I find it funny that we spend most of our lives figuring out who we are. Like Tigger in Winnie the Pooh – “that’s what Tiggers like best!” Only to find that we’ve generated what could be a rather longish list of things we are not.
My house reminds me every day of things that I am not. It looks at me and whispers things like “you sure ain’t no plumber!”
Who made that patch in the wallboard, there? How come the orange-peel texture doesn’t look right? Did you replace the glass in that window? ‘Cause it kinda looks like it…
I noticed over the weekend the scars on my right arm, left over from when I had to replace the spark plugs every month in my Ford van. Because I am surely no mechanic!
Okay, be fair, now.
It was the heart of the Great Recession, and the company I owned had gone belly up. And that van had almost two hundred thousand miles on it, and needed serious work that just wasn’t in the budget. And that van, that thing was a Freestar, and had that transverse-mounted V-6, and you couldn’t even see the plugs on the rear side to get them in or out.
And you couldn’t reach ‘em from underneath, so you had to sort of hug the engine and stretch waaaaay down there into the dark first with your right hand to probe for the spark plug with your fingers, and then again with a wrench to get it out. Torque? Forget about it! And there were, like, the sharp ends of a hundred or so bolts sticking out of the firewall – oh it was tough, and it was bloody. And then you had to do the same thing again to put the new plug in!
Nope, not a mechanic.
So, my Honda Ridgeline ran out of windshield washer juice, see. And it seriously needs to be washed. And I can’t even see out of the windshield.
Now, in December we invested in kayaks, see, and put a set of racks on the truck to haul ‘em around.
But you can’t put the truck through the car wash with the racks on.
And now it’s March, see, and our schedules are soooo tight, there’s no chance of the boats seeing any water until at least May.
So, I’m out there with a 17mm ratcheting-box-head wrench, and my wife is looking at me, asking “why don’t we just wash the truck?”
I look at her for a long moment.
Our front lawn looks shaggy because we can mow it ourselves, thank you very much, but can’t find the time. The gate that leads to the side yard has new boards in it, but they aren’t painted yet, because, well, now I fixed the gate – and one of these days I’ll get around to painting it. And we just invested a huge pile of money in reworking our plumbing because, hey, it’s easy – alls ya gotsta do is buy one of them snake things, see?
“Because we never WILL wash the truck,” I reply sadly. “We will EVENTUALLY get to the lawn. SOMEDAY I’ll finish the gate. It turns out, we’re not those kinds of people. It’s not what we are.”
She looked at me thoughtfully, and then smiled.
“Do you need help taking the racks off?”
Just a quick note – the image for this post was generated for free at Craiyon.com. The prompt was “blue ford freestar with hood open and smoke coming out.” Sort of missed on the hood thing, but it’s pretty cool! Just thought I’d give them a shout out because their AI made the image for free.
John D Reinhart 