SQUARE FEET

It was a mid-August Sunday morning, many years ago, when the Paiva family (me, the wife, daughter and mother-in-law) were sitting around the breakfast table reflecting on all of the things we'd managed to accomplish in the short nine months since moving into our new home. We'd installed a fireplace, paneled, painted the outside, landscaped, etc. There we were, sipping our coffee, still finding it hard to believe that we were "LAND BARONS!"
The wife and I are dreaming out loud as to how we could add rooms upstairs, enclose a portion of our patio to keep out the little beasties (Ah, yes! No more bugs in our burgers, ant-free corn on the cob, no floating gnats in our diet drinks!). We were intoxicated with the glee and merriment of new homeowners! There's no stopping us now; we'll build over the garage! I'm going mad, I tell you, mad!! But, however, after every statement, the elder statesman, the mother-in-law, breaks in with, "But won't that increase our taxes?!?", temporarily bursting our bubbles. But not for long! We can increase our hallway by extending our stoop, and install those long stained glass windows that we admired. Again she chimes in with, "But doesn't that cost a lot of money?" Now I inform the mother-in-law that there are two things of mine that you don't mess with...."My food"...and "My dreams".... and if she continues to do so, I will install a skeet-shoot-spring under her chair and yell "PULL!" So she throws out my food and raps me in my dreams with a wooden spoon.
At this point our daughter was bored stiff and asked if she could be excused and go play in the yard. "Sure honey, maybe mommy and daddy will come out and join you", figuring that the wife and I can do our dreaming outside, plus it'll give us the opportunity to survey the back forty of the "PAIVA-ROSA!" (Forty feet, not acres.) It will also give me a chance to stick the mother-in-law with the breakfast dishes and nurse the bump she gave me on my head!
I tell the wife how, if we use bi-fold doors and piano hinges, we could enclose the patio area, and fold it up in the winter when it's not in use. "As a matter of fact, why can't we use piano hinges on barn dormers upstairs, and fold them down when their not in use!" I ranted. Now my wife is looking at me as if I'm flirting with euphoric insanity. And from the kitchen window, the mother-in-law is bellowing, "The man is bonkers.... he’s trying to turn our beautiful house into a camper!" To tell you the truth, she was right. Even Rube Goldberg would agree with her on that one. Now more noise is emanating from the back window. "Why don't you come back to reality?" I answer the noise with, "Because reality costs too much! And besides, I'm a thinker...a creative person!" She fires back, "If you're so creative, why don't you figure out a way to fix our cracked stoop?" Here I am chasing windmills, and she's sending me to the store for a can of peas! My wife, the peacemaker, interrupts with, "My mom has a point. You're making all these plans, let's see what you can do with the stoop." I said, "What, me work with cement?...What do I know from cement?" But, they want the stoop fixed?..I'll get the stoop fixed. I spent the next day on the phone talking to contractors, trying to get estimates over the phone. The same question kept popping up. "How many square feet are we talkin' about?" they'd inquire. "How the heck do I know?" I'd respond. The only thing I knew about square feet was that Herman Munster had them on the end of his legs!
"Well Pal, I can't tell ya how much it'll cost, if I don't know how large your stoop is." I responded with, "Can't you give me a ballpark figure?" "It depends Pal. Are we talkin' Ebbets Field or Yankee Stadium here? I tell ya Johnny, there's no way'a tellin' ya over the phone! I gotta come see for myself!"
Soon the parade of contractors began. Dented, beat-up, vintage Buicks, Oldsmobiles and Chevy's...all with ladders strapped to their roofs, were pulling up to my door nightly. Men in work clothes, carrying clipboards, were throwing all kinds of numbers at us. "Well Mack and Mrs. Mack, it's gonna run ya anywhere from fifteen hundred to three thou to replace the stoop" they'd inform us. "And how much to just repair it?" we'd ask. "Fifteen hundred to three thou!" they'd fire back. Then the guy would look at me and say, "Look Mack, this aint 'Let's Make A Deal', and I aint 'Monte Hall'! Take it or leave it! I got plenty of work. I wouldn't be able to start work on your stoop until the beginin' of next summer anyway!"
I said, "This doesn't look like a 'LOVE CONNECTION', so why don't you do your talkin' walkin'?" (To myself) What I really said was, "Ya know 'MACK', being that you have so much work, I wouldn't want to add to your burden 'PAL' so THANKS but NO THANKS!"
I'm not the type that gives up easily and I fancy myself as somewhat of a bargain hunter, so I call up the guy who installed our fireplace and ask if he knew somebody! Not only did he know somebody, he said HE could do it, but first he asked "How many square feet?" (Again with the square feet) To which I replied, "Please don't ask me that question, I'm getting a headache!"
Twenty minutes later, a brand new car pulls up, he gets out wearing designer clothes and carrying a leather bound Gucci clipboard. He sizes up the situation, then informs me that he'd remove a portion of the existing stoop, apply a new surface and when he was done, it'll be a new stoop. He can begin work on it tomorrow and complete it in just two days and all for the price of THREE HUNDRED BUCKS!"
I gave him a deposit, we said our good nights and he left. I couldn't wait to get inside and gloat to the girls. A new stoop for three hundred smac-a-roos!
The two days he promised, turned into six weeks of driving up to an incomplete structure that was encased in what looked like the worlds largest sandwich bag (like who knew cement could go stale?), dry concrete footprints on our oriental carpet, plus several un-returned calls to the contractor.
On the first day of the seventh week we came home to discover that the clear plastic had been removed, and what was once a straight, but cracked stoop, had been transformed into the "Leaning-stoop-of Paiva!" My wife looked on in horror, but my daughter loved it. She thought we had built her her own custom made three-tiered slide! My mother-in-law looked at me and laughed then suggested we call the Olympic committee and rent it to them as a practice slope for down hill racers. With egg on my face, I called to complain only to find out that his phone had been disconnected and that he was out of business.
The moral of this story is, look for the contractors with the dented cars... they build straighter stoops! I gotta go now, it's starting to rain and I have to glue those little rubber flowers you put in the bathtub, on my steps. I wouldn't want anyone to slip and hurt themselves!

HOLIDAY ON ICE (PACKS!)

My brand new neighbor is about to become a brand new parent, and asked ME what to expect. So I told him.
Being a parent is quite cool. At first you're in awe of the miracle of birth. Then you take the little tyke home and the fun begins. Mom's going to be understandably incapacitated for a while, so being a liberated male, you take care of most of the newborn’s needs (I drew the line at breast feeding).
Being new to this, ten minutes after the new addition is home, while you're wife is resting, you call the hospital to tell them that you have a defective baby! You'd like a replacement! This one leaks!....and it keeps throwing up on you!
Before long you start becoming a champ at playing with and bathing the new kid on the block, not to mention changing it's diapers. This last part has accomplished something that your mother couldn't. You are cleaning your nails and washing your hands on a regular basis! Boy, it just doesn't get any more paternal than this, does it? Oh great, it just spit up on my new shirt!
You manage to get through the "Honey it's crawling, it's pulling things off the table, I think it's trying to stand” stage. This is when that ignored advice, about child-proofing your house, that other people have been warning you about, kicks in! You begin at warp speed to barricade rooms, raise things to above shoulder height, and remove all breakable items from the coffee table. But not before you find your little dependant sitting on the floor, covered in chocolate, with your wife's favorite crystal candy dish broken under the table (not to mention the yodel juice all over my new NIKES!).
The next stage is "THE TERRIBLE TWO'S" through Pre-K! This is the time that any Dad worth his weight will do anything to entertain his kid and the friends, who are sitting on the grass while you become part of the birthday entertainment. You're jumping up and down, making weird noises, talking like GOOFY and DONALD DUCK, and acting like a real jerk. Meanwhile, the other kids are telling yours that they think dad should cut down on his coffee intake. "He just keeps jumping up and down, making weird noises, thinks he's a Disney character and keeps acting like a real jerk. He's like, scaring us, okay?"
Pretty soon you're kid gets involved in sports, so you're throwing the ball around with your kid, goal tending (which means you're being barraged with hockey pucks and soccer balls), or shooting baskets and going a little one-on-one with that new basketball hoop. (Forget that you had to call the fire department to get you off the garage roof when you were installing it.) You spend your afternoons playing with your kid and evenings soaking in a tub of Mineral Ice and Ben Gay! You went from being an athletic jock in your youth to being a test dummy for the local TRAUMA Center!
Still wanting to be a hero to your kid, you figure that you may be too sore to play, but you're not too sore to coach. So you take over coaching the baseball team. It doesn't take long before you have absolutely no friends left in the community. Not only are your kid’s teammates not talking to you, but neither are their parents!
You survive class trips to zoos, museums, circuses, hikes that come complete with mosquito bites and poison sumac, amusement park rollercoaster rides (where it's pay-back time and now you spit-up on your kid), and the ever popular "HOLIDAY ON ICE!" show. Here your kid looks up at you with those baby blues and says, "Dad, will you teach me how to ice skate?" "Oh sure, I'll teach you. I haven't even come close to my threshold of pain. In fact, why not have our own show? We can call it "HOLIDAY ON ICE-PACKS!”

THE FAMILY TRIP

My life is a little too structured, but I do have these occasional explosions of spontaneity. So last September, when I came into the house and announced that we were going on a FAMILY TRIP upstate to see the leaves change into their autumn hues and maybe stop off to do some pumpkin and apple picking, the wife first sniffs my coffee cup to see if I've been into the hard cider. After realizing that I was of sound mind when I made this impulsive proclamation, she says, "The heck with the house work!" and soon we're heading north in the Cherokee!

"Where are we going, Dad?" asks the daughter. "Don't really know" answers the father. "We'll just keep heading north, take the back roads and see where they take us." My wife joins in the conversation with, "Isn't that kind of risky, honey?" "Maybe", I answer, "But so is anything worth anything in life." "Spare us the philosophy, Dad, and just keep driving!"
Now I'm parked on the side of the road. "Yes, officer, it is a lovely day." "No, I wasn't going to a fire." "No, I wasn't aware that the speed limit within the city is 15 miles per hour... in fact I wasn't aware that this was a city!" "No, I guess going five miles over the limit isn't very funny and no, I don't think that I'm Mario Andretti!"

"Daddy, why did he give you five traffic tickets?" "Answer her, Mario Andretti", the little woman chides. "It was bad enough when Dear Old Dad, asked him how Opie and Aunt Bea was, but when he called the officer "Barney Fife" he was lucky to get off with just FIVE citations!"

As we drive around, my wife suggests that maybe we should've waited a week or so, as the leaves are still green and we could've purchased a map of the area so we wouldn't be lost now. As far as I was concerned, we were on an adventure, and we weren't lost! My daughter said "Dad, there's no more road left, we're LOST!" I told my daughter that when you own a JEEP you make your own roads. She bought that until I ran over an animal trap of some kind while driving through the woods.

After changing the flat, I finally made my way back to a road and eventually found a little town with a diner. We all make up for lost time in the rest rooms, go back to our booth and order our food. We were so hungry we could've beaten out the Tasmanian Devil in a pie eating contest!

Well fed, we're beginning to get back to being ourselves, turning negatives into positives by laughing at the day's experiences. However, we are having to shout at each other in order to be heard. We soon discover the reason. The roar of over a dozen Harley's pulling into the diner's parking lot.

Soon the door bursts open and the diner's filled with Bikers! This six foot eight bearded building wearing a studded denim vest, over a way too small tank top is headed our way. Every one of his steps vibrates the glassware on our table. This is a man who samples every one of the major food groups on an hourly basis. In my mind the words "fee-fi-fo-fum" are accompanying each of his steps. If he comes over to our table, I won't let him intimidate me. I'll be a man and stand nose to nose trading insults like we used to do in New York City! I'll look him in the eyes and say things like, "If you eat a salad once in awhile, Tiny, maybe your belly would stay inside your jeans where it belongs!" Or, "Try putting some vowels to those grunts, and who knows, maybe you could actually form words!"

He stops at our table. I stand, the girls watching....I extend my hand and say, "Hi, my name is Bob, I love the vest!" He shakes my hand and smiles, then says "My name's Henry, this is my place and I see by that baby-size spare on your Jeep that one of my animal traps must've eaten your tire! I can't apologize enough. I have a couple of my guys setting you up with a full size tire from my gas station next door. Sorry about the inconvenience. The meals on me and as soon as they have the new tire on your Jeep, they'll escort you to the thruway so you can get home."

On the way home my daughter says, "It wasn't a total loss, Dad. The trees may not have turned colors yet, but your face sure did...several times as a matter of fact!"