Memory is a funny thing. It’s like an ocean of soup. You float in it, grab on to a floating chunk and get carried away. Sometimes you look at what you’re holding on to, get washed to shore, and look closer. You see some things you never noticed even when they were happening, and decide you don’t need to take drugs to see beyond the present, recreate the past, see it for what it was and then some.

I mention it because I’m reading Carolyn See’s autobiographical book, the part where she takes her own memory back to her first psychedelic experience that she shared with her husband of the time.

So I’m trying, without drugs, to find a memory I can infuse with significance and then extract it.

Something came to mind.

For no particular reason, I thought of the time I took apart a barn, singlehandedly, by myself.

We were living in Riverside in the Big House on Third Street. That’s the one where we had Big Parties. We were no longer eligible to stay in student housing because I was no longer a student.

I had a full time job teaching, and we were able to upgrade our rent from $60 a month to the still affordable rate of $105 a month.

The landlord was glad to take us on as tenants. The house had been the Free School. The kids living there were beginning to attract attention for wild parties, drugs, and boys and girls living together at any age. The landlord probably envisioned police raids, bad publicity, lawsuits, and was relieved to rent to a public school teacher’s small family with positive ties to the University.

Shirley was taking ballet lessons in greater L. A., driving in every day, wearing out the car and the road, biting into the budget, and I was paying back my student loan. So I leaped at the offer to take down the barn on the property before it could be cited as a fire hazard. The landlord offered a free month’s rent.

I had a hammer, a screwdriver, and pliers.

I started on the roof.

The garage was a carriage house from the past century, two stories of unpainted wood. Climbing up, I discovered the living quarters of the coachman above the cavern for the carriage. Those were the days when servants lived on-site so they would be available at a moment’s notice.

The coachman could live in his little upstairs room above the carriage and adjacent to the larger space which would store the hay for the horses. He could throw down a bale.

The little room had a little bed with a thin mattress and a few cowboy-type items which I don’t remember, maybe a boot, a whip, a picture on the wall.

The barn was long abandoned, ready to fall apart of its own volition, and what the landlord categorized as an eyesore.

He wanted it removed, offered, and I jumped at the chance. Any time anyone wants to give me money, I’ll take it.

I’m nervous around heights, one of the more common phobias, but for contracted money, I climbed on the roof and started removing nails.

I had an empty coffee can to hold the nails, because many of them were still good enough to be reused, and I was raised to never waste anything. Save everything, you never know when you might need it. That helps explain terms like “hoarder,” and why my life accumulated more than I could manage, even with storage units I couldn’t afford.

So I pried up nails with my claw hammer, using the handle of the screw driver as a fulcrum. One by one, I’d pull the nails, sometimes pounding the boards to loosen them. Each loosened board was thrown down and later piled up and stacked for eventual removal. The pile grew as the barn diminished.

I was learning architecture. The roof removed revealed the supporting beams. Since it was repetitive work, my mind was free to make connections.

I saw that everything has structure, is a structure. There is a supporting framework rising from a foundation. We add walls, make rooms, put in details. We go from a work in progress to the hope that we can become complete and rest in comfort.

Good luck on that.

I didn’t think all those thoughts as I was working on the barn. The barn gives me a chance to go back and think them now.

I worked in the afternoon after teaching. I worked on the weekends. I forgot about my fear of heights, sometimes enjoyed the emerging view, then focused on my hands.

Then the top floor was gone, its ingredients and constituents thrown down and stacked.

I came down to start on ground level, removing the walls like flaying a fish.

Days grew into weeks. Weeks became a month.

That magic moment when, supports and underpinnings removed, the walls fell outward, and I could work on them on the ground.

Then I could see the empty space, where once the barn had stood. I could renew my memory to see the process of deconstruction, then turn it around and see in my mind’s eye the original process of construction from the ground up, like time-lapse photography where I can control the speed.

I thank my brain which gives my mind a place to live. I thank my mind for giving me something to think about.

I thank the barn for letting me take it apart.

I thank the landlord for giving me a free month’s rent.

I know I was like hired labor at slave wages. When the barn was gone, and the pile of its entrails loomed in the driveway, the landlord, knowing he had taken advantage of me as a bargain, said, “Don’t bother about the pile,” and he hired a hauler to take it away in a single afternoon, and still came out ahead, way ahead.

And I thank Carolyn See in absentia for giving me something more to think about.

Life and memory, it’s like dismantling a barn.

As it always is.