Remembering Where I Put, What I Have

Winter has come to Denver and in a house with active human and canine inhabitants, lots of hats, mittens, dog leashes, slingshots, and various ancillary outdoor gear piles up. Also among the Hooker house crew is a collective appetite for spicy food and the calloused tongues it produces. There are two restaurants in particular we frequent in our neighborhood: U.S. Thai and Santiago’s. Even the “medium” spice at US Thai will take the enamel of the soup bowls and probably a little off your teeth too. Not to mention the “hot” and “Thai hot”. The latter my comrade Adám Bové says they won’t even serve to some of hooligans he calls friends he takes there, and he takes lots of friends there. These restaurants are the type where the stainless steel kitchen grills and sinks are in plain view of the customers and usually have flames coming out of them. There are also usually large steel cans of sitting around, filled with eggshells, hot peppers, or pineapple slices.

Then there was the old picnic table my father dismantled some years ago on the farm. He built it when I was still small enough to crawl under and it sat by the pond on the farm and was painted a cool olive green to match the “Pony Shed” – the family picnic house that once stabled my grandfather’s ponies it is named for. I am sure there are countless family photos of 4th of July birthday picnics where we are all gathered around that picnic table, eating ice cream sunburned and sticky-faced. The boards to the table are stacked under the loading docks of the barn like dusty coffins in a morgue, waiting to be resurrected or safely and sentimentally forgotten for a future generation to pull out and ponder their origins and project their dreams upon, like I imagine archeologist must do with bones of mastodons.

My father and I, among other things, planed two of these boards down on Christmas day. A dog or two slept on them in the back of Adám’s jeep in the ride back to Denver, where along with my visiting sister, we (re)assembled the picnic table into a shelf. Add 5 steel cans donated from the trash from our friends at the aforementioned restaurants – or in the case of Santiago’s – knowledge of their delivery truck schedule which drops off and returns cans of tomatoes and jalapeños, and an open invitation to dive in their dumpster, and I think I have a mighty fine shelf, and a solution to the Hooker house storage and accessibly conundrum for these cold climes.

The green paint from the picnic table has faded with years of exposure, but the faint gray-green hue can still be seen in some of the grain, and for experimentation, I rattle-caned the inside of the steel food cans with “Machine & Implement paint” from the hardware store. A few square nails I pocketed from my father’s work bench were spiked into the face board for keys, and the shelf also gave me a home to elk antlers I found early one morning in New Mexico with friends, and a great painting my mother gave me, and a great book from my sister.

There may be as many problems as there is material in the world. Sometimes they are one in the same. There is plenty of both, big and small, to go around. What we have – and how we use it – is sometimes all we are measured and defined by. The problems we create, and how we solve them, may be as telling. In either case, what really defines us, I feel, are the stories, and the memories we can make though it all. At least hope to now remember where I put my keys.