Watching Ben Work

I love work.

I can sit and watch someone work for hours.

That’s exactly how I spent yesterday — watching Ben work.

Yes, Ginny and I moved directly from the joy and stress of Mark & Eve’s wedding last Saturday to the joy and stress of home renovations this week.

For years I have neglected the simplest jobs of home maintenance so that the cumulative result became dire.

Yes, I’m guilty.

Squirrels found their way through holes in the wall and rotten wood fringed our deck. By putting off doing minor chores, I’d let things degenerate into a huge chore — a chore I estimated would take me three weeks to do, if I could do it at all.

Well, yesterday a Jacksonville Beach contractor, Mr. Ben Spiker, came to our house to do the job. His phone number is 708-7566. In one long day he accomplished more than I could have done in three weeks. And he did it professionally with skill and precision.

It was a joy to watch him work.

You know the kind of joy you get when you see someone who really knows what he’s doing, doing it. It’s almost like watching a dance — only with hammers and saws and drills and routers.

Here’s a photo I took of Ben Spiker headed up the ladder with another jigsaw puzzle piece of new wood on our roof:

Someone pleased with his work recommended Mr. Spiker for work at my daughter Jennifer’s house and she was so pleased with his work that she recommended him to me for the things I needed done.

I’m glad she did.

While I watched Ben work, my daughter Eve came over. She’s fresh off the boat from her honeymoon in the Bahamas. Mark and she must be starting marriage out right because Eve was headed for dinner with her friend Trish while Mark planed an evening of war games with his buddies.

“Let their be spaces in your togetherness…”

Eve brought over a folder of wedding photos to show me.

It pleases me so to see her so happy.

If Donald, John, Helen or Jennifer (the finks!) ever e-mail me the cruise /wedding photos they promised, I’ll post a link but maybe they haven’t recovered from the wedding festivities yet.

Between shipboard wedding and home repairs, I haven’t had much of a spiritual life this week. Haven’t thought of Jesus at all.

I mentioned my low spiritual state to my friend Wes Tuesday over breakfast at Dave’s Diner.

Wes told me not to worry about it.

“Folks who are religious all the time are apt to lie about other things too,” he said.