Late last summer, I took a day off so I could help my father install a new swamp cooler on his and Mom’s rental property. The rental is actually my mother’s childhood home, a smallish, post-World War II tract house that I suppose could be loosely categorized as a bungalow. My Grandma June lived there until the mid-1980s, when a stroke debilitated her badly enough that she could no longer take care of herself, and then my uncle Layne, the hard-livin’ biker who took his final ride last May, occupied the place for a while after that. But for the last 20 years or so, my folks have earned a little extra income for themselves by renting it out to strangers. Unfortunately, the Salt Lake neighborhood where the house is located isn’t what it was during the Eisenhower years, or even the Carter and Reagan years, so it’s difficult to find tenants who both (a) are willing to live there, and (b) give enough of a damn not to trash the place. The last bunch left an especially nasty mess behind when they abruptly split without notice — Dad went to collect the rent one month and found the place empty, save for filth and vermin, and I’m not kidding about the vermin — leading to an entire year of clean-up and renovation. Dad performed most of the work himself (and it’s actually not done yet!) but the task of hoisting a bulky, heavy air-conditioning unit up to the roof was too much for one man, even one as resourceful as my father. To be honest, it ended up being too much for two men as well: after a half-hour struggle that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Laurel and Hardy movie, we ended up disassembling the damn thing and carrying it up the ladder in pieces.
Not so long ago, being around my father under those circumstances would’ve inevitably ended in disaster. The setbacks in the task at hand and my relative incompetence at that sort of work would’ve put him in a foul mood, which would’ve made me defensive, and the feedback loop would’ve quickly spun us into an angry shouting match over nothing at all. But recently it feels like something between my dad and me has quietly evolved. We seem to have somehow outgrown the alpha-dog pissing contests that defined our relationship for so many years. We still get testy with one another and occasionally bicker, but now it’s more like little border skirmishes instead of all-out global thermonuclear war. And as unlikely as the idea once would’ve seemed, I sometimes even find myself enjoying the time I spend helping my dad with jobs like this, when we’re just a couple of Men Doing Manly Things.
Anyway, our plan had been to have the unit in place before the day became too uncomfortable, but by the time we gave up on lifting it whole, broke it down, and got all the parts onto the roof, the sun was already well up into the sky, and heat was beginning to radiate off the unshaded roof like the wavy mirages that float over I-80 as it slices through the West Desert. And if the temperature alone wasn’t bad enough, the tar on the asphalt shingles was softening and our feet were slipping in the loosened grit with every step we took. After a frightening foot-and-a-half-long skid, Dad suggested we throw in the towel for now; he would come back that evening when it was cooler and finish the reassembly. I didn’t need much convincing. We carefully stacked the remaining parts and tools on the roof, locked the ladder in the garage, and piled into Dad’s beat-up old flatbed truck. He asked if I wanted to go grab a Coke; I said sure.
