Our house on Rusty Hinge Road is like an unfinished sandwich. Which is to say that the attic and the basement –the metaphorical bread – still await finishing touches, while the middle two floors – the meat – have been redone.
While those last few last projects linger, I often look around and notice other things that have already begun to fall apart in the dozen years since I redid them.
For example: when I built my office, I constructed three drawers to store art supplies. Regular readers will not be shocked to learn that all three drawers now house random flotsam and jetsam.
The top drawer actually holds art supplies but they are the ones I should throw out: dried-out markers and hardened paint tubes. Unfinished, blobby modeling clay amoebas that my children crafted before they developed hand-eye coordination. I have two hot glue guns in there, twice the number I need. There's an old bolo tie with a broken cord that has needed attention since before I was born.
I looked in that drawer today searching for, of all things, art supplies, and as I pulled on the knob, it came off in my hand. This was troublesome because I labor under the delusion that I make sturdy furniture and the knobs shouldn't be coming off in my hand. Adding to the dilemma, I am lazy, and since I practically never go into that drawer, I felt obliged to fix it. That way there would be one less broken thing, right?
So, with knob in hand (I knew if I put it down I'd never find it again or a curious cat would bat it down the stairs and under the sofa) I went about fixing the drawer.
I knew I would need a Phillips-head screw driver, but the last time I saw one was in the console of my truck (there are, mysteriously, two there). Being lazy, I didn't much feel like bending down to put on my shoes, especially with a knob in my hand, so I did what anyone else would do, I looked in the pencil holders on my desk. Aside from pencils and pens, these cans, decorated by my children for Father's Day, have been known to hold the occasional screw driver. I found a chop stick, several hardened paint brushes, a fork with bent tines, a back scratcher, a tire pressure gauge and somewhere around the bottom, a U.S. Postage stamp with a picture of Harry Truman. But no screw drivers of any sort.
Down in the garage, which at the moment is serving as a combination lawn furniture storage facility and feral cat condo, is a shelf where I have, over the years, been stacking screw drivers. I don't remember ever buying one, they seem to replicate like bacteria. Somewhere in the reptilian remnants of my brain stem I have a synapse that derives pleasure from grouping like items with like items. All of these screw drivers are of the "flat head" variety. I can't remember the last time I used one of them to actually drive a screw; I use them mostly to open cans. The flat-head screwdriver is the VHS of screwdrivers. Long since outmoded by Mr. Phillip's ingenuity.
But, being lazy, I didn't put on my shoes and a sweater and walk down stairs, through the house, out the back door and into the garage.
And I had a new problem. In order to reattach the knob, I had to open the drawer. Like the drawer itself, this proved to be a bit sticky. Without a knob, I had to open the second drawer, reach under and wiggle the top drawer open.
Once the drawer was open, I was able to locate the head of the screw that is threaded into the knob and by pushing it through from the back, I was able to tighten the knob in place just enough to keep it there so the whole thing wouldn’t just spun in place.
I remember the first time I saw an electric screwdriver gun. I was a small kid and my father had tightened a handle-less, flat-head screwdriver into the chuck of his old one-speed Black and Decker drill. I don’t recall the purpose of this endeavor, but knowing Dad, it might have been some sort of prank he was pulling on our neighbor, George. I remember thinking at the time that it was a brilliant idea. It wasn't until about twenty years later that I observed some Canadian workmen installing sheetrock on a ceiling with a cordless, electric screwdriver.
They are everywhere today, but I remember the early ones were temperamental, quite expensive, and didn't hold a charge for long.
I bought one shortly after we moved here and it is never far from my side. After a few years, the batteries lost their charge, so I bought new ones on the Google. Mine is blue, and Japanese and with it, I have screwed practically every screw and drilled every hole in this house with it.
Luck would have it that Melissa, tired of seeing it on my dresser, put it on my desk by the pencil holder. I just picked up the old blue electric screwdriver, moved a bunch of stuff out of the drawer, and carefully tightened the knob, where it will stay, with any luck, for as long as it has to, provided I don't go snooping around the drawers more than once every couple of years.
After all, I know what's in there.
Nothing useful.
Don’t get me started on Allen wrenches. ben.guerrero@sbcglobal.net
