It had been a nice Sunday afternoon. Peace and serenity ruled supreme. The hours were spent shuttling between the coffee shop and the couch, with the odd time out for a glance at the newspaper headlines. It was the very day of rest church leaders have advocated for so long.
But the guys who wrote the Bible didn’t own houses or they might have put out a different message about taking Sundays off. In fact, had they owned houses, it’s possible they might never have been able to find the time to get around to writing the Bible in the first place.
But I digress.
To homeowners everywhere, true days of rest are only a memory, Sunday or otherwise. They exist somewhere in that hazy, long-ago childhood when Ma and Pa performed all the vital services in life. The days when meals just appeared out of nowhere and clothing washed itself.
This past Sunday, about an hour before supper, I realized the bathtub drain was plugged. Actually, I came to that conclusion several weeks before, but ignored it. But the day of reckoning – not rest – had come.
On my knees, tools spread out on the floor, head plunged into the tub, I started to work. After a quarter of an hour of twisting and turning, the stainless steel stopper popped out of its anchor in the drain hole. As did two springs and a small, metal washer.
Grabbing a tweezers, I carefully removed all the matter that had been clogging the drain. Soon, it was running as freely as the day it was installed. Mission accomplished.
But the mission soon became a battle and the battle became a war when I tried to reinstall the metal stopper. In went the first spring, then the washer, then the second spring and then …
“SPLINK!!!”
The washer jumped from its mooring and fell down the pipe to the bottom of the drain, taking with it all my hopes for an early end to the job.
What followed were efforts that would have made an open-heart surgeon proud. Down the hole I lowered a wire with a hook on the end, hoping to catch the washer as if it was a speckled trout. When that failed, in the true spirit of Sylvester the Cat after Tweety Bird, I sent down the same wire with a magnet attached to the end, all the time holding a flashlight above my head like an operating room light.
Before long, inevitably, I was in the basement, under the bathroom, taking apart the plastic drain pipes leading from the tub. When they finally came apart, water gushed out over my hands and down my arms. Into the freshly opened pipe, I inserted the wire with the hook, then the wire with the magnet and then my own long bony finger until, at last, I felt the washer.
Success.
In another quarter of an hour, the pipes were all hooked up, the drain stopper was reattached and the trial run commenced. The bathtub was half filled, the stopper button in place. But it wasn’t holding to my satisfaction. And though my precious Sunday supper was ready, I decided to take the stopper apart one more time.
So, off came the stopper, out sprang the springs, and the washer went …
“SPLINK!!!”
I can record the noise the washer made as it tumbled down the drain again, but the sounds I made, unfortunately, are unprintable. They involved graphic descriptions of how I felt towards the inventor of the stainless steel drain stopper and my feelings about metal washers, home ownership, etc. The guys who wrote the Bible would not be pleased.
Supper was late Sunday night but it didn’t matter that much.
Sylvester was never very hungry either after Tweety Bird got away.
©1991 Jim Hagarty
