Bill's Musings

In 1975, we went to a quaint German restaurant, and while we were there I noticed a really nice structure covered in vines, under which they had nicely placed tables. I didn’t know what to say, I was gobsmacked. I had never seen such a thing. I ended up saying nothing, just enjoying the pure beauty of it, not knowing what it was called. I just knew that one day I would have one of these, uh….thingies.

Fast forward to March of 2011. The exterior of our house was finished, finally the way we liked it….except for one thing. We have a front deck which is on the right side that just didn’t look right. We had no roof over it, and really didn’t want to go through a whole engineering thing because to roof it, we would have to change a bunch of things. But while browsing through the internet, there it was! A pergola!! I now knew the name of what it was I had seen in Germany, and I had the perfect place to put one!! After running outside in the snow with a tape measure, I realized that the one I saw online was PERFECT. It’s like they had made it for me.

Anne was watching me with amusement. I was like a kid in a candy store. It was on sale too…so I ordered it. It took a week, and there it was!!! All 6 boxes of it. I don’t know if you remember me writing about how my secretary assembled everything for me, but I really doubted this would be one of those things. Six boxes…..six big boxes, full of stuff, instructions seemingly in Swedish, bags of the wrong kind of screws….this would have to wait. I tried to get a couple of contractors to look at it, but after they saw it, they stopped returning my phone calls. I took this as a hint. And so, slowly but surely, the boxes ended up in storage, nice and deep behind all the other flotsam and jetsam that has accumulated in our lives.

And now, we fast forward 2-1/2 more years, to now. Anne is away to Toronto on a conference. She’s had a tough time in the past 5 months, taking care of everyone but herself. So, I decided to ‘man-up’ and give this pergola a try. Mackie and I began by dragging this thing out of storage. My, my, that was a ball of fun. We literally had to take everything out to get to it. We almost quit right there. It’s a good thing Mackie was there to cheer me on, or else it was staying put right there. But we got it all out.

Now we had another problem: no instructions. Even Swedish instructions are better than no instructions. This almost stopped us again. But Mackie, ever resourceful, found us English ones on the internet (I almost unplugged the internet at that moment, but he was so happy….little bugger….) I was quickly running out of excuses to put up this thing. After reading the English version, I realized that maybe this wouldn’t be so bad. I just couldn’t do it alone. I said this to Mackie, and he suddenly looked light a deer in the headlights. He really shouldn’t have found the instructions….little bugger….

After buying Canadian screws, after buying the lumber that wasn’t in the instructions, then pretty well throwing away the instructions, the father and son team of Mackie and Bill stood together and assembled our first (and likely last) pergola, and I finally realized a dream of mine. It looks awesome, I must admit. Now all I have to do is grow the vines, get some lederhosen, make some schnitzel, and convince Anne to have supper with me under the stars one night. I think the lederhosen just might clinch it!