I have no acumen for mechanical labor. It’s strange to say, but I don’t have the patience for it. With written work, I find it easy to get started with a cup of coffee and start writing, reading, revising—and I enjoy using my own language no matter how dull the nature of the work. Even work reports can shine with unique phrasings, or even adroitly used punctuation. And at the end, you have something you feel a certain pride in, something which is representative of your ability.
But working with gears, hinges, drills, drywall, and nails gives me anxiety. When the desired outcome isn’t achieved instantaneously, I resort to forcing things. I meet resistance and I keep pushing, which, of course, is how things get broken. And when the thing is broken, you’re worse off than before. Not only is the drawer, door, or light fixture still non-functioning, but now something new, something expensive, is lodged in there as well.
Maturity has managed to curb most of my frantic impulses, but with kids, I know not to leave a job incomplete—as my wife often urges me to do. With the door still off the track, the screen still not in the window, the faucet still in pieces, I can’t pack up the tools and leave one more mess, one more incomplete in this house of incompletes. At any moment, there is laundry to put away, trash to take out, dishes to unload, toys, strewn around the backyard, art supplies dribbling down the sides of the table, and there’s no food to make dinner, there’s also no room in the kitchen to make dinner; it’s been taken over by unpaid bills and other random junk that’s arrived in the mail and hasn’t made it to the trash which, again, is overflowing.
In this situation, to leave something undone, something I’ve probably been looking at all week, is the most obnoxious of failures. Even if I am only trying to leave it undone for a moment to collect my thoughts, the moment I leave the task, my son will look at me with his big eyes and ask, ‘now can we play superheroes?’ A simple request I’ve been flatly refusing while I went to the store to buy the required items, cleared the area for work, and got all the tools out (often in several trips because I never know what I need). I can’t bear to refuse such an earnest request again. Who knows how many more times I will be asked before an assumption is forged by my repeated refusal—an assumption that I am perpetually unavailable. Even if this assumption isn’t formed, how many more times will my kids even be interested in playing with their dad who lives in a different world than theirs?
So, the grout, the dining room table, the toilet tank must be repaired NOW, while everything is out, while there is opportunity to clear one space in the larger chaos of this house, while it’s so damn close to being fixed if I could just get this little plastic thing to move oh-so-slightly to the right *snap!* Dammit!
…
Yesterday, I hadn’t worked on my new bike yet, so I was a little anxious about changing out the tires—the back wheel has an extra chain tightening bolt I’ve never had before—but after eons of fixing flats at the side of the damn roaring highway in the dark—the tires of a bike are one mechanical thing I’ve become pretty comfortable with, and I was almost impressed by how quickly I got the job done with everything fitting back on right, with just the improvement I’d been hoping for. But then, there was the screen door.
Doors—what is it with doors? I’ve only owned a house for about two and a half years and I’ve replaced everything with a hinge in the place excepting—thank, god!—the garage door and probably only because we never use it. The knobs on all the doors have been replaced, they’ve been locked from the inside and had to be picked open with a bent paperclip more than once; my son, when he was a toddler, locked himself in his bedroom and the door had to be smashed down to get it open and, most recently, the locking mechanism froze on the front door. I had almost got the thing off the hinges when I realized a could just break the old lock out.
Every one of these repairs was an anxiety-inducing mixture of children barely restrained from the working area, tools, small, loseable pieces, vague printed instructions and Youtube videos on a grease-smeared phone screen which showed the whole job coming out easily simply because of one small difference. How anyone could enjoy this kind of work is utterly beyond me, but then again, people like to take things apart to see how they work—the very idea gives me acute anxiety. If it’s still working, I don’t even want to see where the batteries are let alone start pulling out the guts of the thing.
When we moved in, we had a screen door on the sliding glass door to the deck. It was rattley and bent, and it didn’t move as smoothly as I would’ve liked, but it was fine. Then, as with all screen doors, one evening, when visibility was low, someone tried to walk right through it, mistaking the light through the reticulate network for the real, unadulterated thing. The door was so badly bent, so rattley stuck that the best course of action was to pull it off and toss it. I had to bend it up something fierce to get it to fit in the trash for weekly pick up.
When you break something in your house, you have the idea that a newer, nicer screen will someday replace it, something shining and even noble, bravely sliding along its hinges to slam the aperture closed; you don’t expect to spent $100 to secure a similarly rattling, stuck, flimsy-looking screen, but that’s what you’ll get. At least if you’re me.
And it’s a process to get to that undesirable point: pack the reluctant kids into the car, stand around the hardware store looking for someone, feel overwhelmed not by the selection, but the lack of selection—why not order it online? My god, is there anything I’d have less desire to do than spend an hour or two searching for screen doors that fit my frame online!? So, I take a gamble and just buy one. We forgot rope, so we throw down another $10 to buy some and, of course, it turns out to be much easier to just put it in the car and balance it on our heads. The whole family driving around town and running other errands, lifting the screen door up each time and positioning it just so, like a jerry can being balanced for the walk home in Africa.
Back home, the screen door is carried to the backyard while children run around and through my legs. The door is balanced against the sliding glass door for about five seconds before it’s knocked over when someone mistakes it for a functioning door and tries to open it and nearly crushes the blueberry bush which has already lost several branches to errant footballs and other backyard missiles.
The written instructions seem to basically say that the door should just be put in top-first and that the wheels which guide the door along the track will sink into the door until they’ve cleared the jamb. Maybe it’s just wishful reading, but it looks like I just need to force the thing in here. From the top, I can’t see what’s going on the bottom. I try to use my foot. Ha! I call my wife, who’s inside feeding our infant daughter. The previously eating baby goes into a chair and, deprived of her nourishment for so inessential a task begins, rightfully, to squall. The other children, attracted by the commotion, come over and peer directly into our fitful struggles to get the wheels up into the door to clear the track. Despite all the encouragement, no amount of force seems to want to move the wheel over the tiny groove in the door and, possibly to cheer us on, my son starts pressing the “radio” button on his electric motorcycle which plays the same obnoxious faux-pop sample over and over. So, there’s a crying baby, tinny ambient “kid’s” music, directions, questions, and a feeling of failure all competing for my attention.
In my frustration, I slap my hand down on the deck, and my son asks, “why did dad slam the floor?” and, of course, I feel like a total idiot for not being able to hold back my frustration for one more crucial second because, after my wife shepherds all the kids upstairs and I am left alone to think, the wheel easily pops into place. However, perhaps as punishment for my outburst, no amount of screwing with the door (literally unscrewing, moving, and screwing the screws which control the track portion) will induce it to roll smoothly along the track. It bucks, it jerks, it teeters nearly as much as the previous broken door and, of course, this reveals to me just how cheap and flimsy the thing looks, skittering along its track, much like the door we’d intentionally ripped out and stuck in the trash months before only to squander $100 to reinstate.
In the end, I just spray the hell out of the door with WD-40, roll it back and forth a bunch of times, and hope that repeated use will erode whatever is making it stick like that, but, very likely, it won’t be long before, some warm evening, when the sun is setting at just the right angle, and the crepuscular world is twittering with bird song, and releasing the perfume of the lavender which is all but taking over out there, someone will be too overcome by the beauty of such a world to heed the flimsy impediment of the screen door, or perhaps will unconsciously choose this moment to topple the artificial barrier between themselves and such a harmonious scene. Either way, it won’t take much to render the door unserviceable given that it wasn’t put on correctly in the first place. Then, with the bent door removed, all of us with sigh with relief and not having to jerk an extra door open every time we want to duck outside and escape the chaos within. In this moment, the cycle will begin again. We’ll spend six months talking about getting a screen door, and then a precious six minutes cramming the thing onto the track to solve the problem and hold one small aspect of the chaos at bay, if only for a moment. What else can we ask for?
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