The Aerie
Sunday was annoying in a lot of ways, but one of the ways was unexpected. I was already in a bad mood, in part because my wife was leaving to go to a party while I was going to be staying home, not going to a party.
She was in her coat, ready to leave, and I was making my lunch: the coffee was brewing, the bagel was in the toaster.
Then one of my kids came in. I won't say who, I'll just say The Kid, since if The Kid learns I've blogged this The Kid will destroy me.
Anyway, The Kid came in and said, "Dad, how does a toilet plunger work?"
With a sinking feeling, I asked, "Why do you want to know?"
"Well," said The Kid, "It doesn't seem to be working."
"Your father will take care of it," said Mrs. Party-Hearty, one foot out the door.
"Oh yeah," I snarled, "I'm just the #*!@% janitor after all."
Now, I have to explain. This Kid has a unique super power: This Kid can kill simply by walking out of the bathroom. Superman would veer off course and crash, flying through this cloud. Batman would weep. A couple of years ago we had a friend over, and The Kid walked out of the bathroom, and it was quite the sight watching our friend trying to oh-so-politely ignore the effects of The Kid's super power while her eyes were watering and her hair was curling. It would have been hilarious, except that being The Kid's father does not convey immunity - my vision was dimming, and I couldn't tell whether the black spots were from wooziness or from paint flaking off the ceiling.
So when This Kid in particular tells you that the toilet plunger isn't working, this isn't just an annoyance, it's a crisis. And when there's food being prepared, a disaster.
I urged The Kid to try again, but it was my fault The Kid could get nothing accomplished. The evening before had been the end of a real red-letter day, and I had celebrated by purchasing a new toilet plunger at the dollar store. Yes, I'd bought a $1 plunger. It was 99 cents overpriced. Every attempt to plunge the toilet caused the plunger to invert itself, requiring manual intervention to correct it. And believe me, you don't want to manually intervene with a recently-inverted plunger.
After a couple of increasingly frustrated and aggravated exchanges with The Kid, I was forced to look into the problem. We couldn't risk The Kid working on it any further. In the past, The Kid had decided to try to force the issue by flushing the toilet a second time, resulting in hours spent sanitizing the laundry room beneath the main floor bathroom. This time there were bags of Christmas groceries stacked all over the laundry room floor - a sceptic disaster could cost us over a hundred dollars.
Squaring my shoulders, and breathing only through my mouth, I marched steadfastly into the bathroom to inspect the situation.
I awoke in the living room, still weeping "No! Noooo!" Fortunately The Kid's powers tend to collect up at the ceiling, leaving a precious layer of life-giving oxygen below.
Taking a deep, dusty breath of floor level air, I returned to inspect the situation.
Apparently The Kid, like most superhuman creatures, possesses more than one super-power. In addition to being a one-Kid Buchenwald Shower, The Kid can block drains so thoroughly that blasting caps are necessary.
I fumbled with the lousy $1 plunger and discovered, as had The Kid, that I had wasted an entire dollar on this thing. It went in concave, and emerged convex, doing nothing useful in-between. Digging through the trash (which at this point was a welcome improvement) I unearthed the head from the prior plunger. It was so worn that it had developed holes all round the rim - this was not, after all, the first manifestation of The Kid's powers. Working very gingerly, I removed the new head and replaced it with the old one. Immersing it blindly into, well, immersing it, I positioned it over the opening and plunged. The clog didn't move.
Remember what I mentioned about those holes? Well, what happens when you squeeze a liquid-filled thingy that has holes?
Believe me, you don't want to imagine the results.
By this time my air was almost out, so I left the room to breathe.
Grabbing some more air, I tried several methods, none of which were successful, and none of which I'll disgust you by describing except to say, no, I didn't try THAT. Eventually I took the old "holey" plunger head, put it in a plastic bag, affixed it back onto the handle, and finally succeeded.
That, of course, was only half the battle.
The next 45 minutes was spent with a bucket of ammonia water (or possibly "watery ammonia" given the ratios), and a collection of old rags - some of which, ironically enough, were The Kid's old diapers, long since retired to the rag-bag.
Oh, didn't I tell you? Yes, we had twins and a singleton, and we washed their cloth diapers at home the old-fashioned way. My wife -you know, the one who was at the party during this whole thing? yeah, that one - my wife is a very old-fashioned girl. Old fashioned enough to want to wash cloth diapers: not so old fashioned, however, that she considered diaper-laudering or even diaper-changing for that matter to be "women's work." Oh no. No, her old-fashionedness extended to a very precise date early in 1956, after the women's suffrage movement but before bra-burning.
No this wasn't the first time I've had to deal with The Kid's super powers.
So ninety minutes after I started, I staggered out of the bathroom, reeking (hopefully only) of ammonia. In the kitchen my forgotten lunch was waiting - a rock-hard toasted bagel, and a small pot of black tar that used to be coffee.
But that was okay, because I really didn't expect to have any appetite for quite a while...
The wife arrived home from her party and later we had a chance to discuss the marvelous adventure that I had while she was out eating fresh homemade bread and birthday cake with a roomful of lesbians. "Stop," she said, laughing, "You're going to make me wet myself - you have to blog this!"
Yeah, that's what I want to do - relive THAT experience...
Posted by Albatross at December 19, 2005 3:40 PM | TrackBack