Yeah, my garage has been crumbling for quite some time. It sucks, because I loved hanging out back there when I was a kid. Sometimes I'd jump into one of the cars and pretend we were on a cop chase. It was a kinda-sorta clubhouse back then. It's the last original garage on my block. I loved fiddling around with the tools back there, in particular the shovel and the pitchfork and the axe.
(He said ominously.)
But the gutters have fallen off. The roof has a bunch of holes in it. Birds have nested in the mechanical garage opener, making it useless. The concrete floor is crumbling. One of the windows is broken out. Many animals have been hiding out in the junk back there. It's falling down on its own, but the City of Elmhurst, ever eager to get rid of an eyesore in the neighborhood, is tearing it down for free tomorrow. I'm really going to miss it. Sometimes I thought maybe we could convert it to a guest house like some rich people have on their property. It would be more like a cabin in the sense of the frontier world, but what the hell.
So I've been going through the garage in the hopes of finding stuff that I could salvage. I can't do that kind of thing very well anymore. I have one bad leg, the other isn't much better and because of my current tennis elbow I'm stuck with one good limb.
As you can imagine, I had to take a lot of breaks just to relax and get my strength up. As I cast my gaze about the backyard I realized that I hadn't been back here much of late. It's really a nice place to relax. The people who owned the place before used it as a garden, so it's pretty wild back there. I don't tend to it, so it grows everywhere. There are also a few atavistic things that grow back there, like the occasional corn stalk or a small tree. It's beautiful.
I sat and luxuriated in it, and I don't care if my garage is an eyesore, it looks perfect back there. It should be in a horror movie, it's that grim and beautiful.
And tomorrow I get to watch as it gets torn down. Nothing will go up in its place. It will just be a parking spot, nothing more.
And that saddens me.
UPDATE: For those who don't know, I was going to post this last night, but I discovered I'd written one of these the night previous and got too high to post that one.
I woke up this morning, thinking it would be the last time I would look out my bedroom window at the garage. I was sorta right. The workers were about five hours late, so they quit halfway through the job today. They emptied the garage out on the inside and ripped off the roof. There are three walls remaining, so it looks more like a ghost of its former self. Perhaps a bombed out European building in the waning days of WWII. I walked in there, shocked by how much light shone down on me. I stood at the broken out window directly into my garden of surprises for the first time since I was a kid.
And the last time ever.
The workers will return tomorrow while I'm at work. I will come home to an empty stone slab where my garage used to be.
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