The next morning was awful. Really and truly awful. Every muscle in my body protested at the mere thought of moving; the actual doing of it didn’t bear thinking about. I was as stiff as the boards that lay out in the yard.
I woke up with Briar kneeling next to me. I was on my back in my sleeping bag. His hand was lying on my shoulder, and he was just barely shaking me to wake me up. My eyelids flickered open, and he was looking down into my face.
“Hey, champ,” he said gently. “You know, it’s just possible you might be a tad stiff this morning.”
That’s when I gave thought to rolling over, an instinctive feeling for young teen boys when awakened by someone in the morning if they’re lying on their backs, and that’s when all my muscles rejected the idea of moving at all. No matter what.
I groaned. He smiled, but it wasn’t a smile of glee; it was a smile filled with empathy. He’d evidently been where I was now.
“Here,” he said, handing me two ibuprofen tablets and then a glass of water. “This will take the edge off in a few minutes.”
I tried to tighten my stomach muscles to sit up. A mistake, a bad mistake.
“Let me help,” he said, seeing the distress on my face.
He put a hand behind my back and one on my are and pushed and pulled me up so my top half was partway up off the bed. My muscles didn’t like it, but they weren’t doing the work so didn’t protest nearly as much as when I’d called on them a moment earlier.
I took the pills and expected him to lay me back down, but he didn’t.
“I know this seems extreme, but I also know where you are right now, and the best thing, unimaginably awful as it is, is to get up. Once you start moving, the muscles will begin to loosen. And you’ll feel much better. Besides which, we don’t want to miss our run.”
“RUN?!” I couldn’t believe him!
“And stretching first. That’s important. Here, I’ll help.”
And he did. He actually lifted me right up out of my sack. It was a good thing I’d showered with him yesterday as I was just as bare now as I’d been then. It was embarrassing, but I was thinking more about the pain I was feeling than the show he was getting. The pain had done a number on my morning wood; at least I didn’t need to be embarrassed about him witnessing that.
“You okay on your feet by yourself?” he asked, letting go of me to see if I could balance okay.
I seemed stable enough. I nodded, and even that hurt.
“Need help to the bathroom?”
I was smart enough not to shake my head. “No, I’ll manage,” I said, though it probably sounded more like a whimper.
I took a very short step and then another and another, and I was moving. Like a 95-year-old man with lumbago, but moving. I found he was right: the more I moved, the easier it got. Oh, everything still hurt, but if I kept my movements small and didn’t force anything, it was manageable.
Stretching wasn’t fun. But the same thing worked while stretching that had worked when I’d first got up. If I stretched an arm two inches out to the side instead of a foot, it just hurt a little. Same with all the other muscle groups. Two inches could then grow to four and eventually that formerly impossible foot.
Yesterday I’d been bored after stretching for five minutes. Now, I spent a good fifteen minutes before there was some semblance of normality. I still hurt after that if I tried to do anything quickly, but I could actually move fairly smoothly with a decent range of motion.
Briar watched me carefully. When I showed him with my body language I was doing better, he said, “Running will actually help. Ready?”
“No,” I said, thinking longingly about that bed I’d left shortly before but then seeing his expression, added, “but let’s go.”
We did. Instead of running up the hill again, he told me he’d found a better place, and he turned the other way at the end of the driveway. We ran downhill for only about fifty feet, and then he turned off the road into a bunch of the trees that lined the road. I saw there was a sort of trail there. The land wasn’t level but became much flatter after we’d run a short distance.
The trees extended out farther than I’d thought on this side of the road. They were scattered, dense in some areas, thin in others, and we ran a while before leaving them. The trail wound through them and then out into an open field. We stayed on the trail as we ran, and it crossed the field. When we got to the other side we came to more trees, and Briar stopped.
“We’ve gone about a mile, perhaps a little farther. We should turn back, even though you’re doing better today. It’s always a problem when you’re beginning training to try to do too much before your body’s ready. Your spirit will always be ahead of your fitness.”
We ran back. I tried taking longer strides just to see if my muscles would permit it, and they did. They’d loosened completely, and I was feeling surprisingly good, considering what I’d felt like a half hour earlier. It wasn’t till I was again sprawled on the front yard that I realized I was hardly hurting anymore anywhere, and that I hadn’t stopped during the run at all except where we’d turned around. Of course, half of yesterday’s run had been uphill. I’d been spared that today. I was still panting some, but wasn’t breathing as hard I’d been the day before.
I’d learned my lesson, however. Don’t lie still and stiffen up! I’d learned it well, because even though the idea of just lying there till noon was so, so attractive, I got up. I was hot from running, but the air was still cool enough that the idea of dousing myself in cold water got crossed off my mental agenda pretty quickly. Instead, I went inside to see what was for breakfast. I felt like I could eat a horse and then maybe have a small billy goat for dessert.
After breakfast, we began working inside. Briar surprised me by suggesting I pick out a bedroom that would be mine and we could do that first. I wanted the one I was currently sleeping in, and that was fine with him. He asked me what I wanted it to look like, and I was going to revert to my old ways and say, ‘Uh, I don’t know,’ when instead, I realized I could do better than that. That shocked me a little. I simply wasn’t used to this. He really wanted me to think and give him an opinion.
So I did. “You know, it’s probably not practical, or even possible, but what I’d really like more than anything else is my own bathroom.”
Briar turned around once, then again, giving the room a 720º look-over, then said, “I don’t see why we couldn’t do that. But I really was asking about the walls and floor. Do you want plain painted walls? Wood paneling? Wallpaper? Want to paint a mural on them? What? And do you want a carpet or just to refinish the hardwood boards and maybe put a small throw rug or two over the floor, or something else entirely? Maybe a small ice-skating rink in one corner? A bowling alley in another?”
He grinned at me, but I think I got the point: I should use my imagination, not just accept whatever was conventional or easy.
“Oh,” I said, a bit sheepishly. Walls were much easier to work on than constructing a bathroom would be, and I realized belatedly he hadn’t been thinking of anything that major. Still, he had said okay. He’d said why not? So, why should I back down now? Just because I didn’t want to offend him? No, that was nuts. He wanted me to express an opinion, wanted me to state a preference. He wouldn’t have forced me into doing that the other day if he wasn’t trying to encourage me to speak up about what I cared about when the occasion arose. He was going to listen to me, really pay attention to what I said, and accommodate me when he could. This time, it seemed he could.
“I’ve always had wall-to-wall carpeting in my bedroom; it’s what I’m used to and it’s comfortable. Walls? I think I want them plain and painted. Then I can decorate them with anything I want, pictures, posters, or nothing. I sure don’t like this old-fashioned wallpaper with tiny blue flowers on it. Can we paint over it?”
“We can, but the better way, how it’s usually done, is to strip the wallpaper off. But this is the old kind, and you need a steamer and lots and lots of elbow grease to get it off, and it takes a lot of time. I know an easier way. We can just put new drywall over it. We’ll have to do some of that anyway when we cut into a wall and build an addition for the bathroom. It’s easier and much quicker to put up new drywall than to strip old wallpaper. We don’t want to be still doing this job two years from now.”
So we set in doing it. Just like that! No talking it to death, no looking through catalogs, no going to Sam’s Club or Home Depot. He’d obtained copies of the original building plans for the house when he’d bought it. He spread them out and explained them to me and pointed out where the load-bearing structural beams were, and where the plumbing ran, and I saw it wasn’t hard to figure out the best place for the bathroom. Then we set to work, cutting out a new doorway in one of my bedroom walls and framing the opening to fit a standard door, building the walls for the bathroom from two-by-fours and nailing them in place in the spare room that we were stealing some space from. We ran hot and cold water supply lines along the basement ceilings to under the new bathroom and then up through the floor so they’d be behind the new drywall.
All this, every bit of it, was new to me and amazing, really, when I learned we could to it ourselves. The hammering I’d learned to do the day before really came in handy. Measuring and cutting the two-by-fours were also something I’d learned how to do the day before, and now I was doing on my own. Briar did tell me the lengths to cut and what to nail together, but I was the one who did that. I built the bathroom wall sections to the dimensions he gave me. I suggested doing all this outside, and he asked me how I’d get them in through the door that was only two-thirds the height of the framework I was constructing. However, rather than teasing me or criticizing me for not thinking of that, he told me he’d once actually done that and then had to take it all apart and redo it inside.
I think he was lying; it sounded a little false the way he said it. But he was saying it so I wouldn't be embarrassed—a fact I thought about the rest of the day, feeling a special warmth because of it. He really cared about what I was feeling.
It took the rest of the morning and some of the afternoon, but I got those frameworks done and nailed them in place. When that was done, I could see how the room layout would look, and I was excited. Delighted, too, but more than that. I’d done something. Me. Just me. He’d told me how, but I myself had built the framework for my own bathroom! If you’d told me a week ago that I’d be doing that, and doing it soon, I’d have checked the yellow pages for the nearest psychiatric asylum.
We ate a late lunch, sitting in the shade of the tree in the front yard with sandwiches, and Briar said, “Just so you know, all that hammering you’re doing isn’t done that way these days. They have nail guns and just shoot the nails in using high-pressure air.”
“What? You’re kidding, aren’t you? I’ve about killed my arm and my hand is all numb, and you say there’s an easier way?”
“Yeah.” He chuckled at my show of annoyance; I was putting it on a little, and I think he knew me well enough now to see that. He knew I was proud of what I’d just accomplished. “But if you’d done it that way, you’d never have learned how to use a hammer, and your grip and arm muscles wouldn’t be getting stronger. Besides which,” and he stopped to grin, “I’m not sure I would have felt good with you running around loose with a lethal nail gun. You might have accidentally nailed yourself to a two-by-four. Or worse, me!”
I didn’t see the humor there that he did, and I had to think about it. Discarding the safety issue, it seemed about a tossup to me, but I decided not to get on his case about it. He apparently had a reason for everything he did, and it had worked out pretty well so far.
After lunch, we ran some wires for new electrical outlets in the bathroom and stubbed out where the toilet, shower and lavatory would be. “We’ll do all the hook ups later, probably have licensed electricians and plumbers do that so we know everything’s to code,” he told me.
Next came the drywall in both rooms. He knew what he was doing, and so it went pretty quickly. He showed me how to mix the mud for the joints, and tape them so the seams weren’t visible. He didn’t waste time thinking about what came next or deciding whether this or that should come first and wondering how to go about it. Or resting. He didn’t ever seem to rest. I did at times when he was showing me things. But he kept going, and the work got done much faster than seemed possible. I learned that most jobs go two or three times faster if you don’t spend all your time dithering over what to do next. He didn’t do any of that. He just knew.
Finishing the rough work for that room took us all day, but we’d accomplished a lot. It was really something. The room was going to be mine, and I’d done a lot of the work making it. I stood in it while he was out showering, just looking around and feeling a pride that was amazing. I’d never felt anything like it before. I’d never done anything like it before.
He came back in and dressed and told me I’d better clean up because he expected me to help with dinner. I was looking forward to that shower. It was another hot day, and I’d been sweating since I’d begun working. I took a towel outside with me, stripped off, feeling a bit raunchy doing so outside, but tried to be more mature and ignore that. The anticipation of cold water pouring over me was delicious.
That was when I was really surprised. I pulled down on the water valve and got flooded, but the water was warm! Duh! The drums had been sitting in the sun all day, at least most of the day till the tree shaded them late in the afternoon. The water wasn’t hot, just warm, and while I’d been looking forward to a cooling shower, a warm one was even better. I took my time, washed my hair, and soaped myself three times and then just relaxed, letting the water run over me.
I was drying off when I heard a rustling noise in the trees that screened us from the road. I turned to look, expecting to see a raccoon or maybe even a deer. I didn’t see anything but did hear something that sounded like a larger animal moving away from me, and then nothing. I began to wonder, were there bears around here? This sure didn’t sound like what I thought a raccoon would sound like, and deer, from what I’d read, managed to move through the woods causing hardly a ripple.
I couldn’t hear it any longer, so shrugged and turned to go back into the house. The kitchen was at the other end of the house and Briar couldn’t see me. The feeling I’d had earlier of being outside and naked came back. What the hell, I thought, and instead of wrapping the towel around me, I just held it by my side while walking back across the yard, then around the house to the front door. I felt really juiced all the way.