Master with the Mousetrap: The Two Armies at the Battle of Ravenna, 1512 (c. 1512, printed 1530)

" … we're rapidly closing that overlong-open window."

The scheming part's over now. We're finally Mustering the forces necessary to affect the changes to the front porch The Muse mandated two summers ago. The project hadn't started, couldn't have started, until after the permit was approved. Before then, we were scheming, projecting, and assessing. Permit approval made this project inevitable and, finally, surprisingly, real. Before, it was theory; now it begins to become practice. Very little's settled yet. We've painted only in the broadest strokes. We've spoken as if we knew even though we couldn't have possibly known. We wanted estimates for an effort nobody could imagine. Once the principals converge to imagine together, we will begin the real work of assessing actual effort and focusing forces. So far, I've given notice that we have approved permits, doubtless a huge and important milestone even though we really haven't started anything yet.

The first presumption of many to die in this effort was the notion that we might keep the mess from intruding into our lives. She grew itchy as I explained to The Muse that workers would have to ferry material down through the basement to build temporary supports beneath the porch deck. She had been planning a quilting project that might have impeded the movement of that material. I'd already been struggling to comprehend what I would have to contribute. Creating access will require upsetting considerable stuff. I am still determining where I'll be putting it instead. Most of that stuff has been needing to be moved somewhere more permanent—another in a lengthening list of procrastinations coming current.

The Blind Men and The Elephant will first manage the project, for every person associated will have already developed notions of what this project should entail. Not one of them actually knows, nor could any of them yet understand, so we will experience battling notions. Conversations will reveal the outline, and then the underlying detail, so Job #1 will foster those conversations and continue them through several increasingly uncomfortable iterations until everyone develops a similar understanding. Some assumptions should survive, but every contributor will lose at least one ox in the process. There's no way around this.

We will learn with whom we have the pleasure as we seem to inflict insults and injuries on each other. My needs will naturally inhibit yours, and we'll all try to be just as accommodating as possible, but complete pliability will prove impossible, if only because it always was. We might prove capable of producing precisely what we aspired to create, but not in any way we'd imagined beforehand. We will seem to have created a frustration engine for much of the effort, with insults reigning down on everybody's very best intentions. We will each find ample justification to practice our generous interpretations, to make up stories where absolute idiots sometimes become our heroes. We might each admit, to ourselves if to no others, how we wish we'd never gotten involved with this cluster-you-know-whuck! We will survive even if our notions can't. We should learn more than we bargained for and somehow manage to create a magnificent testament to best intentions despite ourselves and because of ourselves.

We will create a legend, one we'll repeat without hardly any encouragement. We'll feel compelled to tell this story because it so strongly enhances our self-image and esteem. Everyone—or, well, almost everyone—who hears the story might privately wish they could have been a part of this history, for the remodeled porch will stand as a testament to human capability. When finished, it will become a template for successfully accomplishing something, though its process will never be repeated or, indeed, repeatable. This entry into the history should be as compelling as The Villa's origin story, the infamous remodeling effort of 2022, and the kitchen turnover of '18. The long-planned installation of the automated central irrigation system might one day surpass this change, but we're closing in on the final installations of our tenancy here. Soon, we'll be history, too, with nothing but good old days stories about a time fraught with uncertainty, where we mustered a small cadre of craftspersons to create another routinely impossible outcome. Before the frustrations settle in, while we're still Mustering, anything seems possible because it still is possible, though we're rapidly closing that overlong-open window.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Grace, #PureSchmaltz