Gazing, amazed, at a gazebo rising

I am looking out the window on a misty autumn morning, listening to crows sing and watching moisture drip like falling diamonds from the oak trees in our yard.

I don’t know whether it’s rain or just dampness from the fog, and neither do any of television’s weather people, who keep dancing around a reality that is falling on their heads.

In any event, they are woeful about whatever it is, because wetness seems to impact on L.A. the way an Omaha-sized meteor might if it were on a direct line to the Music Center.

As I observe a day whose beauty is beyond my capabilities to adequately describe, I suddenly hear the high whine of a table saw slicing through wood. And then I hear the pounding of a hammer slamming nails home.

Sounds take on a muted tone as they pulse through the thickening fog, leaving passersby to wonder at their origin. But I know the core of their source. Even in the rain (or is it fog?), the work on Cinelli’s Grand Gazebo goes on.

There may be among you, little children and certain state-college undergraduates, who are uncertain exactly what a gazebo is. Basically, according to my computer dictionary, it’s “a free-standing roofed structure usually open on the sides.�

But simplifying the magnificence of what we are planning is the emotional equivalent of describing the Taj Mahal as a building by a pond. Ours will be a gazebo to challenge any that was ever built. It is to our yard what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris.

Actually, I don’t know why we’re building a gazebo. I find myself sometimes discovering that I have unintentionally agreed to a project slipped into my subconscious by my mystical wife. Women have ways of bending men to their will with techniques that would humble a wizard.

Picture this: I am comatose on the couch in front of a TV set watching 22 large men batter each other on a field better used for a museum or a house of erotic pleasures when she says, “Dinner’s almost ready, dear, would you like a glass of wine, and how about building a gazebo to go with dinner?�

“Uh, yeah, OK, sure.�

Zap.

Suddenly, two men named Barry and Corky are out there clearing the ground. Suddenly, water pipes and electrical conduit are being laid. Suddenly, forms appear. Suddenly, a cement truck is backing up to our yard. And, suddenly, saws are humming and hammers are pounding in the rain. Or the heavy fog. Whatever.

“You’ll love it,� she is saying to me now as I watch our bank account slowly diminish. Barry is a master woodworker. Corky is his assistant. Barry is short, Corky tall and lanky. They are like Laurel and Hardy scurrying about in our yard.

“I’m not sure we really need a gazebo,� I say without a lot of conviction. It is a fait accompli, and I know that. But I must be heard.

“I can see you leaning back in a comfortable chair,� she says, creating an image, “reading something simple while sipping a martini on a balmy summer evening. Won’t that be fun?�

A martini isn’t fun. A martini is best drunk sad. Think of Billie Holiday singing to an almost empty house in Toledo. Think of Humphrey Bogart giving up Ingrid Bergman in “Casablanca.� Here’s looking at you, kid. Makes you wanna cry.

The concrete base is solid. Objecting to a gazebo at this point would be like pounding on the girders of a skyscraper under construction and demanding that the work be halted.

Gazebo Cinelli will be 200 square feet. It will have lights, a wet bar, a mister for keeping it cool, a phone jack and a surrounding garden. Off to one side, an area has been walled and flattened for a hammock. The only lacking accessory will be a satellite tracking system, and I’m not even going to mention that.

Folks will come from miles around to see it. They will stand in wonder, eyes wide and mouths agape, to behold what we have built, and want to take pictures of us in front of the gazebo posing like the couple in Grant Wood’s “American Gothic,� except that I’d be holding a martini instead of a pitchfork and she’d be smiling triumphantly.

It isn’t exactly my gazebo, this grand edifice underway in our yard. It’s hers. But she has been at my side every minute of half a century, bearing my moods and hoisting my occasionally limp spirit with arms of encouragement and support. She has whispered joy into my ear and shouted optimism into my life.

She deserves every inch of it, every nail of it, every dollar of it.

I sit before the window and watch it coming to life as the world around it glistens in the dampness, and a crow talks to the saw in the foggy, foggy dew, and I think how lucky I am to have her.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be reached at al.martinez@ latimes.com.