Ch. 4 Stay Out of my Garage
Our garage was as foreign to me as an Armenian marketplace. I couldn’t believe this mind-boggling place was attached to our home. It was a cornucopia of strange looking objects hanging from pegboards, perched on shelves, carefully arranged in sliding cabinets. I pondered stupidly, what is all this stuff?
God help him if Rob needed us to get something from the garage. This usually occurred while he was wedged beneath either the sink, or the car.
“Honey,” he’d ask, “please get me the pkghfhstyusfmd.”
“Huh? Where is it?”
In the garage, right next to the svgsfdrwegm.”
“What does it look like?”
“Kinda like a bnpawertum, only bigger.”
“What color is it?”
Sigh. “Silver.”
“Ok, what’s it near?”
“It’s on the work bench!”
I came back five minutes later frazzled and empty-handed. “There’s nothing silver on the work bench!”
“Which work bench did you check?”
“How many do you have?”
“Three!”
“For crying out loud,” I grumbled and stormed off to search again.
By then, Rob had extricated himself from what he was doing, “Aw, forget it! I’ll get it myself.”
Robert is a car guy. Not just a motor head, but an expert and aficionado of German engineering. He is also a framer, an electrician, a plumber, a welder and a landscaper. There is nothing the man cannot build or fix. Not that I’m complaining. His skills are greatly appreciated at our house. However, it can be intimidating, considering that I am unable to get a lid off a pickle jar! I use the heel of my shoe to bang a nail in the wall. These kinds of improvisations drive Rob crazy.
For any required tool, for any obscure task one can imagine, Rob’s response is, “Yeah, I’ve got that.”
“Honey, I need something to fasten the garland of flowers around our lamppost.”
“You need zip ties.”
“Oh. Do we have any?”
“Yeah, I’ve got those.”
“What if they don’t match the garland?”
“I’ve got them in every color.” Darned if he didn’t.
Since I had no creative control over the garage, to me it was just a big dumping ground for whatever didn’t fit inside the house. I tossed framed pictures, old boots, unused lamps and a slew of ‘things we would sell at a yard sale.’ This also drove him crazy. You’d frequently find Rob storing, moving, lifting, shifting or rearranging objects into mysterious categories, so that each time we entered the garage, it looked different than the time before. There was no hope of ever finding anything. I think it was a ploy so that we’d have to ask him and then he’d know we were in there.
“Where’s the Swiffer sweeper?” I asked. “I just put it in the garage two days ago.”
He frowned, “I moved it. Do you have to put the mops in there?”
“Where else would we put them?”
He motioned inside the house.
“In the house? I’ve been putting cleaning supplies in the garage for months.”
“Yeah, I know,” he crossed his arms and frowned again.
“Let me guess. When your buddies come over, it’s not manly to have mops in the corner of the garage?”
“Darn straight!” he admitted.
“Then hide them!”
“I already did.”
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