Ordinary Stuff

 “Just the ordinary stuff.” the inspector said without looking up from his iPad. With his little stylus he was checking off items he’d looked at during his hour long inspection. He was just finishing. I hadn’t expected any real surprises. I’d expected he would find that the light in the sofit over the stair wasn’t working. It only worked sporadically. It used to respond to toggling the three way switches repeatedly-off, on, off, on-and then it would grudgingly flicker on. It stopped obliging and remained semi-permanently “off” now-a-days. If you left it “on” it sometimes came on in the middle of the night, but never when you wanted it to go on. The only reason it was not repaired was I had no ladder to reach it. I needed a long extension ladder to reach the sofit that overhung the landing on the stair. Without one the fixture would be the only item on my list of “things that needed repair” that remained undone for this official inspection. Like a miracle the light came on when he flipped the switch just before descending the stair, after completing his second floor inspection. He was checking the box next to “hallway lighting/switches” on his iPad when the owner’s rep asked him, “Well, what did you find?”  Without looking up from his electronic list the inspector said “Just the ordinary stuff.”

I don’t know...there was just something so deflating in that short statement that I was sad when I heard it. I should have been happy that there was nothing worth noting in his inspection. And I certainly shouldn’t have cared about what the inspector-a young fellow who hadn’t even lived long enough to learn one tenth of the skills I’d learned in my life and career-cared about my efforts at creating a perfectly clean and operable townhouse. He was a pup. He was a checker of boxes. Yet, I was stung by his abbreviated comment. He hadn’t a comment about the new lights and wiring in the kitchen. Not a sound about the sinks that were not leaking, the toilets that flushed perfectly, the tile work...The floor tile work that was so perfectly laid-out that there was not one sliver cut, or awkward tiny piece anywhere! No comment. That the electrical panel had been vacuumed out (yes, I took the cover off and vacuumed out all the lint and dust accumulated over thirty seven years). And the doors that opened and closed succinctly without squeaking or binding. And the laminate flooring in the master bedroom, trimmed and fit without any of the awkward voids and transitions found in most people’s work. True, he might have noted that the sub-floor under that laminate had “chalked up” a bit and caused the floor to have a faintly “gritty” sound in spots when you walked on it but the fact that he didn’t led me to believe that he hadn’t a whit of appreciation for the work that went into the floor itself. So while the report itself was clean the feeling that my work had been for naught was firmly cemented in place by the perfunctory comment...”Just the ordinary stuff.”  

I will not miss this place too much. I will not miss the trains that pass only a few hundred feet from the building. They have become so frequent that sleep is impossible from 5:00 a.m. on and sometimes even earlier. It will be even more disturbing if the proposal to add passenger trains to the line becomes a reality. I can not imagine twenty or thirty more trains, blowing their horrible horns-Long, Long, Short, Long-as they approach the crossing at County Line Road. It will be hell. And then there is the water treatment plant just down the road on Old Dixie Highway with its sulfur smell and the noise of their emergency generators running all day long sometimes. So loud that one can not think straight and one must preserve sanity by hiding in the air conditioned, sealed up townhouse until the noise and/or smell has stopped. The former stopped by schedule the latter only by a change in the wind direction. No, I will not miss it much, but I can not help but miss it some. So many years (16 years!) I’ve owned this place and so many memories are tied up with it, it would be impossible not to have some thin attachment.

I can move on though. Carefully because the moves are harder, the cost more terrible, the future clearer, as I get older. And I must get it through my head that, no matter how personal and prideful I get with my work and my efforts, to all the world it is nothing special. I am nothing special- we are all “Just the ordinary stuff.”