Progress

I drive to Tracy where Chad’s mom and stepdad live, and where he’s working on our new home. They’ve just built a huge agricultural shop. And on the newly laid cement, under the overhang next to the mule corral, Chad’s been toiling away. For months.

I’d come to “help,” but offered as much help as a blind person assisting Picasso with his art (although some may argue that that is, indeed, what his process entailed).

So far, here’s what I’ve contributed:

1. Painted a board white
2. Walked around saying, “Sawzall”

See, initially I thought it was an Eastern European word. The last name of the person who invented the tool, Czajal. Then Chad enlightened me; It literally saws all. I kept saying it, flipping it back and forth from “Czajal” to “Sawzall,” enjoying how my mandible hangs when I say it. All together now: “Sawzall.”

My Australian accented surfer dude Siri (way more mellow than the American one, an uptight know-it-all with no sense of humor who also happens to be trapped in my phone) takes me the non-freeway route, per my request. I hate freeways. Everyone’s on them, escape routes are limited, things move so fast, there’s not a lot to see…give me a country surface street any day; I don’t care if it tacks an extra hour to the commute.

I drive on a narrow road past old farm houses. Bright green pastures with cattle grazing behind saggy barb wire fences. To the left, the Sierra’s rise like little pointy snow-capped teeth in the distance, but I’m in a completely different place. Flat lands, old flood plains turned grazing pasture. As I continue, I see more and more track houses, some newly built, some still just flimsy looking raw wood frames. All of them much bigger and closer together than the older homes.

I drive past these tight clusters of homes in various stages of development, encroaching quickly on the modest farms that have been there for decades, and have the character and stories to prove it. Most of the old homes are small. I’m sure they don’t have walk in closets or any real storage space.

My, how our priorities have shifted.

I think about progress. What is progress, really? After we’re all gone, will our progress still be considered progress, or when measured against what’s been lost in the process, will it pale in comparison?

I pull into Chad’s mom and step dad’s home, a farmhouse they moved into when he was 13. It has all the charm, all the layers of life and energy, soul and creativity, that these new developments lack. There’s no HOA here governing what can and can’t be done. No nasty letters addressing the fact that the mules don’t all match and thus there will be a fine.

My tires crunch on the gravel. I park, get out, and wander over to our new home. Before I can go inside to see the progress, Chad pops around from the back, gives me a hug and says,

“Babe! Come check out all our storage space!”