Good Studs are Hard to Find

The General knows where she’s going and knows what she’s doing, even if she’s only fifteen.  All she needs from us is a ride, money, and weekend pizza delivery.  It’s easy to be her parent.   All you need is a car, a wallet, and a phone.

Her and her friends hang around town in a pack.  They take turns spending the night at each other’s houses.  Even so, they need rides.  “Take me to Megan’s,” she calls and says.  “I’m at Jenny’s.  There’s a bunch of us.”

This arrangement works for us.  If she were at home, we’d have to listen to her advice.  She has opinions on everything, particularly our pace of work on the house.  It’s easier to give her rides. 

We have to go to Home Depot, so we pick her up on the way.

“I love this truck!” one of her friends says.

“I love this song!” another one says of Charlie’s stuck in the seventies selection.

“Are you joking me?” the General says to her friends.  “They’re OLD,” she says of us.

Charlie turns up the music.  “Listen to your wise friends.”

The General reaches over to the CD player.  She sniffs by her armpit.  “You know when we thought we smelled B.O.?” she says to her friends.  “That was apparently me.  Ewww!”

We let out the girls and they say, “Thank you!  I love your truck!  You are so lucky!”  Fifteen year-old girls all speak in exclamation points.

The excitement continues as we enter the hallowed halls of Home Depot.

“We’re only here for the studs,” Charlie says to anyone who’ll listen.  He hasn’t had  an opportunity to frame for a while.  He’s excited to get back to building walls instead of kitchen cabinets. 

He’s starting off easy, as the wall he’s building is a stub and it’s only purpose is to hold up the bar behind the counter in the kitchen.  Still, it’ll be something different than giving fifteen year-old girls rides and interpreting instructions for Mill’s Pride cabinet assembly.

We walk down the best-smelling aisle in Home Depot.  There are rarely women in this section.  There’s rarely anyone around here.  This is the least glamorous spot in the building.  There’s wood, lots of it, cut in big hunks and slabs, piled high and stacked on each side of the aisle.

I’ve never seen anyone shop for wood like Charlie.  He doesn’t go over and pick the first one in the pile, put it in his cart and leave.  He has a method.

He picks up a stud, holds it upright and looks at it, then holds it horizontally away from his face and looks at it closely.  At this point, he more than likely will drop the stud on the floor like it instantly caught on fire.  Then he picks up another one.

The first time I saw him do this, I wondered what he could be looking for.  Surely they weren’t as bad as all that.  He drops them so quickly, so violently, that you wonder if the stud’s full of bugs or something.

“They have to be perfectly straight,” he says.  “They’re going to be attached to cabinets which are perfectly straight.  They can’t be crooked, like the walls.”

On this day, the stud area had been recently replenished with two banded bundles of two by fours.  “It’s a good day,” Charlie said with smug satisfaction.  “If they’re banded, they haven’t had a chance to warp or twist.” 

He cut the band and began his stud inspection.  One by one, he pulled out a good thirty studs, eyeballed them, and quickly dropped them on the ground.

“They’re inches off straight,” he said.  “Every one.”

He pulled out thirty studs before finding eight usable ones.  He pulled out twenty more before he found the last few he needed.

“Why do you do that?” I asked him as he dropped a stud quickly on the ground.

“I don’t want the next poor guy to have to go through my rejects, too.”

There was a time when we looked for the worst in wood.  When we taught Tae Kwon Do, we did our best to find the crappiest pieces of 1 by 12.  We got some so cracked and warped that the cashiers often asked if we’d like someone to get us a better piece.  “You sure you want to pay for that?” they’d ask.

They didn’t know the frustration of taking a belt test and flunking the board breaking.  We were trying to give our students confidence, so these crappy boards were perfect.  Now we’re trying to undo cheap construction on a 1972 ranch house.  Our confidence is boosted by un-crapping the walls.

We went through the Contractor’s checkout line since we had these bulky hunks of straight studs.  We looked like we were going to do big, exciting Contractor-type things with all this wood.  I acted like I was part of the construction team, even though my job ends when I bring out my credit card.

Charlie was as happy as if he’d bought a new drill when he loaded everything in the truck bed.  “I don’t have to jimmy anything over the tire well or angle things into the trailer,” he said.  “Everything fits flat.”

He was so happy that he returned the cart to the designated location in the parking lot.  There he bumped into my X.  I saw them talking and ducked quickly into the huge cab of the truck.  He stalked me often while we were married.  It’s an automatic reaction.

While my former and current husbands chatted in the Home Depot parking lot, the General paged.  She needed money this time.  “Just drop it off at Megan’s,” she said.  “A five is plenty.”

It’s a small price to pay for peace.

One of the girls rushes up to the truck and says, “She smacked me in the head.”  Another one says, “She’s being violent.  Tell her to stop it.”

Charlie grabs the General from behind and holds her arms behind her.  “Here’s your chance,” he says.  “Payback time.”

Her friends could only giggle.  I didn’t let this opportunity go to waste.  I tickled her armpits until she wriggled free.  She looked at me, saw my halter top and said, “You’re nipping majorly, Mom.”

“Why are you looking?” I said.

Charlie looked at my top and said, “Cool.”

One of the girls asked another, “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Cool.’”

The girls got embarrassed and giggled loudly while running back into the house.

“Awkward,” the General said, and followed them in.

Embarrassing the General and hanging out with studs at Home Depot: what a way to spend the afternoon.

A little help? [] 11:15:51 PM