March 4, 2010

One Thing Leads to Another

On Monday, the ominous cloud started following me around. After a productive week renovating the sports bar at the club, I was feeling positive about being finished on time, by March Madness.

Because we had a very generous individual donate a room's worth of flooring to us, I asked my helper guys to rip the carpet up on Monday. When I arrived, I was thrilled to see that it was already finished and then I saw the one guy's face.

"Come over here," he said. I knew it wasn't going to be pretty.

As a board member at the club, whenever I am there, if there is a problem, I always here "come over here" or "I want to show you something." There has been a whole lot of that since we started renovating this new bar.

This time, the "come over here" was brutal. Apparently, putting down our new flooring wasn't going to be as easy as we thought. Thanks to a clogged bar sink that had sat that way for years, the pipes underneath the floor had rotted. The floor had been wet and the floor was rotted through. It's a good thing we ripped the carpet up and found out.

Had we not, maybe some of our customers at the bar would have been taking a fast ride down to the crawl space. Thanks to this little find and the necessary fix required (including replacing plumbing that was rotted through), the floor sits idle and will until probably next week when I'm down to single digits until opening day.

On Monday night, I took Big I to ju-jutsu, feeling the weight of the day's find on my shoulders. And then I saw my friend from karate, the father of two who battled lymphoma so bravely and without missing a class, even in the midst of chemo treatments. He told me he's had a relapse.

Suddenly, the rotted floor seemed completely insignificant. I felt like I had been punched in the gut. I can only imagine how he and his family must feel.

On Monday night, while still mentally reeling from that news, my Mom informed me that she didn't think my 92-year old grandmother was feeling well.

Yesterday, I decided to go see for myself and took my grandparents dinner while Big I went to ju-jutsu again. My grandmother informed me that she deposited a large jar of change into her account. "I now have enough money to bury me," she said.

She went on to tell me that she doesn't need a Cadillac of a casket. She just wants something simple. She told me to make sure she's not buried with any jewelry on. She wants us to have it. She wants her wedding ring cut off if it can't be taken off. She told me about a small baggy of gold that she wants me to have melted down to make lockets for my girls. She told me she feels like "the walking dead" and it was almost more than I could take. She's 92. I have to expect that at some point, the end is inevitable; but I've spent my life thinking she would always be here and the fact that she seems to be preparing herself to die has really shaken me.

Someone sent me an email this week about a professor and golf balls. You've probably seen it before, but he basically fills up a big plastic container of golf balls and asks if it's full. When his students respond "yes," he adds small pebbles. This continues as he adds sand and eventually liquid coffee. At the end it says that the "golf balls" are the important things and people in your life. The sand is the small stuff.

I'm going to worry about the golf balls for now, and let the money pit of a sports bar roll off my shoulders. A girl can only take so much.