the thoughts of Dave
Dave came to fit the new gates he had made to replace the rotting old pair for my driveway entrance yesterday.
Actually, he hadn't technically made them completely. Typically for our house, cobbled together by some local farmer in the 1920's – using a lot of 'close enough' measurements and 'that'll do' material procurement – the driveway width and span between the two massive granite gateposts was not a usual standard width, but somewhere between two common commercial widths. What Dave had to do was buy, then deconstruct, a commercially made pair that was too big for the entrance, resize parts of them, and then reconstruct them again to make them fit our gateway.
An interesting character is Dave. He'd given up doing the patio laying job he had nearby because it was raining too hard. But instead of deciding to knock it off for the day and go home to get warm and dry, he decided to come up to mine and fit the gates instead. So he arrived, parked and unloaded the van, and now was outside working in the driving rain.
I know because I was watching him from inside my warm and dry house.
When the weather cleared, I went out to offer him a cup of tea and see how he was doing. He was, as usual, wearing shorts, T-shirt and a beanie hat, and had raindrops dripping off the end of his nose.
"The rain doesn't bother you then?"
"Nah, it's a bloody nuisance is all. Can't lay a patio on a lake."
Cue mental image of him trying to lay concrete slabs on a lake.
"No, I don't suppose you can," I say as my mental version of Dave sinks to the bottom of a lake still holding a square paving slab.
"Otherwise I like the rain," he said, "stuff of life."
"Just as well, we've had more than enough recently"
"It doesn't rain water everywhere of course."
"Eh?"
"On some planets I mean. Or moons."
This is a thing with Dave. From patios to planets in one conversational leap is quite normal.
"Oh?"
"Yeah, methane some places. As liquid rain. Bet that's smelly."
"Don't expect you could lay a patio on that either," I add.
"Yeah... ," Daves eyes went glassy and I could see he was mentally traversing the universe instead of screwing the hinges onto my gates.
"It's odd, isn't it, how we're here and think this is all normal, but there may be other aliens out there somewhere thinking that it raining water on other planets would be awful?"
"Err... yes Dave."
"If any of it's real of course."
"Eh?"
"Well, you know, all these atoms making up the universe and it's really only the difference in temperature of them that's making them into the things we perceive them to be. We only happen to be made of a few of them that are different materials temporarily, that are in the same place, for a tiny bit of time. And when it's finished being us, it'll be something else."
He paused, then his eyes snapped back into focusing on me.
"Anyway, yep, I'll have that cup of tea now."
"Er.. OK, yes, of course, I'll go and get it. Still two sugars?"
That was Dave.
Fitting gates he'd made while wondering thoughts about the nature of the universe. Did a great job on the gates.
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