I never think of Davenport, but today I went there for lunch. So-so turkey burger and a Fat Tire ale at the Whale City Bakery's sunny, window-side table. I brought along a New Yorker to read, and passed the time guilt-free and bask-happy. That's better. Those Kelly's Bakery guys are on to something.

Earlier, as I was leaving for lunch, I heard a lot of automotive banging around in the driveway. I thought it was one of the new tenants moving in. (Holgar found a woman with a Chihuahua to take the room above his warehouse. I guess small dogs are okay.) But it was Holgar himself, wrassling with an enigmatic object in the bed of his truck. It was a big plastic drum, with some gunk on the bottom, attached to what looked like the side of a car.

I go, "What's that?" And he's all,"That used to be my washing machine. I think it just gave up." He told me he tried to fix it, "but this gaddam modern appliances, made in China, you have plastic-here-and-plastic-there, and it snaps together so once you snap it apart to fix it, that's it, it's over, okay. It used to be you could unscrew the top to take a look, okay? But now they have one long screw all the way on the bottom, and to undo it you have to take this-apart-and-that-apart, okay, and all the time Mahlia is telling me 'I don't think you should do that, what are you doing to the washer?' And I say 'Mahlia!!' and she says 'But I don't think you should be doing that,' and I say 'Mahlia, PLEASE!!'"

I laughed, enjoying the picture he painted of frustrated repair with the sweetie "helping," and seeing the pathetic result of his efforts in the bed of his truck. "So now are you going to get a new one?" I asked. He already had one, of course, in his warehouse. "I was at the Salvation Army awhile ago, okay, and they had an end of the month sale, and I think 'well, someday I'm going to need another washing machine', and guess what? That day has come!"

I tell him it's a lucky thing he has so much storage space. Holgar has a warehouse with its own address, a long building with a high ceiling that is full of stuff he'll need "someday". Mahlia calls it a "shed." When I first moved in, I noticed that my closet, that had been behind the front door when I first saw the place and said yes to it, had moved out with the previous tenant. I asked Holgar what I was supposed to do about hanging my clothes. No problem, okay? He unlocked the big side-rolling door to the warehouse, a dark and dusty place lit by windows way up there next to the ceiling. We went past the Bush-Cheney posters that mark his office, past a block of those metal grill shelves filled with old phones, electroncis and clots of wire, to a plywood wardrobe that had been painted yellow. It was only a little warped, a little stained, and only a little smaller than the space it would go in my place, but that was enough for me to refuse it. He said the wardrobe had come from my place, several tenants ago, and he'd moved it into the warehouse after that tenant declined to want it. "I thought, 'oh, is still a good wardrobe,' okay?" So he put it back here thinking someday someone will want it. Ha ha fat chance, I thought at the time. But see how that extra washer came in handy? And didn't he repair my suffering electricity with spare parts he had in the warehouse? So, okay, then. Maybe there's hope for the little yellow wardrobe.

I wish back then I'd taken a closer look around at what Holgar had in there, and at how far back it went, and at how many rows of shelves the space held. At the time, I was fresh off of missing my Dad, who was also an electrical engineer, who was also a packrat convinced that he could fix/reuse/find a use for all kinds of dusty stuff he crammed into the garage. Knowing Holgar had a whole hanger of stuff was a comfort at the time. I didn't really need to know what the contents were. But if I'd taken a closer look at it all, I could have decribed it for you in more colorful, gory detail.

Pip