Tag: Seth

How Things Work When They Don’t

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20161 Comment

antique-vacuum

Dear Will:

When it comes to home maintenance and repairs, I’m what they call in the trades Really Bad At It, or Utterly Useless, for short. You might recall, for example, how I somehow managed to destroy a fairly-new reverse-osmosis system while trying to fix a small leak under the kitchen sink. I could fill this page with other humiliating examples of my ineptitude, but let’s skip over that formality and go directly to this week’s confession: I’ve done it again. The legend continues.

As always, it started out innocently enough: I was simply trying to do a little vacuuming—a low-skill assignment for which even I am qualified. I might even go so far as to claim a certain degree of competence in the field of Automated Dust Removal. But as I was maneuvering out into the upstairs hallway, I became aware that the family Hoover was no longer Hooving. “This thing sucks,” I hollered at my wife, Dana. “It’s supposed to,” she offered cheerfully. “It’s a vacuum cleaner.”

Diagnosing that there must be something obstructing the brush mechanism, I set about disassembling the intake unit. I figured I just had to remove a couple of screws, clear out the obstruction, and put the thing back together. I can work a screwdriver, I thought. How hard can it be? Right? Well, more than a dozen screws later, I finally had it opened.

It took me little time to clean out the brush and intake, but getting the base to snap back into place proved a little trickier—especially when I discovered that a small, metal bracket had joined the loose screws scattered about me. I knew where the bracket belonged, but getting it back into place appeared to defy several physical laws while tenaciously affirming the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Soon I looked like Jim wrestling a crocodile on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. And the croc was winning.

Well, of course I never got the thing back together (see: Thermodynamics, Second Law). Within an hour Dana and I were standing in the aisle at Costco pursuing the only sort of appliance repair that works consistently for me. And then, as fitting punctuation to an evening squandered, we spent most of the time at Costco fingering her iPad and ordering a new vacuum from Amazon instead.

The new machine (not a crocodile, but a Shark®) arrived a couple of days later. Seth offered to take Sharknado out on its maiden run, and when he was done we were shocked to see how much gunk it had managed to collect. Walking around the house afterward, we noted how different the carpet felt—like it was brand new. Hmmm. (Let that thought swirl around your head for a little bit.)

So it turns out the old Hoover really did suck, but unfortunately not in the manner that it was supposed to. Who knows how much grime has been accumulating over the past many months, or how long, for that matter, we had been shuffling around in it? Ewww. So in the end, my failed repair work may have been the best thing that has happened to our carpet since it was installed.

And thus emerges the familiar pattern in another embarrassing tale: Something goes wrong, and in my attempts to make it better I make it much, much worse. But in the end—somehow—I end up far better off than I could ever have been had disaster not struck to begin with. Happens all the time. I’m pretty sure Paul wasn’t thinking about carpet cleaning when he said that “all things work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28), but on the other hand, isn’t it curious how much good comes from the bad stuff we unintentionally make worse? Interesting how that works. Carpet Diem!

PW

Breakfast for Dinner

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20163 Comments

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Dear Will:

The thing about pancakes is that you get to douse them with syrup. Goopy, sweet, and delicious, syrup is one of the great nectars of childhood. Remember when you first discovered that—even though they were super-indulgent, dessert-like wonders—pancakes were a featured item of the Most Important Meal of the Day? Talk about beating the system! You would look at your siblings incredulously, blinking in amazement as if to say “Can you believe this?” in some sort of eyelash-flapping Morse code.

When I was growing up, I probably ate pancakes at least once a week. My mother would fry up a pound of bacon, cook a dozen or so eggs, and throw in the flapjacks just for good measure. It was both wonderful and no big deal. But then some fool invented cholesterol and spoiled an otherwise great thing for generations of kids to come. Add in the complications of over-programmed childhoods and it’s perhaps easy to understand why, one generation later, my children have pretty much subsisted on Cheerios and Quaker Oatmeal Squares for breakfast throughout their lives. It hardly seems fair.

So in order to assuage my guilt and keep them from reporting me to authorities, when they were small I began the practice of making Special Breakfast on Sunday mornings. It was an important bonding ritual for me and my kids since my wife, Dana—who has never been much of a breakfast-eater—was rarely around to cast a disapproving motherly glare at our mounds of goopy goodness. Guilt-free and giddy, we would slather and stab, forkful upon sticky forkful, unconcerned with caloric intake or the latest in nutritional science. And for one hour each week, I got to be the cool parent while eating breakfast the way it was meant to be eaten.

As a consequence, my kids and I have come to take our pancakes very seriously. We don’t use Bisquick (please) or Krusteaz (don’t insult me) or any other variety of ready-made mixes. As for me and my house, pancakes are strictly from scratch, with real buttermilk and a variety of other not-very-secret ingredients that, over the years, have turned the basic recipe from The Joy of Cooking into my own signature line against which my children judge all other so-called hotcakes. Straight from the griddle, we smear them with butter and genuine maple or homemade apple syrup. If Dana is around we’ll throw in a few blueberries so that perhaps she’ll cave in and join us.

Or at least, that’s what we used to do. These days, I’m in meetings from early to late most Sundays, and I get through the day without any breakfast, Special or otherwise. For his part, like any good teenager, Seth (the only kid left at home) would rather sleep in till noon if given the choice, so as with so many other essential family rituals, Special Breakfast now happens only once or twice a year. It’s just not the same. We’ve lost something important—and it’s not (I hasten to add) weight.

So with Dana’s complete (if unenthusiastic) acquiescence—we have declared that tonight shall be Breakfast for Dinner, an indulgent shout-out to years gone by when calories didn’t count and it was still possible for Dad to be cool.

And in so doing, we shall feel virtuous because we are fulfilling a mandate given by prophets of God, who said (and I quote): “Successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of faith, prayer, repentance, forgiveness, respect, love, compassion, work, wholesome recreational activities . . . and pancakes.” At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what they said. And if not, surely it’s what they meant.

PW

Lunching with Snaggly and His Wayward Cousin

On By Peter WatkinsIn 20151 Comment

Dear Will:

As I see it, my mother had better options. She could have passed along her cheerfully unselfish disposition, for example, or the perpetual sparkle in her eye. Or maybe she could have simply given me her ability to bake the best cinnamon rolls you’ve ever tasted. (Mmmm, cinnamon rolls.) These are traits I could use. But no. Instead she passed along the bald-guy gene that has distinguished (?) our family for generations. And then, as a signature design flourish, she threw in her snaggletooth for good measure.

For those of you who like to play hygienist in your off-hours, I refer specifically to my right central incisor, which, like the runt of the litter, finds itself behind my other teeth trying to push and shove its way into line. The problem is, there just isn’t room for li’l Snaggly, so mostly he just pushes and shoves, creating the kind of premolar disorder that has financed the boats of many an orthodontist and the college educations of his children. Jostled thus for decades, the adjacent lateral incisor now finds itself leaning out of formation as if looking up the road to see when the parade is going to arrive.

Oh, and the parade does come—at least three times a day typically. Oatmeal Squares and bananas. Potato chips and PBJs. Countless morsels of steak and green beans, with occasional chocolate chip cookies snuck in between. (Mmmm, chocolate chip cookies.) They all come parading past my tangled toothage to be processed for swallowing, much to the delight of cuspids and bicuspids alike.

Ah, but for li’l Snaggly and his increasingly wayward cousin. Say you’re sitting at In-N-Out, scrolling through email with your left hand while fisting down a burger with your right. You’re chewing happily because you were smart enough to ask Amanda to add grilled onions and pickle to your Double-Double. The molars are really going to town now while the fangs upfront are mostly just pumping up and down as if on the most disgusting merry-go-round ever. You’re in blissful reverie until you discover that Snaggly’s cousin has taken it upon himself to hook your lower lip and add it to your midday mélange.

Now no one would ever accuse me of being a vegetarian, but I’ve always felt that adding my own flesh to a meal is taking meat-eating to an inappropriate extreme. And having chomped down on myself, over and over, in the very same spot, for 30 or 40 years, I’m a bit of an expert on the subject. In fact, I’ve now built up so much scar tissue in that one area of my mouth that I’m pretty sure that when I walk I’m starting to list slightly to the right.

Which is not a declaration of my politics but an acknowledgment of the fact that who I am—in all my bald-headed, snaggletoothed glory—is at least in part a consequence of genetic inheritance. And while my future as a male supermodel may be somewhat in jeopardy, I look at my own children and conclude that my parents passed along plenty that was worth sharing. And that I married well. Especially the marriage part.

So here’s hoping that Luke and Bryn and Seth have inherited their mother’s thick, glorious mane and her impressively bright intellect; her effortless empathy and passion for justice; her internal drive and (of course) her impeccable teeth. Also, if one of them could please master the art of their grandmother’s cinnamon rolls—sooner rather than later—I would really appreciate it.

PW