Jill and I are racing to our house-rehab deadline. As usual, I was overly ambitious when I submitted another historic tax credit rehab project proposal two years ago. Oh, the things I said I would do! Replace the roof, fix the garage (whose roof was caving in), finish the porch, finish the pantry, on and on. If you’ve been reading this blog a while, you’ll notice that it seems I’m always racing to a deadline. This comes of my being an eternal and thoroughly unrealistic optimist. Every time I eye a prospective project, I image finishing it in three days instead of nine or one week instead of three. We’ve been working on the pantry – a tiny four-by-thirteen-foot room – for months.

What happens is this: we try something new, like tiling the pantry wall above the new counter. Then we like what we’ve done so much, we conclude that we have to do the same to the other wall. Then the pantry’s looking so good, we figure we’ve got to refinish the floor too. Then, as I’m refinishing the floor, I notice that we never did finish the wall under the pantry sink. And so on.

We’ve had Will helping us. He finished the floor on the second-story porch, which came out great. Some of you have asked about Will’s broken tooth. The pocketful of cash I loaned him for the extraction was too big a temptation. I should have known. Sometimes he asks me to hold his earnings until the weekend has passed. There are, let us say, too many distractions when he’s not working. Which explains, in part, why he’s working all the time.

When I saw him the day after his dentist appointment, Will just shook his head sadly.

“You didn’t go?” I asked.

“No, Mister Ron, I didn’t.”

“The money’s gone?”

“All gone.”

“What happened?”

“Sometimes, you know, I meet a girl. You got to treat her right, you know. Before I know it, my money’s long gone.” He shrugged and shook his head again. “Sorry.”

I shrugged too.

Will has since worked off that debt. I tell him it looks like we’ll have to go to the dentist’s together. Maybe Jill will join us. It’ll be a field trip.

Jill and I are celebrating her having passed her Ph.D. exams. I’m proud of her. She’s an outstanding student (on full scholarship) but I can’t stand to watch the way she studies because she puts everything off till the last minute, often pulling all nighters to get the assignment done. It’s good to have her back finally. Good also to have her help with the house. She’s the painting and detail expert. She’s also the taskmaster and very dangerous to take to a salvage warehouse. We drove to North Carolina for an early Thanksgiving a couple of weeks ago and stopped at Governor’s antique building supplies in Mechanicsville, Virginia. I thought I was safe – we didn’t have much time to shop and we couldn’t take anything big because we didn’t have Jill’s SUV. But Jill found these really cool wrought iron light sconces for our front stoop. And two cool glass globes to go with them. So there I was, walking to the car with a smoking wallet and yet another project. It’s going to be nearly impossible to mount those sconces to our building. For starters, I’ll have to drill through five inches of stone, then a wall of brick. Watch for news of that attempt in the next few weeks.

Jill and I reminisced the other day about our Cincinnati Thanksgiving. A few years ago, Tom and Dorothy — her father and stepmom – invited us to make them Thanksgiving dinner at their house in Cincinnati. We immediately agreed, picturing a quiet, cozy dinner. We sent them a shopping list and expected everything to be in order when we arrived. We discovered that they had put the turkey in their fridge, as we had instructed. But the turkey was frozen. And it was now six p.m. Thanksgiving eve. We learned also that Dorothy had moved the festivities to her pizza restaurant, a franchise she co-owned with one of her sons. the restaurant would be closed and we’d have it all to ourselves. But it wasn’t going to be the four of us. About twenty other family members would be joining us, Dorothy announced. “About twenty?” I crokaed, glancing sharply to Jill, who only blinked at me and shrugged.

“It’ll be great,” Dorothy continued. “You’ll have a whole professional kitchen to yourself!”

I had never cooked in a professional kitchen. Could be fun, I thought.

Tom opened the freezer drawer and pulled out a pack of green beans. “We got green beans!”

Dear man, he wasn’t joking. Two hours later, Jill and I returned from the grocery store with six bags of food. We had the turkey immersed in warm water in the sink. “Is that going to be all right?” Dorothy worried over my shoulder as I checked the very frozen bird. She meant, would we die of food poisoning if we left the turkey out all night? Later, in the guest room, I moanaed to Jill: “If we ruin this dinner, we’ll taking the blame. Doesn’t matter that Mom and Pop are poor planners.” Jill got up at six the next morning and started peeling potatoes.

She and I had learned not to tell anybody there was butter – lots of butter — in them. We were in a margarine household. “Transfat alert!” I joked. Whenever Dorothy or Tom drifted through the kitchen, I shoved the butter behind a pot or covered it with a lid. We had bought two pounds of butter. There’d be butter in and on everything.

At ten, we put in the turkey. “This won’t be ready until about five,” I warned.

Dorothy waved away my concern. “We’ll be fine.”

Jill asked what time she had told everyone to arrive at the restaurant.

“Four o’clock!” Dorothy chirped. “But we won’t be ready,” I insisted.

“Oh, that’s fine,” Dorothy continued. “We always gather at four.” Again I exchanged a bug-eyed What-the-hell? expression with Jill.

We cooked hard. All day. Four o’clock came and went. We pulled the turkey out at five. To our profound dismay, we discovered that there was hardly any fat in the turkey pan. Was this a special-order fatless bird? We’d have to improvise. At five-thirty, we sent Tom and Dorothy to the restaurant with the bird and the stuffing. Jill and I stayed behind to make the gravy and finish the potatoes and make the salad. I don’t recall everything we put in the gravy-that-wasn’t-gravy. The turkey butt, chicken broth, Worcester sauce, all kinds of odds and ends from the pantry. We tested and tasted and tested some more. Finally, at six-thirty, we gave up and took what we had to the restaurant, which was a forty minute drive. We had three pies on the back seat, the potatoes in a pot on the rear floor, in the company of yams, beans, and salad. Jill held the steaming pot of gravy on the floor, braced with her ankles. I took a corner too fast and a cupful of hot gravy doused Jill’s right foot. “Everybody’s gonna hate us,” I groused. Jill dabbed at her soggy shoe with a paper towel. She said, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

When we arrived at Pizza-Fest, we learned that the children had already eaten two hours earlier. All the pizza they’d wanted. We also learned that, since this was a pizza franchise, its kitchen was equipped only with a single large pizza oven that was no higher and no wider than a pizza pan. There was no stove top and no conventional oven. The“cooks” would set the pizza on a conveyor belt and the belt would run the pizza through fifteen minutes of heating in the custom oven. “Why didn’t anybody warn us?” I growled at Jill. The mashed potatoes, the yams, the green beans, the stuffing (one of Jill’s specialties), and the turkey –- all of it we spread out on pizza pans and ran through the oven. As we awaited dinner, I discovered happily that Pizza-fest had wine. I filled a water glass with it. One of the teenagers said to Jill and me, “Don’t worry. This happens every year.” I poured another glass.

In the end, the company was pleasant and the food, despite the setbacks, was good. Okay, the gravy was a disaster. But nobody died of food poisoning. And Jill and I derived considerable satisfaction in seeing the diet-conscious grown-ups down those buttery potatoes.

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Drummer Mitch Mitchell, sixty-two years old, died abruptly last week, apparently of heart failure. In 1966, when he joined the Jimi Hendrix Experience, he was just nineteen. It is hard to imagine that Jimi Hendrix – genius though he was – would have had as great an impact if it weren’t for Mitch Mitchell. Nobody was doing what Mitchell was doing in rock. He was a jazz drummer through and through. But he had a rocker’s heart and drive. Hendrix was a bluesman gone psychedelic. Together, with the ever-competent Noel Redding on bass, they created fusion before anyone had a name for it.

Miles Davis’s landmark fusion album of 1970, Bitches’ Brew, owes a nod to Hendrix mostly because of Mitchell’s jazz-inspired treatment of Hendrix’s arrangements. Few drummers on the rock scene at the time had Mitchell’s chops. It was obvious that he had studied the jazz greats, especially Elvin Jones , who often kept time with a steady rain of syncopated rolls. This style became Mitchell’s signature and is evident in most of Hendrix’s tune. You can hear it on Hendrix’s first hit, “Hey Joe.” Here, take a listen:
Hey Joe

Listen to the way Mitchell rolls through the lulls between verses, very fast and controlled and varied in every pass – from double-time sixteenth notes to punchy single-stroke triplets. These licks would become the standard of rock power-drumming. But nobody was doing these before Mitchell Not coincidentally, one of his contemporaries, Tony Williams, was Miles Davis’s young drummer. Behind all of these ground-breaking fusion drummers was Max Roach, who — starting in the late 1940s — played jazz drums hard, giving them new authority not simply as a grand-stand noise-maker but as something musical.

To get a firmer sense of what was going on in 1966, take a listen to another version of “Hey Joe” by the rock group Love. It slightly pre-dates Hendrix’s version but stylistically lies a galaxy away. Mind you, Love did a good job with the tune. Still, their limits are painfully clear. Like the Byrds and other groups who tried “Hey Joe” at the time, they could only chase after the melody with a manic drive. Hey Joe by Love

Hendrix’s version has an elegance that comes not only from his bluesy treatment but also from the rain of rhythm that Mitchell supplies. In hearing Mitchell’s jazzy style, less experienced drummers (no pun) thought they had to play solos through every song. Thus began decades of overplaying among rock drummers. Mitchell was always mindful of being an ensemble player. In orchestrating the dynamics of every tune, in making the drums more musical, he elevated Hendrix’s work so far above what other rockers were doing that these albums — “Are you Experienced?”; “Axis Bold As Love”, and “Electric Ladyland” — remain among the best in the rock catalogue.

Alas, Mitchell did not, or could not, fulfill the greatness his debut with Hendrix seemed to promise. He never found another band that allowed him to shine in the same way. Nonetheless, he kept playing and playing well and earning great respect everywhere he went.

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The house belonging to Baltimore artist Grace Turnbull was put up for auction recently. Jill and I went to check it out. We’re crazy about old houses. This one was completed in 1928. Turnbull designed it herself. A slate-roofed cottage with lots of stained wood inside and leaded-glass windows, it’s arts-and-crafts mostly. We were surprised to learn that Turnbull, a sculptor and painter, died in 1976. The house has sat empty ever since.

She bequeathed it to the Maryland Historic Society but the Society couldn’t keep it up. Repair of the roof alone will cost $200,000. (Slate roofs last a good 70-100 years but then, when they need replacing, you’re in for a load of trouble.) Turnbull – who lived alone and was still mowing her own lawn when she was in her eighties – envisioned the house as a museum to showcase her art. In fact, she designed the house to do just that. The living room is an open, two-story gallery.

But house museums are closing across the country. Even renown, historic Williamsburg sold off one of its plantation houses recently. And some of the best independent houses, like Mark Twain’s (in Connecticut), are having serious financial trouble. They’re simply way too expensive to keep up and fewer and fewer people are visiting them because old house can’t compete with other distractions, like amusement parks. The result is that an increasing number of these houses are being put into private hands. The ramifications may be grim for historic preservation, especially for anyone hoping to designate and/or bequeath his/her old house to a local government or non-profit.

So, thirty-two years after her death, Ms. Turnbull’s dream hit the hard wall of fiscal reality. The house has an estimated value of $700,000. It’s in one of those well-manicured enclaves with ancient trees and copper-trimmed roofs and late-model luxury cars that looked as groomed as race horses. When I stand in a place like that I keep expecting somebody to escort me out of the neighborhood. “Sorry, sir, do you have business here?” That said, Turnbull’s house isn’t anything exceptional – except for the carvings at each corner of the house’s exterior. These are unusual in the extreme. So is Turnbull’s studio, just off the garage at the back of the house.

About 30 people showed up to gawk at the house. You could tell who the serious buyers were. They looked nothing like Jill and me. Some gritty speculator types were in attendance too (they looked more like us), but the house wouldn’t go cheap, we were sure. Just before the auction was about to begin, the auctioneers surprised us by stopping the sale. Apparently someone had made an attractive offer that morning and that was the end of business.

What about all of Turnbull’s art? That was auctioned – in a widely publicized sale — the next day at the auctioneer’s showroom. I went out of curiosity. Turnbull’s paintings are impressionistic (she was 20 in 1900) and very nicely done. Her sculpture is more eclectic and ranges widely. Jill really wanted something of Turnbull’s. I decided to wait for a lull in the bidding. Sometimes at an auction, the bidders get weary for a bit and let some items go cheap. As it turns out, during one of those lulls, I got a table sculpture called “Aztec head.”

Like everything else Jill and I own, it’s damaged, but very cool. We buy paintings with rips, vases with cracks, chairs with splits – we could open a museum of broken things. The only problem is, in today’s financial climate, nobody would visit it. Some said it was a tragedy that Turnbull’s collection would be scattered across the country after such a sale. True, it would have been a grand tribute to the artist to preserve all her work in one place. On the other hand, a little piece of her world is now making art-lovers happy in many homes like ours. And it’s possible that more will see her creations in this way than in manner she dreamed.

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Holy cow, who’d have thought we’d see this day? The election of President Obama is as monumental as the moon landing. Many were convinced that it couldn’t — or shouldn’t — be done. But here we are, all the stronger for it. I have no illusions that things will change overnight. But things will change. We’re working against a lot of damage. We’ll be paying for G.W.’s mistakes for decades. The most immediate benefit is that the world will, once again, take us seriously. Nothing so clearly shows America’s potential — and good sense — as this election. I am so frigging proud of us for making this happen.

At the same time, I am cautious. If enough cynical, nay-saying politicos pile on Obama in Washington, he won’t get anything done. I am reminded of Jimmy Carter. Some say Carter was too good for the job, his ideals too high. This was most clearly illustrated by his boycott of the 1980 Olympics, which almost no one in America understood. Americans don’t like pain; they don’t care for patience; they want what they want and they want it now. It seems Obama knows this and is willing to take the risk.

And, finally, we get away from the horror show of the current administration. Living with G.W. Bush (and his cronies) was like sharing an apartment with an unrepentant, petty criminal. Every time you turned around, something was missing.

“Where are my car keys, G.W.? I’m late for work.”

“Your keys?” G.W. lies in the Lazy-boy in the front room. He’s watching Nickelodean re-runs of H.R. Puff-N-stuff. As usual, he’s not dressed for much of anything except a nap. He’s wearing striped boxers, dirty sweat socks, and a “Make My Day” t-shirt. In his lap sits a large bowl of Cheerios — it looks like he’s eaten most of the box you bought only this week.

You say, “Don’t do this to me, G.W. I need my car. I’m supposed to be at a meeting in twenty minutes.”

G.W. nods as if trying to be helpful. Then he offers a fraternal smile: “Oh, yeah, something happened to those keys.”

“Something happened to my car keys?”

“Yeah.” He spoons up a mouthful of Cheerios. “They’re gone.”
“You lost my car keys?”

He nods, chewing. “Car’s gone too, buddy.”

“Holy shit, where’s my car?”

“I don’t know, man.” He swallows his cereal, shaking his head with regret, then uses his spoon to scratches at an itch just inside the band of his boxers. “I really loved that car. It had good pick-up.”

“G.W., my car, what happened to my car!”

He looks at you as if you have just insulted him. “You know, it wasn’t easy gettin’ home, man. I couldn’t take a taxi ’cause you didn’t give me that twenty I asked for. You remember?”

“Please, just tell me.”

“Took me three buses, man.”

“Please.”

“You ever tried to transfer buses going cross town?”

By this time you’re on your knees, your chin almost on the armrest of his Lazyboy. “My car, G.W., please.”

He looks at you curiously. “Lighten up, bud. It’s in auto heaven. You believe in God, don’t you?”

“For cars?” you croak.

“God loves everything, didn’t you know that?”

You groan. “I’m never gonna see my car again, am I?”

He wags his spoon at your nose. “Only if you go to heaven, son.” Then he winks. “I’m rootin’ for ya.”

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