they ate lunch in the basement.

After the job was done Alfred and Marnie sat in their chairs for a week staring at the garage talking and finally they put their car and pickup in the garage opened and closed the auto door a couple of times and put their lawn chairs on pegs in the garage.

Once back inside their house life went on as before—Marnie knitting, Alfred doing the crossword puzzle and both watching TV. They spoke little from forty plus years of marriage with not much left to say. Truth be told they enjoyed their nonstop banter in the yard while their garage was being built.

Now it was mostly meal talk:

Iced coffee or Iced tea?

Tea.

Dessert?

What you got?

Pie.

What kind?

Cherry.

Fine.

Come the end of winter, the leaves coming back on the trees Marnie said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a screened porch?”

“Yep,” said Alfred.

Come the beginning of April Marnie and Alfred were back on their lawn chairs chatting away as the same crew returned and began the process of building them a screened porch with an entrance from both the outside and their living room. They never said so but they were happy it took a good two months to build and then another few weeks to finish the inside.

In the late fall and winter, they could no longer use the screened porch so they retired back inside their house and their old ways.

“Should’ve had them make it good for year ‘round,” said Alfred.

“Yep,” said Marnie “We should give ‘em a call.”

“Yep.”