Next, I needed private living quarters. The small brick ranch I inherited from my parents, whose untimely death left me sharing space with my grandmother, denied me the journey into independent adulthood being traversed by my peers. So I applied the rudimentary drafting skills I learned during my brief time as an engineering student to a design for a complete second-floor addition to my little house. Oh, the audacity!
Those were different times. I strolled into Citizens Bank in Park Ridge and applied for a construction loan. I had the benefit of a debt-free home to use as collateral, but they could have denied me, personally redlined, based on age and career inexperience. They positioned the funding as a mortgage loan.
I hired a local contractor, a friendly family man from Des Plaines named Arny. He liked to build things, including his own large family, but he was not great at business, as I would later discover. He should have hesitated to undertake an ambitious remodeling project under the direction of a twenty-five-year-old, but he needed the work and quickly put together a bid.
Arny was also generous to a fault. When he saw the large in-ground pool out back, he said it would be nice to have a balcony overlooking what I’d earlier created. He sold me on the idea, but this should have been the time for what’s commonly known as a change request. Instead, he simply added an expansive cantilevered second-floor deck the width of the house, accessible by two sets of double sliding doors, also not part of my original design.
This is commonly called scope creep. When finished, there was a massive $14,000 wooden structure hanging off the back of the house that could have supported one hundred people. The entire project had been estimated at $40,000, the size of the loan I had taken.
I worked nearby, at Lutheran General Hospital at the time, which afforded me the ability to run home during my lunch hour to oversee progress. It was during these visits that I was presented with opportunities to add even more creep to the scope. For instance, the electricians noted that light fixtures were not included. Nor were there electrical outlets sufficient to be practical. I had been quoted a basic package that would have required extension cords everywhere I wanted to place a lamp. “Oh, and wouldn’t recessed and track lighting look nice by the fireplace and bar?” You betcha! Kaching!
But those were the good times, long after a period when the house was almost destroyed. Arny was not only lazy with numerical planning, but his construction methods lacked, shall we say, foresight.
I believe that God was being very kind to me during this period of my life. Perhaps it was in heavenly sympathy for the five years of darkness during which death and disease robbed me of my formative years, ages sixteen to twenty-one. My Heavenly project manager gave me very loud and clear warnings, but, like Noah during the construction of the Ark, displayed rainbows following deluges. Two of them.
The first historically rainy period came during the construction of the pool. I’ve written about this previously. The entire backyard nearly collapsed inward, sliding like a burn-scar mudslide in heavy California rain and perilously close to the neighboring property line.
The next was an equally unusual two weeks of monsoon-like downpours that began immediately following the removal of the roof protecting my little house. Roofs and gutters are very important. This is common knowledge, especially if you’ve ever experienced rain without one or the other.
The rain began without concern but quickly took on a dire character during the middle of the first, second, and third nights. Arny had rather carelessly covered the completely open insulation-filled rafters above our heads with a tarp that was of inadequate size, improperly secured, and full of holes. Grandma and I raced around the house (yes, we lived there during construction) with every pot, pan, and garbage can we could find. Victoria Falls erupted through the living room ceiling. Bridal Veil Falls came through a light fixture in the dining room. Smaller but no less damaging leaks pitter-pattered throughout the house as the loose, decades-old insulation became saturated. Walls, ceilings, and carpeting were ruined.
I had moved into the basement when the installation of sliding doors impacted my first-floor bedroom, another unplanned scope change that created very useful ground-floor egress to the pool. That room temporarily became the most efficient fly trap ever devised during a time of year when house flies peaked. The open rafters invited them into the house but resisted allowing them out. I was horrified when I opened the inside door to the room. I quickly donned a face mask and devised a Ghostbusters-like apparatus with a ShopVac to suck up literally a million black bugs. When I turned the power off, the Vac’s five-gallon container hummed from the trapped insects.
My temporary bed in the basement, a pull-out sofa, was in the center of the tiled area, next to the ping-pong table and across from the laundry. Comfy but damp and a bit creepy. The morning I woke up on an island surrounded by muddy water was a definite low point. Earlier, I mentioned the importance of gutters. Their absence allowed water that would normally be whisked away by downspouts to fill the window wells, overwhelming the drain tile and flowing down the concrete walls like lava from a volcano.
Meanwhile, in another part of the devastated house, Grandma walked from her intact bedroom through the dining room, where water had stopped dripping from the ceiling light fixture. As she stepped into the Kitchen, the entire ceiling collapsed behind her in a single piece and with an explosive thud. Her life had been spared with one short stride and by literally one second. She very likely would have been killed, neck and back shattered by the weight of the falling plaster and rain-soaked insulation. Thank you, God!
By now, Arny was complaining bitterly that he was running out of money. He even sat on the newly constructed staircase to the upper level, crying to Grandma while having a smoke. When he approached me, the child-boss, for additional funds, I told him that I had gotten a loan for the amount he told me and that there simply wasn’t any more money.
At this point, he could have walked off the job, leaving me with an untenable situation. To his credit, he finished the project during evenings and on weekends, hiring unskilled neighbors to help with drywall and trim. An insurance claim for the flood damage, unbelievably, came through. A windfall for rainfall.
But this is all background for the point of my story. Many years later, I ran into Arny at a local store, now defunct, called Service Merchandise. I hadn’t seen him. He spotted me, the little man looking up at me with a distraught expression. I wasn’t aware of the impact our time together had on his life. Much later, his house near the Des Plaines River was completely flooded. He was the Job to my Noah.
“I forgive you for what you did to me,” he emphatically commented, but there was a hint of anger in his voice.
“You do?” I said, surprised and naively unaware of the resentment he’d been harboring.
“Yeah. I’m a Christian. I have to.”
So, there it was: forgiveness. But it was directed at me like a blast of reproachment from a Biblical shotgun. He was able to forgive but not forget, and I wondered if at any time it occurred to him to forgive himself for the many mistakes he’d made. Did he consider that I’d never even gotten mad at him through the entire ordeal?
Arny was better equipped to be in sales. He had an irrepressible smile and was good-natured to the core. He just shouldn’t have been a general contractor. He’s gone now, but he provided for a large, adoring family, sort of like Bob Cratchit. I hope he’s comfortably ensconced in his Heavenly hereafter. I just hope God doesn’t let him build anything.
• • • • •
If you enjoyed this essay, consider buying one or more additional collections totaling 134 tales of growing up in the 60s and 70s. Set in the City of Park Ridge, but ranging far beyond its borders, these coming-of-age tales should resonate no matter where you're from. Search for Vic Larson on Amazon for a peek.
