One of my neighbors seems to have multiple homes in the area. Sometimes during the day, I'll spot him pedaling up the street and around the corner, where he'll lean his bicycle against a wooden post in the small carport next door. I have never seen him enter this house, and in the evenings I never see the lights on. Behind the carport sits a white garage, where throughout the week he'll park that bike, open the garage and get to work. For the next few hours, all of the noises coming from the garage are the same ones I heard in high school shop classes a thousand years ago. Around six in the evening, he'll close up the garage, hop back on the bike, and ride back to wherever he rests his head at night.
With his grey tousled hair and wiry frame, I like to think he retired here from a northern state somewhere. Maybe he's a Vietnam veteran, like my father. He seems to be pals with another similar-looking fellow across the street from his garage. They'll sit outside on old blue lawn chairs, sharing a few canned beverages. The other guy doesn't seem to be using his garage for much, outside storing a massive SUV, which he probably doesn't really need at this stage of life.
I've been off and on curious about this neighbor's garage project. I suppose I could just mosey on over and ask, but I feel like that might be rude. Plus I'm in a "red" state, so who knows what else might be hanging around in that building. I try to limit my interaction down this way, for good reason. You never know.
A few weeks ago, a big white pickup truck backed up to his garage. Soon he and and a couple other folks began dragging up onto the truck bed this immense wooden canoe. It was painted dark green along the sides and burnt orange on the bottom. It was too big for the bed, so one end lay in the bed while the other part rested on top of the truck's passenger area, which they anchored with a rope through the door windows. Maybe not the greatest anchor system, but I'm no engineer. After a short while, the truck and canoe pulled away.
I think about how perhaps this canoe was his big project - a culmination of his life's work - so to speak. He took a long time crafting this canoe, hours of sweat and handiwork in humid afternoons making it come to life. He didn't have to do this in his twilight years, but he did.
The canoe my neighbor created got me thinking about what sort of life's work I might be able to leave behind. Unfortunately, I'm no handyman by any stretch of the imagination. Outside of grade school shop classes, I've never really built anything worthwhile. And this includes art classes. I cannot draw, sculpt, paint any damn thing, and I had to go and get C's in various subjects to prove that to the world. So I'm stuck with some other method. There's always the writing thing, but I keep thinking it should be something more substantial than that. I always thought results for that would happen sooner rather than later, not that anything of later substance has happened, either.
Seems I haven't really applied myself much to anything since college. A few jobs I liked, but then eventually developed an unhealthy disliking to. That's the way of the world though; most of us endure that love/hate with whatever the vocation. This pandemic has likely given many much more perspective on this, working remotely and now almost being forced to return to all the places we had to slog to daily. For many of us, our jobs aren't what we love per se, just a means to an end. I don't think my mother putting thirty years into the state contracts division constitutes her life's work, and it shouldn't be for anyone else either.
There's always time and space for one to curate their own interests. My neighbor certainly did. I guess it's just a matter of how bad you want to invest in such. I just hope there's enough time for myself here to find that, to leave something others will remember me by.