Weekly Roundup: Love Lift Me Up Where I Belong Edition

The story thus far: broke my left wrist at a Spec Racer Ford race in the last weekend of September, rehabbed it, then broke my left thumb in two places at Mike's Bike Park on December 23rd, along with all sorts of tendon/ligament drama. This past week I took a few tentative hops on my Ordnance dirt-jumper, as seen above. Yesterday I went back to Ray's MTB in Cleveland, hit the downhill jump line with reasonable success. In neither case was I able to ride for more than about half an hour before the pain in my hand started to affect my grip strength.

I'm going to assume that I'll be able to make my usual Colorado/West Coast downhill MTB trip this year, assuming that the hand continues to heal. What's interesting about this process to me is that I had about seven weeks where I felt like I wasn't making any progress at all. Couldn't really play guitar, couldn't even start closing a 100-pound Gripzilla, couldn't even do lightweight dumbbell exercises. And I wasn't improving at all on any of these fronts. Then I woke up one day and I could do all of the above. As with the apparent collapse of the United States as a functioning entity, my healing happened gradually, then suddenly.

Oh, and in the middle of all this, I sold my house. Happened in about six hours. So I've been moving out. Having lived here for just a few days short of twenty-one years, I expected that the process would be laborious, and it's proven to be just that. What I didn't expect: that it would be sorrowful, or that it would put me so much in mind of someone who is long gone.

Just over a decade ago, my housekeeper bounded up to me and said, "We have to do something about the basement." I was surprised it had taken her so long to say something. When I had my home built in 2001, I paid another ten grand or so to get a full basement instead of the crawlspace arrangement so common in suburban Columbus. I knew I'd eventually use it all, and I did. The departure of my first wife had made almost no dent in the subterranean nightmare hoarder's maze that had accumulated between 2001 and 2009, a dank and mostly dark labyrinth of bicycles, inventory for my business, humming racks of computer servers, vomit and fecal matter deposited without authorization by my four cats. There was a single tidy corner for my treadmill and Pro-Spot weight bench. Everything else was a mess.

Jaci had an idea. She'd been to one of the home improvement stores and had seen a new generation of heavy-duty shelves. Nicer and weightier than the usual battleship-grey, bent-steel affairs. We'd use them to get all the junk off the floor and into a reliable location. She was willing to do all the work. I just had to pay for the shelves, plus whatever hazmat-style cleaning equipment would be necessary to get the basement under control.

Of course, I couldn't let her do it all herself. We picked a weekday and went down there together. She was twenty-nine, I was thirty-nine, we had what felt like unlimited energy to accomplish this task, and we were close to being in love. Working with about fifteen square feet at a time, we cleared the floor, scraped the biomass out of the porous concrete, bleached the stains out, then built the shelves and loaded them. We sang Bob Dylan tunes together, each of us taking obvious pleasure in supplying lyrics when the other person lost their way.

Meet me in the morning... fifty-what? Fifty-six and Wabasha! Oh, yeah! Honey, we could be in... Kansas! By the time the snow begins to thaw!

We made trash runs to unsuspecting neighborhood dumpsters in her gold Land Rover Discovery, giggling like children who were in the process of helping themselves to forbidden Halloween candy. My girlfriend of the time, the infamous V. McB., pronounced herself "over" the whole thing and decamped to a friend's house. Which freed us up to play the stereo upstairs, volume cranked all the way, and sing along with that.

By the time the sun went down we'd essentially solved the problem. The basement smelled like one of those low-rent "Fabuloso" bottles that she always used to clean the house, in open defiance of my loyalty to the Lehn&Fink products -- Lysol and whatnot -- that had supported my family when my father was a salesman there in the Seventies. I'd like to tell you what we did next, but apparently a few of my readers let their children read this blog, so... let's say that we celebrated and leave it at that.

Seven years later, long after we had agreed to part ways, Jaci took her own life.

This past Thursday night I started unloading those shelves into a PODS storage unit. There were a half-dozen guitar amplifiers that I'd bought and relegated to storage in the years between 2010 and now, a few boxes of bike parts that I clearly remembered assembling and putting away. But the majority of the things I found were a genuine surprise to me. A jewel case containing the original Gran Turismo game, for the first PlayStation. A cardboard box filled with Shooter's Bibles from the turn of the (Twentieth) century and before. T-shirts from various 5K runs, dated 1997 through 2004. A stuffed vinyl Apatosaurus, about ten inches stem to stern and wearing a tasseled cap; that was from the graduation "party" I had in a wheelchair after I broke my neck and finished my senior year in 1988. A series of 1/18th-scale Formula One cars in their original presentation boxes. A transparent vinyl box containing One Lap of America memorabilia.

At some point I realized that Jaci had been the one to find these items in the basement menagerie, box them up, and put them in the back reaches of the shelves she'd assembled. At the end of the night she'd been unwilling to accept any money for making the whole thing happen. Said it was "her treat". I guess it was her way of loving me, of trying to restore something broken in my house because the things that had broken in me were beyond her ability to fix. When I found perhaps the twentieth unfamiliarity, when I was no longer willing to grab and shove and lift the things that had last been touched by her, I shuddered and turned away from the long line of black shelves. Filled the POD with other things, from other parts of the house.

Next week will be the zero hour beyond which I can no longer delay my reckoning with what Jaci left behind. The shelves are festooned with a hundred or more magnets and stickers from long-gone pizza places, computing vendors, sporting events. I will load my little GMC truck with the remaining contents and take them to a storage unit. I will remove each long particle-board plank from the rails and stack them. Then I will take the Vaughan "California Framer" out of my toolbox and knock the rails out of the slots in which they have nestled since around the time my son was born. I will undo Jaci's work one ringing blow at a time before carrying the rails and uprights up to my truck.

I wasn't really surprised when I heard about her death. She'd been immersed in sorrow from the day I'd met her, courtesy of a family tragedy in her youth and two marriages to men who didn't understand who she was or what she wanted. But she was capable of shining in the right moment. She loved music, loved quiet moments too, could find a dark humor in almost anything. A few months after squaring the basement away, we went to an amusement park together because V. McB. hated roller coasters and standing in line.

Jaci and I held hands as we waited for the Diamondback and the Racer. We stuffed our faces with horrible food and stayed on our feet until the very last minute the park was open. Then when she saw my green Audi in the parking lot she yelled, "Race you, old man!" I had longer legs but she had limitless energy. I reached her side of the car long after she did. I kissed her for a long time while a group of teenagers heckled us. On the way home she looked over to me and said, "I wish it could always be like this. But it won't be. We don't deserve it." And she was right.

I'd like to think she will be with me as I knock those old shelves apart and store them, but I don't think she will. It's been so long since I saw her in my dreams or thought of her at random moments. She is dust in a box now, having beaten me there by a space of time that will hardly matter in the arc of history.

My son had a date for our ride at Ray's last night. A girl, his age. They don't see each other as anything but riding partners, circling the "flow trail" together a dozen times while her father and I chatted idly about BMW repair and the cost of college. They have maybe a year of that innocence left, and then the electromagnets switch on. At that point, you're just a passenger. For years. Decades. Until the desire fades out of your heart and you become yourself again, a child once more. As I am, now, at fifty. John and I are children together on our bicycles, pointed in the same direction.

And did you know desire's a terrible thing The worst that I can find And did you know desire's a terrible thing But I rely on mine

I feel free from desire most days now. And when I think back about this woman whom I once loved, who delighted me with her agile body and dirty mind, I don't think about our acrobatics or our shared pulsations. I think of her smile, her laugh, the joy she took in sorting out a disaster of a basement. The rest is shielded from me. Hard to reach. Not worth trying. I roll down the hill at Ray's, wingman to my son, towards a wooden ramp and a space of distance/time to clear. Animated by a desire that is older than my love for any woman, likely to outlast any need for those already-fading fumblings. Ah, John is over the first box jump and heading to the next. It's my turn now, to soak up the transition through wrists and hands oft-broken and absurdly fragile. Into the air, if only for a moment, and free, love lift me up where I belong.

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For Hagerty, I wrote about my new trucklet and an old, if imaginary, car. For the Washington Examiner, I suggested a few ways to get started on track.