Shingles: a nervous disorder

I just finished up my monthly expenses and noticed something wonderful—a little bit of money left over after taxes.

As I ponder what to do with it, my mind wanders to the Caribbean. I am sitting next to Johnny Depp, who is dressed in his finest pirate attire sipping on a large margarita. I glance up to catch a glimpse of the golden sun as it sets over a brilliant azure blue sea. I close my eyes as I feel the salty sea mist on my face.

I’m brought back to reality by the phone. It’s my roofer with an estimate.

What a surprise; it’s the exact amount I have in my account. So much for the Carribean.

He promises to drop off roofing samples and tells me that all I have to do is to pick out the color by Monday. It sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? Well, there is one catch: I have to decide what roof I like by looking at books of two-inch squares of color. There’s added pressure when you understand that I have to like my decision for 30 years.

My house is green, so my first reaction is to nail as many of the two inch sections to my house as I can. That way I can see how they look in different sunlight and next to green. I check all of the angles so I walk to the street, to the neighbor’s house and to the back yard. I climb up a small hill and can’t tell a darn thing from a two-inch swatch.

So it’s off to Home Depot to try to get a whole shingle in the three colors I had narrowed down. The clerk was a little bit confused when I told him that I just wanted one shingle in each color. I think that he thought I was a nut and just wanted to get rid of me, so he cut open a few packs and gave me one of each color. Of course, he did write sample on the back so that I didn’t get stopped for theft.

Bigger was better—at least I could see them. I thought that I had one narrowed down until a friend of mine pointed out that lighter colors are affected by acid rain.

I decided to hit the road and I brought the selection book with me. At least I could see which roofs seem to hold up better to rain conditions. I pulled up to a few houses in my town and thought that I didn’t really want my neighbors to see me out stalking roofs. So I headed over to Pennsylvania where fewer people know me.

I was on some side street when I saw a lovely farmhouse with a brownish roof, the green color was similar to mine. I pulled over to get a better look. I pulled out my sample book and large shingle that I thought looked like a match. I sat there with the motor running with a large shingle in my lap and sample books strewn about, deep in thought when I heard some screaming. I looked up only to see a very angry woman running from around the side of her home. “Hey! You there! Whatcha looking at?”

Oh great, I thought, she thinks I’m stalking her children whom I didn’t see playing on the swing set. How lame is it to tell her that I just really love her roof? I don’t think that I would buy that line. I made tracks and fled, which is very hard to do when you have a shingle on your lap. Driving away I wondered if that woman had some kind of satellite security camera and was my Jeep going to be on the Channel Six news broadcast.

That was the end of chapter one. I picked a color, called the roofer and decided to sell the house in 10 years to avoid hating it when I reach my 80s. I was happy until I began watching the crew pull off the old shingles and noticed the bats flying out and hitting my neighbor’s house. There’s nothing I hate more than bats. With all of this stirring up, you just know that one is going to get into the house.

But I’m way ahead of the program. I invited a good friend over for a late dinner, around dusk to be exact. He suspected something was up when I handed him a fishing net when he walked in the door. My daughter and I each had a quilt on each sofa in the living room. After dinner we were sitting there finishing some dessert when a bat sailed down the staircase. We both screamed and instinctively dove for our quilts as he calmly stood and scooped up the creature up with one swing.

“You two are fast…and crazy,” he said.

That’s fine, I agreed, as the kid and I headed out to the Best Western until the job was finished.