Page 661 - WhyAsInY

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Marilyn had wed in a private civil ceremony in New Orleans a few years before.) We loved the view of the hills that the house afforded, and our architect (Keith Kroeger, again) thought that it would perfectly suit our “modest” goals: reconstruction to put a master bedroom on the first floor; plenty of room for our children as well as the grandchildren who we hoped would be born in the years to come; a family room; a swim- ming pool; a large basement with room for model trains, a gym, and a billiard room; and a deck upon which we could enjoy the breeze while seated in our rocking chairs.
We took title to what is now number 7 Garnet Road on September 12, 2003. (It was number 5 until we relocated the driveway during con- struction and had the right to choose what we believed to be the luckier number, and, as noted earlier, 7 was worn by the Mick.) After a two-year period of indecision as to whether to implement our grand renovation scheme, brought about in part because Danny and Marilyn had moved away from Bethel, we finally sat down with Keith in December 2005 and started to move forward with plans. Construction started six months later and was not complete until April 2008, four months before my target date for retirement.
During the interim, from September 2003 to June 2011, we enjoyed walking to our offices—Kathy, contending with the wind on her twelve- minute walk on West End Avenue for all eight years, and I, walking twenty minutes or so through Central Park, envisioning track plans and taking in the scenery, for the first five.
During the last three years of that period, I spent half of my time in the house in Roxbury. I shelved (meticulously, of course) countless books, records (yes, vinyl records!), laser discs, CDs, and DVDs. I also designed the workshop that we had built under the new deck, the centerpiece of which was a Shaker-style workbench a picture of which I had found in a book. I then purchased, with Peter’s able and eager assistance, an entire set of saws, drills, and other woodworking paraphernalia; accepted my first gargantuan delivery of wood; and built the entire substructure of my, as you would expect, overly complex and overly ambitious model rail- road, a railroad that I felt compelled to construct in three scales: O scale
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