Saturday in the Garage

A slice of the American Dream

Photo by Dylan McLeod on Unsplash

I’m sitting in my garage on a Saturday afternoon, thinking about the weather. It’s ninety degrees out, the wind is starting to kick up, and somewhere between Monday and Tuesday, it’s supposed to rain. That’s Southern California for you. We like it that way. I think.

The garage, by the way, is one of the great underrated rooms in the American house. Nobody calls it a room. It’s got a concrete floor and a door that opens to the street, and it smells like whatever you worked on last. But on a Saturday afternoon, with the big door up and a little breeze coming through, I’d put it up against any living room in the neighborhood. You can sit in a garage and think. You can’t really do that in a kitchen.

Anyway, the weather. Weather is a funny thing. It turns on a dime. You never really know what to wear. I like shorts on a hot day — who doesn’t — but spring around here is a negotiation. I start the morning in shorts, and by the time I’m out and about, I’m wishing I had a change of clothes in the truck. It gets chilly quicker than you’d think.

Weather forecasters don’t help. They’ve got radar now, satellites, computers the size of buildings, and they still shrug at you from the TV and say “chance of showers.” A chance of showers. I had a chance of being six-foot-four, too, and look how that turned out. Just tell me if I need a jacket.

Maybe I’m just getting old. I put socks on in the morning now. That’s new. I was never a slipper guy — not in good weather, not in any weather — and now I am. Nobody warns you about these things. One day you’re barefoot on the patio, the next you’re shuffling around in slippers as your grandfather did, and you can’t remember when the handoff happened. I think it happens in your sleep. I think there’s a night, sometime in your fifties, where a little man comes in and leaves a pair of slippers by the bed, and from then on you wear them.

Still, I like my coffee outside. That hasn’t changed. Eden, the wonder dog, sits right next to me on a warm morning, because that’s where she’s decided she belongs. She’s not asking. Dogs don’t ask. They arrive. You learn to drink your coffee around them.

The birds don’t care what the weather’s doing. They sing and carry on either way. I admire that about them. Nobody ever saw a sparrow look out the window and decide to call in sick. The rabbits prefer the warm nights, which Eden takes as a personal invitation to chase them around the yard. She never catches one. I think she’d be disappointed if she did. She’s in it for the running. Somewhere along the way, she figured out that the point of chasing isn’t the catch, and I wish more people had learned that.

The neighbors are out too on a day like this. Somebody’s got a leaf blower going, somebody else is pretending to work on a car, and a couple of kids are riding bikes in that wobbly way kids ride bikes before they really know how. You can tell the season by the sounds more than the temperature, if you pay attention. Winter sounds smaller. Spring sounds like everybody remembering they have a yard.

I’m looking forward to the warmer nights — the kind where you can light a fire in the pit and sit out with a drink and not have to think about much of anything. That’s the best part of the year, if you ask me. Not the hottest days, not the long afternoons — the evenings, when the heat lets go, and the sky does that thing it does, and you can hear people laughing three houses down.

Then again, there are the bugs.

But that’s a different story. I’ll tell you another Saturday.

Eden is asleep on “her” recliner, and I’ve still got half a cup of coffee. That’s about as much Saturday as a man needs.