Death To A Monument To My Vanity

The last few weeks have been very eventful. I taught a 40 hrs class for the department while working my regular shift that week (96 hrs that week) followed by a week of working a side construction job, another week of construction with a trip to Athens to meet with some educational psychologists, and a trip to North Carolina with my mom to move my grandfather back to Atlanta.

In the middle of all that came a septic system problem. Yep, black water backing up into the laundry sink in the basement. The remedy? A very costly new leach field which has to go where the boys' swing set is. So that's got to come down.

Now, calling it the boys' swing set is a little misleading. I built it when Ben was about two years old. And in the following thirteen years, the boys played on it only a very little. Mostly our guests' kids ended up playing on it more than anyone else.

But it's not their fault. We had looked at buying a $300 swing set kit, but I had assured Paula that those were trash, and I could build one much better. A book on swing set ideas and $1200 of materials later, I had built a swing set with a ten foot high beam to swing from that was so solid, an adult could swing high enough to be parallel to the ground and not budge the thing a bit. I used 16 foot long 6 x 6's as the main structural components and buried those sons-a-bitches 3 feet in the ground with concrete around them. Follow that with 13 4 x 4's buried in the ground 3 feet as well. Like I said, sturdy as hell. But that's not what the kids wanted. Or what Paula wanted either. And they just didn't play on it like I had dreamed they would.

Years later I tried to make it more enticing to the boys by affixing a zipline from the top of the swing set to a tree across our yard. That too was an exercise in "I Can Do That Better" where I forewent spending $200 on a zipline kit to cobble pieces together to make my own for the sum of $350. A real bargain. And when the boys started jumping off the swing set to get speed on the zipline, the downward bounce started pulling the whole swing set to the right. Down came the zipline and down came any reason for the boys to play on it.

So there it sat and stared at me. I had to mow around it every week in the summer. It was a constant reminder to me and my vanity every time I looked into our backyard. The regretful thing is I turned what should have been an expensive and temporary way to get my toddlers some time on a swing, into a competition. I'm not sure who with. Our neighborhood was full of elderly people at the time. But I was definitely trying to prove how good of a woodworker/father/husband I was by building the monstrosity. I don't really remember, but I'm sure as I built it I was dreaming of my friends who were fathers coming over and telling me how awesome I was. I spent more money and time on it than I should, and ended up with something that the boys didn't want to play on. And any praise I did receive rings hollow when what you've created doesn't meet its purpose. In the end, I couldn't have missed the mark more.

Anyway, it's coming down this week to make way for the septic system repairs. Of course, the demolition is taking longer than anticipated due to the fact that the son-of-a-bitch that built it, built it way sturdier than it ever needed to be.