A Column by John Estridge
Many, many times every day I feel sorry for My Long Suffering Wife Ruth.
And I know, without a doubt, my close female friends who know me well, also feel sorry for her. If anything around the house needs fixed, Ruth grabs her tools and does it.
I am not the quintessential male. I am the opposite of the quintessential male, whatever that might be. I do not know how to fix anything around the house. Give me a task to fix something now, and I sit and stare at it without a clue on how to even start. I have evolved to that point where I sit and do nothing as opposed to how I was when I was younger and I still deceived myself into thinking I could at least do the simple things.
You see, in my younger years, I just dove right in and attempted to do things I had no clue about. I ruined a lot of things, and I did a lot of damage, costing money at a time where I had little to none.
There was the time back in the early 1990s when I attempted to fix a leaking toilet in our main upstairs bathroom. That is not something that is too awfully hard for the majority of people in the world. But it was for me.
Thinking like the repairman I should be, the first job was to shut the water off to the toilet. I grabbed the oblong shaped knob like thing to shut off the water supply and tried to turn it with my bare hand, but was unable to do so. I did not even speculate that I was weak and I should ask my wife, who was not yet my ex-wife, if she could get it turned off. Instead, I had an almost new can of WD-40 – I still have the same can in the garage — so I sprayed about half a can on it. It did not help. Thus, I went to my tools. I did not have many, but I found a large pipe wrench with a long, heavy metal red handle.
I affixed the pipe wrench with a long, heavy metal red handle to the oblong shaped knob-like thing and pulled, maybe the wrong way, maybe it was the half can of WD-40 making everything very slippery. Maybe it was both. The oblong shaped knob like thing sheared off as I was pulling on the long red heavy metal pipe wrench handle at an upward angle, the long red heavy metal pipe wrench handle or maybe the heavy metal pipe wrench itself struck me square between my eyes with a lot of force. I had been kneeling and then standing, as I sought more leverage, in front of the bathtub.
The children woke me up, or more to the point, brought me back to consciousness with screams of “daddy killed himself” and the not so subtle attempts to pound my chest. I guess they somehow saw a cartoon-like CPR in one of the 2 million My Little Pony movies they always watched and were just randomly pounding my upper torso seeking out a heart. I was inside the bathtub where the back of my head hit the not soft at all inside of the tub.
People did not talk a lot about concussions back in those days, but hey, I do really believe that was one of several I have had. This was pre-cell phone days, and it seemed our landline phone rang the entire night, but even though I yelled for people to answer it, they did not. People mention cobwebs as part of the concussion symptoms. For anyone who has witnessed the start of the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, my brain had more cobwebs than Harrison Ford had when he emerged from the cave.
It was really hard to concentrate, shoot it was hard to know who I was let alone where I was and what was going on. And the headache was rhythmically pounding from within my skull with much greater frequency and force than the kids had used trying to restart my heart.
Then, there was the water continually spraying around the bathroom from where the oblong shaped knob like thing used to be. The kids were happily treating it like a sprinkler and were soon dancing through it wearing their swimwear.
It took a while for me to be able to adequately find the balance and the coherent thought process to get out of the bathtub and then find my way down the stairs to the main floor and then again maneuver down the real rickety wooden stairs to my spider-filled dungeon, I mean basement.
My balance was far worse than unsteady. It felt like I was trying to maneuver through a fun house full of distortion mirrors and uneven floors.
I finally got the nerve to reach through more real cobwebs to where the round shaped thing to turn off the water was and actually got the water shut off to the entire house. But I had no idea how to fix the oblong shaped knob like thing let alone the original small but persistent toilet leak. And now the house was without water anywhere. This was way before the television show Cash Cab, but I called a friend. And luckily, the friend was sober, and he came over and got a new oblong shaped knob like thing on the toilet and fixed the water leak in the toilet in less time than it took to type this and went on his way. He did not stop laughing the entire time he was at the house, and continued laughing the entire way to his pickup, which did no good for my headache or my manly self esteem.
By that time, the kids were calling me unicorn for the knot that started between my eyes and protruded far into the room in front of me. It caused my eyes to cross.
My first wife, I really don’t know why she wanted to divorce me, methodically cleaned up the bathroom and tried to dry everything out. She did not talk much to me for about seven or eight years. I think her first words after that was “I want a divorce.”
Ruth and I went to Home Depot in Harrison recently to do “some shopping.” One of the things we decided to get was some patches for our drywall. At some point in our 14-plus years of marriage, we put two holes in our drywall near the top of the stairs. I am sure it was lugging furniture upstairs and trying to lift it over the banister, which caused the problems, and then they got larger as the years went by even though I did my part by completely ignoring them.
A male employee who looked to be about my age, somebody else who is too poor to retire, helped us find what we needed. With every piece of the puzzle he grabbed from the shelves, he handed them to me and methodically told me what to do and how to do it. Again, he was about my age so he suffered from the same gender bias I have grown up with where everyone assumes because I am male I am a contributor to society and I know more on how to do useful, manly type things than Ruth.
Ruth rolled her eyes to the point I thought they would permanently be frozen inside her head sort of like grandma Stella used to tell us about crossing our eyes when we were little. I dutifully would agree with the man at what appeared to be the proper moments with just the correct amount of affirmative head nods and grunts.
Earlier today, Ruth asked me how far along I was on the patching process. Well, at least I have written about it. I believe that is a start.