Breaking concrete

This morning I tried to smash up a large piece of concrete (maybe 1 by 2 feet, 5-6 inches thick in the center, thinner on the edges) with a small sledgehammer, then a pickaxe. Then I stopped. I was getting nowhere.

It isn’t the first time I’ve tried to demolish concrete with hand tools, and it probably won’t be the last. When we first moved into this house, most of the back yard was a cracked-concrete parking slab for maybe three cars. In some ways, breaking that up was easier because much of it was already in pieces—I could use a shovel to pry up the smaller chunks and leverage the bigger ones from there. Venus and I used a five-foot-long heavy metal pry bar to pull up some of the larger pieces, and we made garden furniture with some of the small slabs we didn’t have the energy to break up, lifting them with an assortment of car tire jacks left over from vehicles that had long since been towed to the junkyard. That was shortly before Venus came out to me as transgender.

I had forgotten all about this particular piece of concrete until I was sitting at my laptop in the shade of the grapevine-covered pergola that now serves as a sort of vestibule to the side yard. The concrete was the result of a failed and forgotten experiment that now makes me smile when I think of it. Left over from the back yard project, and too rough for furniture, it became an anchor. I’d rolled it like a terribly misshapen Fred Flintstone car wheel from the back yard to the side of the house hoping its weight would help me bend and anchor a couple of elm saplings that had “volunteered” to landscape the side of the house. I’d imagined some kind of magical arbor created by arching trees woven together at the top. The trees would not comply.

I discovered that trees, unless blocked by something much larger than them, want to grow up straight for the sun. Despite the ropes I wrapped around them, and despite holding a precarious ladder every few years for Venus to saw off the new growth that had escaped skyward from its training. My mind flashes back to each of those instances as I stood at the bottom of the ladder to steady it. At what point did the short-shorts appear? At what point did I realize that everyone except me and a few relatives called her a name other than Venus? Despite the concrete weight pulling the end of each tree down towards the ground, the mess at the side of the house looked nothing like an arch. It looked more like something had been tortured there.

So I gave up on the idea of the arch, and the concept of any kind of a bower dwindled—until one of the elm trees got so stout that it threatened the foundation of the house. Even worse, a grapevine had begun climbing the other elm a few years earlier. Due to what I had thought was benign neglect but perhaps more closely resembled criminal negligence, it had escaped maybe thirty feet into the air and was beginning to strangle a nearby spruce. So we cut down the elm trees, pulled the grapevine down, and stretched it up the side yard. The vision of a grapevine vine-covered pergola began to take shape.

When Venus and I do projects like this together, usually, I’m the one looking at pictures and measuring the space, trying to figure out the layout and what the final product might look like. Venus provides the engineering: she understands the finer points of how to put things together, and what tools to use for the job.

And that’s why I stopped hammering away at the lump of concrete this morning. I have a history of using the wrong tools for the job. My improvising brain kicks in—the tendency to want to use whatever is available. That’s fine for managing a classroom discussion and playing jazz, but not so good for heavy repairs.

My improvising brain has turned out to be both a curse and a blessing. People often want to know how Venus and I stayed together, when Venus was first beginning to come out, when no one, not us, not our friends, and not even the many therapists we saw over the course of decades, really understood how to approach the topic and still help us live our lives with something that resembled love and fulfillment of our dreams.

My improvising brain at that time turned to the tools at hand: I loved my spouse (most of the time), and we seemed more compatible than most other couples I knew. We enjoyed doing things together, exploring new places together. And we shared a lot of dreams for what our future lives could look like.

So I worked with the tools I had at the time. For the first few years, it seemed like Venus felt better if she just had the opportunity to dress in women’s clothes. Fine, it’s only clothes, I thought. I can handle that. Then she wanted people to accept her as her femme self—recognition and appreciation from other people, not just me. The outward focus was hard on me, but I was okay going to parties and gay bars where it felt safe for her to be dressed; in fact, I was surprised by the sense of freedom I felt in those places.

There were so many miniature steps along the way—something different with her appearance, and eventually the physical changes. By a certain point we’d been together so many years, it seemed normal to have to deal with some physical changes—it’s what bodies do. Venus’s physical changes were slow, brought on by hormones. Perhaps the slowness of time was another tool I had that I wasn’t completely conscious of.

Here’s the thing about improvising: even if you plan on what might come next, you will get surprised. It’s part of the genre. I was surprised when Venus came to me, maybe four years ago, and said she needed to have the surgery, and that she was going to legally change her name and gender. We’d fallen into a comfortable rhythm in our lives: I’d grown used to thinking that’s where we’d stay. The name change bothered me more than the surgery: Venus would lose the Grandell last name, the name I had hyphenated into my own over thirty years earlier. It felt as if she was dissolving an essential relationship with me.

We got through that, too, thanks to a therapist who had more experience with transgender people and couples than anyone we had ever talked to before. The community had not only caught up with us, it had surpassed us. I guess you could say that more tools were available in 2017 than earlier.

As I type this, I realize the reason I stopped pounding away at the chunk of concrete this morning wasn’t that I had decided to give up, it’s because I realized I would soon have a better tool available. We need to rent a jackhammer for a different project in a month or two and a tool like that can take care of something like this in less than five minutes. It’s not just about using the right tool for the job, it’s about having access to the right tool.

And here’s another disclosure: I kind of like jackhammers. In small doses.

Those weathered-looking pieces of wood? That’s what the trunk of the grapevine looks like now.

With a little help from the jackhammer.