Gutter Adventures

In All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulgham, he writes:

The man next door cleaned his gutters yesterday. Downspouts too. He’s done it before. I saw him last year. Amazing. I was forty years old before I even knew that people cleaned gutters and downspouts. And I haven’t been able to get around to doing it once yet.

I live in awe of people who get those jobs done. The people who live orderly lives. The ones who always do what needs to be done and do it right. I know of people who actually balance their checkbooks each month. I know that’s hardly credible, but I swear it’s so.

These people also have filing cabinets (not shoe boxes) with neat, up-to-date, relevant files. They can find things around the house when they need them. There is order under their sinks, in their closets, and in the trunks of their cars. They actually change the filter on their furnace once a year. They put oil and grease on mechanical things. Their warranties runneth not out. Not only do their flashlights work, they actually know where the flashlights are!

In this spirit, I decided to be very proactive and clean out the gutters on my house before the rain destroys my foundation, and of course this year it doesn’t just rain – it rains constantly, almost every day, and with each raindrop that falls, I sit in my house and wonder, “I hope my foundation is ok.”

That doesn’t mean I do something about it. I can procrastinate, since I think, “Well, it’s raining now, and I can’t do anything about it anyway, so I’ll just have to wait for tomorrow.” So I wait for tomorrow, and tomorrow comes and it rains again, and around we go.

One day there is dryness in the land and I finally find the gumption to actually do my gutters, and I have my trusty\handy fourth child at my side to help; we might re-phrase at my side to I am at his side, because he is mechanical and I am not, and when we do something together, he ends up bossing me around. “No, not that way,” he will tell me, as if a guy with three degrees like myself should know this stuff, “we should do it this way.” The thing is, this way always makes sense – he’s almost always right – but every once in a while I take my belated turn and happen to be right myself, and I remind him of it.

The problem is that we don’t have a ladder, so we improvise and decide to park our ghettovan under our entryway roof and then jump from the roof of the van – of course placing our footing on the roof’s support – to the entryway roof and from there get up to the house’s roof. Then we can clean our gutters. Of course I tell him not to step on the windshield – a bad idea in my book, and I don’t know much about anything but I do know that.

Clean our gutters, referenced above, is a bit of an understatement. The last time I cleaned my gutters was like in 2013, before my second bout with cancer, and now the gutters have little trees growing in them. Yes, trees. From the entryway roof, I can scoop our two or three inches of dirt from this section of the gutter, along with these miscellaneous trees. You may think when I say two or three inches that I am exaggerating, but I assure you I am not.

In no time we have the front gutter cleaned out, and now the problem is the downspout; it is clogged. We can’t quite get to that, so down we go and soon we’re back on the ground. We move the van just under the downspout, and we should be well on our way to being one of those people who have cleaned their gutters. We are on our way to feeling good about ourselves, and it feels great.

Then IT happens in a second when my son is getting up to the van’s roof. I’m not sure what happens – if he loses is balance and steps where he shouldn’t or places his foot accidentally in the wrong place – but he steps on the windshield. When I say on the windshield I mean ON THE WINDSHIELD and it collapses, and he collapses into the van’s dashboard in a second. He is in the middle of cut glass and is bleeding profusely from both knees.

The day is not going as expected.

Oops!

My first reaction is to help him get out but he tells me what to do. “Go get something to put pressure on the wound.” He is in pain but gets out himself. I run around inside the house and try to figure out what to use as a tourniquet, and he comes in, dripping blood. “Turn on the water,” he says, going toward the bathroom, and I think for some crazy reason he wants to take a bath. How stupid. He corrects his imbecilic father by telling me that he wants to use the shower spray to clean the wound, and I get it. He does so, and I return to the bathroom with kitchen towels that happen to be the perfect size for a tourniquet.

I ask if he wants some Tylenol. Makes sense to me.

“No, it won’t help.”

He is in pain, and I mention that it might help relieve the pain. He won’t here of it.

There is blood splotches throughout our house, wherever he has walked, and he rests while I clean it up.

I realize that this gutter adventure has more to it than I expected. Days pass and it continues to rain, and the downspout on the front is clogged and the back gutters still have trees growing in them, and I remember that a friend of mine has a ladder. Why didn’t I think of that? I call him up and arrange to borrow it.

At this point, my son doesn’t want anything to do with gutters. I don’t blame him, but he helps me get the ladder home and my other son helps me set it up. He knows how ladders work – it is an extension ladder – and soon I’m in the back of the house scooping the little trees and dirt from my rear-facing gutter. It doesn’t take long, and it’s a nice day, and I wonder why I didn’t do it in this way in the first place. Getting the front gutter downspout clear is even easier. Sometimes the worse part of a task is imagining all that is involved with doing it beforehand.

More of blog after picture…

Clean gutters!  Hallelujah!

I should mention that boys are different than girls. A week later my son had pretty much healed but apparently still had some glass in his knee. He was alone and bored one day in our trailer and started to operate on his knees. He’s a Freshman biology major at college and likes medicine and the body, all of which qualified him as a surgeon. He digs the glass out and cuts off a flap of skin on his big toe, which also had glass in it. On the way home from all this, I ask if he used sterile instruments when doing the operation, and he said he used the clean part of the sock to wipe the blood from his knee. Well, better the clean part than the dirty part. I ask if he might want some Tylenol when we got home, and he makes a sound indicating that I was being ridiculous, so I stood corrected.

If you want to go into medicine, what better experiment can you have than your own body – I ask you that!

I now have clean gutters, and my sons knees are healed, and I can boast that at least one part of my life is organized, so I don’t care if it rains – not at all. Of course, it hasn’t rained since I cleaned out the gutters, so I did it just in time for the rainy season to end. Sometimes you can’t win.

Frank is Dead

Frank the rooster met his demise last Friday, the victim of an axe to his neck while hanging upside down – an inglorious death for such a testosterone-laden bird, an embarrassing way to go, and shocking to him.

About a year ago I read a book about Soapie Smith, a con man who worked the US all the way from the East Coast to Alaska and at one point took over a town and was its mayor. At the time of his death, five people came to his funeral;  of the five, four were there to make sure he was dead.

So it is with Frank.

We will not miss him, and no one shed a tear for the grand old bird. There is a strange freedom we all experience, walking out our door without checking in our peripheral vision and not needing to brandish a stick whenever we are outside.

Freedom is sweet, the tyrant is gone.

How I Could Make a Million Dollars

Yes, I know how I could make a million dollars, being of great service to all those parents across the nation with teenagers (boys especially) that have one overweening goal in life: to eat.

Here is my invention: all these financially strapped parents who endlessly truck off to the grocery store for yet more food, these poor parents would place a special, high-tech lock on both their freezer and refrigerator. That much is not remarkable, but what would be remarkable is this: they would download an app on their cell phones allowing only the mother and father in the family – and only them – to unlock the refrigerator with a press of a button or with a voice-activated command, which of course would only recognize their voices.

So when the mother would like some creamer for her coffee, she would say, “Frigie (the name of the personal assistant, akin to Alexa), unlock the refrigerator.”

Presto, the fridge would unlock.

The said mother would get her creamer and, upon shutting the door, it would lock again.

The teenagers, however, upon trying to open the door to get eight things out of it (of which eight will not be put away again) would pull and pull but with no success.

Even better, the app would have a schedule option on it, so the parents could schedule the fridge to open from, say 3:15 pm to 3:30 pm after school and stay locked until 5 pm, when the mother would begin making supper.

I started the conversation with my wife about this and said, “I have an invention I would pay $1,000 for out of our tax money next Spring.”

“One thousand dollars?”

“Yes,” I said and explained it to her. She laughed.

I explained that we would get our return in investment back in about three months, as our food bill would plummet from stratospheric levels to merely tree-top levels, where other grocery buyers live.

She thought this also funny but really didn’t think I was serious. I was. She said, explaining life to me in ways I might understand, “David, we had these kids and have to feed them, or social services will knock at our door.”

I fired back, “We have to feed them, but no where does it say we have to feed them well!” I explained to her that we could feed them on a schedule, like gerbils in a cage whose feed falls out of a spout on a timer, and, hey, regarding that social services thing: we can always go the rice and beans way (along with potatoes) and arrive at financial solvency in no time.

She was undeterred, being a mother, and they care for their kids.

Still, I’m going to look up on Google how much it costs to file a patent. I expect to hit it big and have the money pouring in with letters from parents around the country thanking me for my awesome invention, saying how they were rescued from bankruptcy by it and even better: their chunky teenagers are now a thing of the past. What could be better?

The only question is: what will I do with my first million? I don’t know but it will not be buying food.

The Great Eclipse and our Marriage

Well, tomorrow is August 21^st, which happens to be Angela’s and my 24^th anniversary and to celebrate, the entire universe has bowed and staged the Great American Eclipse!

This is only fitting, and I’ve been pondering the possible symbolism of it all. What could this heavenly omen portend or be telling us as a married couple, seeing the entire heavens have been reoriented for a national spectacle just to celebrate our anniversary?

(More of blog after pictures)

Just Married

Outside Theatre in Rochester, August 19th, 2017

I think it means that we are very special in God’s eyes, as the very sun and moon bow to us, but that we will only see about 60 percent of the eclipse from Central New York says that we have a good marriage but have a way to go before having a perfect, Total Eclipse of the Sun marriage. Well, we’ve been working at it for only 24 years but are hoping for many more. I say only because my Dad, who is married 64 years, thought 24 years was unremarkable when I told him and said, “You’re just kids.”

We may be just kids, but we’ve had a good start on a great marriage and have it pretty good together – thanks, I can say, to the gospel. It’s nice that the universe acknowledges this fact as well. And hopefully when the next eclipse happens in 7 years, we will by then have it really, really, really good.

That is what the universe is telling us. It’s what the eclipse is all about. Remember that.

Romance When You Have Eight Kids

I recently texted my wife the following:

“Do you want to go out and buy a toilet with me tonight? The romance never stops.”

No, it doesn’t when you happen to have eight kids.

There was a time when we were engaged and held hands wherever we went. When we walked around our Church’s conference center, there we were: holding hands. A walk in the park together? You would see us holding hands. Even when in a store, we held hands, I think. Yes, it was all so very natural: I would find her hand, and she would find mine, and we were set.

Then we got children, and not just children, but eight children, one after another flying out of the womb like bullets from a Gatling gun. We were up in the night, and we were barely up in the day. We changed diapers and then rotated the next kid onto the change table, where we changed yet another diaper. When they peed the bed – which they did a lot – the laundry stacked higher up and up and the water in our well went down and down. Once one of my dear children climbed into bed with us, peed our bed and then went back into their very nice, warm and dry bed. So it was.

Somehow along the way, we were not quite as romantic as we were at first. We often called taking out the trash together our “romantic interlude.” It was so poignant, under the full moon and with the soft breezes of spring blowing, to hoist the garbage bag into the big blue Feher Trash bin. I don’t remember scooping her up and giving her a big, slobbery kiss next to it, but I might have. Chances are unfortunately I probably never thought of it.

And our get-aways just for the two of us: well, we didn’t get away so far. We would joke about how good it was to go for a cancer scan together – just the two of us – because then we could be together on the ride there and back, and if the doctor was late, we could get some conversation in in the waiting room. Then there was the trip to Lowes for a new washing machine – another time out together, and how awesome is that! Once in a while when there was a blue moon and Saturn aligned with Mars, and the powerball number was close to the digits in my birthday, we actually went to a movie together though, being the rich people we were with eight kids, we often ended up at the cheap seats: $1.75 for a movie that was long gone from the major movie theatres, but the popcorn was good. It was just life.

And now we need a toilet, but the text went out two weeks ago and still there is no new toilet sitting in our upstairs bathroom. It’s not that we don’t want a toilet, or that we don’t want to use this great opportunity for a get-away, but we’re just so busy with work and Church and kids and teenage kids that we just never found a time to be romantic in this manner. Of course, when the toilet gets bad enough, then suddenly we will find a time, and out we will drive to Lowes, just me and her, and then sooner rather than later, we will have a new throne.

You might think that eight kids and romance might be easier, but it is not. I can just see me looking into her beautiful blue eyes, and her into mine, and in the passion of the moment I say, “Do you think the seat is high enough for our big boys,” and she will catch her breath and say, “I think I’d like a different colored seat,” and the violins will be strumming, as off we walk into the sunset while loading the toilet into our van, and the rest is History.