This is the Stuff
I don’t do instructions. They give me the heebie-jeebies. The dissecting and the symbols and the do-not-skip-this steps can make anything feel like quantum physics. I’d rather just mess up a bunch and find my own way through. But last Saturday, I waded through a do-it-yourself black- and-white booklet that came stuffed inside the first of two giant boxes full of varying sizes of wood along with bags and bags of bolts and screws. In most matters of construction, I go for a run—as far away from the instruction book as humanly possible-- and let my husband do the dirty work. Not Saturday, though. Saturday, I was all 69 pages in because we had a swing set to build.
retrieved from https://www.backyarddiscovery.com/
The natural wood playset was a gift to my granddaughter on her second birthday, and it was delivered to her parents’ driveway on a wooden pallet in heavy, oversized boxes secured by packing straps. They tell you, clearly, when you purchase, that assembly is required. But doubling the price to have a pro come out and put it all together just seemed silly. We are a family with lots of tools.
So Saturday we built.
My husband brought a sack of extra devices-- like a hundred different drill bits, some random ratchets, and a T-square that turned out to be essential in the early stages of the build. (Who knew? Certainly, not me.) I brought a sack of food for grilling after-the-fact, my reading glasses (Thank God!), our daughter’s dog, and a giant box of teddy grahams for the birthday girl. Our kids’ best friends brought elbow grease, optimism, their two-year old daughter, another hammer, and some limes. All totaled, in the fenced-in back yard we had six adults, three dogs, two toddlers, a giant pile of wood with different five-digit numbers stamped on the ends, seventeen sacks of hardware labeled in code, a couple of yellow swing seats, a green double slide, and one 69 page instruction book.
How could this not be anything but loads and loads of fun?
My daughter-in-law rolled up her sleeves and started sorting, the boys each picked up a tool, and I began barking orders about FW2s and TNT1s while madly rotating the drawings to ascertain if the beveled edge of the board was to be pointed down or up. We deciphered, hammered, drilled, un-drilled and then re-drilled all over again. We argued and laughed and traded positions when our eyes or our patience or our backs gave out.
And then six and a half short hours later (with only a small pile of left-over hardware that we never found a way to use) our girl had a swing set that looked just like the picture beside the button where I’d clicked “buy.”
This is the stuff.
Not the swing set, but the building of it--the disorganized, frustrating, funny, unpredictable day with Morgan Wallen singing “Chasing You” in the background and us in shorts and t-shirts getting sunburned in awkward places while blindly deciphering a how-to picture book. Six and a half hours on a perfectly good, never-get-again Saturday. Time we can’t get back and wouldn’t want to because it couldn’t have been better spent.
This is the stuff.
Jerry Seinfeld calls these “garbage moments” and he prefers them over “quality time.”
“I’m a believer in the ordinary and the mundane. These guys that talk about
“quality time—I always find that a little sad when they say, “we have quality time.”
I don’t want quality time. I want the garbage time. That’s what I like. You just see
them in their room reading a comic book and you get to kind of watch that for a
minute or (having) a bowl of Cheerios at 11 o’clock at night when they’re not even
supposed to be up. The garbage, that’s what I love.”
When my kids were small, my family traveled with me in the summer when I was recruiting. We once found ourselves in Las Vegas, late in the day with a canceled flight, so we rented a car and made the 16 hour trek to Oklahoma through the night. The kids were around ages 6 and 3 so we stopped a lot. At every detour for snacks or bathroom breaks or gas, we bought a trinket or toy to entertain them the next mile of the way. The back seat of the car grew throughout the cross-country jaunt into an ocean of juice boxes, snack wrappers, sticker books, stuffed animals, French fries, plastic gas station toys, and things that were no longer identifiable because of what they had been through somewhere in west Texas when WWIII broke out. When we finally pulled into our driveway the following day, the kids looked like dirty little angels floating in a sea of debris. Chandler’s sweaty head was resting on Colton’s shoulder and they were both, finally, fast asleep.
I rushed to snap a picture because I just could not imagine it ever being better than this. I knew I’d always remember but I wanted a tangible document that I could look at just the same. Unfortunately, as I was rummaging for the camera (Iphones were not yet a deal), the kids woke up. I made them go back in time for five seconds so I could capture the keeper that lives still --some 20 plus years later-- in a frame on the edge of my desk.
We’ve been to Australia and to Rome and up all 1665 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower but the road trip back from Vegas edges out them all. Likewise, the construction-of-the-swing-set day will likely make a top-ten list.
Garbage, Seinfeld says. The kind I live to keep.
P.S. Good Days