Happy Hour

Why do people tackle the job of restoring an old home? I don’t know. I plan to write a song about it someday. I’ll call it A Special Kind of Crazy. That sure describes Brenda and me back in the 1970s. Did I ever mention that we were young, dumb, and full of fantasies?

Oh, I’ll confess, there were some bright spots mixed in with all the plaster dust, like the time it rained.

See, I promised once that I would tell you about built-in gutters. For the more sane and fortunate readers who have lived in apartments in adulthood, gutters and downspouts refer to systems that are built into or attached to a structure (or auxiliary structure garage, canopy, etc.) to facilitate the orderly conveyance of rainwater or melting snow from the roof.

Nowadays, gutters are simply metal troughs attached to the eave of a building. They are ugly, functional, almost impossible to keep cleaned, and fairly— son I say “fairly”—easy to replace.

Back in the day when our cottage on South Broadway in Little Rock was built, gutters were built into the roof structure. They were elegant, functional, unobtrusive, subject to deterioration in time, and frighteningly costly to repair, even more so to renovate. Here's sort of how they looked.

This was before the days of purists, so some folks simply put plywood over the gutters, roofed over it all, and then used modern gutters. That would cause an epidemic of apoplexy amongst the “History Police” these days.

At any rate, we were undecided when we called the most prominent roofing company in the Little Rock area to come out and examine the old roofing on our little cottage and provide some cost estimates. Then we would bring our own “experts” in, buy them some beer, and get the benefit of their experience on their own renovations. There would be plenty of time for lengthy discussion over the coming weekend, as two days of heavy rain appeared in the forecast.

Something happened. I’m sure it occurs in the best of companies or families. People failed to talk to one another. A crew from the roofing company appeared Friday morning, removed a section of roofing whereupon they noticed that it was that magic moment in Arkansas when the forces of the Dark One invade the minds of workers and wreak most of the heartbreak that disrupts normal, happy lives. I’m talking, of course, about “quitting time on Friday,” Satan’s Happy Hour.

With a whole section of wooden planking exposed, the crew left and the rains came. By Monday, the floor below, and Brenda’s piano, were soaked. She was looking for her pistol, and I was frantically calling the roofing company.

After much explanation, recrimination, apology, and allowing of “the coffee to cool,” a solution was reached. The original estimate on a new roof would stand, but the work would include, at no cost—son I say “no cost”—to the homeowners, the complete restoration of the built-in gutter system.

That’s how we got the replaced on our home, much to the envy of our friends and neighbors. We never told them the whole story, just let them think we were prosperous and possessed of the purest propensities in preservation. Our motto was, “If you’re gonna do it, do it right.”

Right.

Sometimes I wonder if those gutters still work.

Into each life,
 a little rain must fall.