Broken Necklaces

There’s a necklace lying here on Cecily’s desk. The string has broken, and the necklace is here, coiled up carefully with all the escaped beads tucked in close. It’s waiting to be repaired.

I think it will wait a long time. This house is quiet and clean right now, but in a house bulging with 10 cousins, such moments are expectant, rather than peaceful. This one is longing to explode into hot, sweaty children and evolving adventure. I will resist for the big things—feeding, washing the important things, finding the library books, a little structure for the body and the brain—but then I’ll just let go and float along with the current of the summer, which becomes the rhythm of the year, and then before I have realized it, the events and excitement of a whole life.

I found more than one broken necklace, carefully coiled together with its stray beads, tucked into little nooks and crannies around Grandma’s house yesterday. They were tucked in alongside unwritten explanations—a tiny sea shell, a piece of smooth stone, a card, a note. The house was not untidy, but it was carefully folded full, and it said in every drawer and on every shelf, “I lived.” They left very little undone, our grandparents. The house seemed to me a museum of their full and generous lives. But they did leave a few broken necklaces.

Tim Gets Hip

I went downstairs at 8 am this morning to find Tim sitting cross legged on the bathroom floor cutting his hair. One second after my inevitable reaction, I wondered (not for the first time) what it must be like to constantly have people yelling your name in exasperation. Every time I yell, I promise myself that I'm going to think of a more constructive, loving way of dealing with the problem the next time. Then he decides to cut his own hair.

Why?

The following conversation is a word-for-word quote. I COULDN'T make this up. No-one could. "Mom, now that I'm seven, it's time for me to do some experiments about things I've always wanted to know, like what does it feel like to cut your own hair." I can't help myself. I say his name again, more gently but still with the inflection of a slide whistle.

"Mom," he says earnestly, "I've always wanted a mullett. I want to reshape my hair because what I have is a backwards mullett." I look at his hair and the undeniable truth of this observation makes me start laughing.

"Tim, why do you want a mullett?" I ask.

He looks at me, mildly surprised by my failure to see the obvious. "Y'know. MacGyver."

Today also I made him an omlette and asked him if he'd like avocado in it.

He paused for a minute. "There are some voices in my head. One is saying, 'She poisoned the avocado,' but all the others are saying, 'It's your mom! You can trust her!' so go ahead, put some on."

Lint

I've often wondered: if I fell down the laundry chute one day while emptying out the hamper and got stuck half way down, would Nigel hear my screams for help and somehow either be able to rouse my neighbor or dial 9-1-1? Today I got the answer to that question.

He wouldn't. Dragon Tales is just too darn interesting. He might move a little closer to the TV...might turn up the volume, even, to drown out that annoying yelling noise coming from the bathroom, but he wouldn't--HE WOULDN'T--come to help. He wouldn't even turn around to look and laugh.

I didn't have to fall down the laundry chute to find this out. I wedged myself into the tight corner. No accident.

To start at the beginning, I must explain that Tom feels called to the law, called to fatherhood, and called to Young Men. He feels obligated to the yard, responsible for the cars, committed to barbecue duty when friends come over. But he does NOT realize that all men everywhere are required to do the fix-it jobs, and I have accepted this. Hey, he calls the cable company and chews them out every time they try to raise our cable rate. He deals with customer service at the cell phone company. So I gladly, CHEERFULLY, (ineptly, as you will see) pulled out the dryer this morning to set about changing the dryer vent hose.

We had one of those old plastic hoses that my Home Handyman magazine calls a fire hazard. It makes three hairpin bends (though Home Handyman advises it not to do so), the last of which leads to a fifteen foot vent pipe that would probably make Home Handyman write us off entirely. No professional will now clean out dryer vents of any kind (see Tom, calling to the law of, above), and especially not fifteen foot ones connected to well-bent flamable hose. I have been scratching my head over what to do about the situation as my drying times gradually increased from 50 minutes a load to an hour and thirty minutes. But finally I concluded that I could at least change the hose and clean out the parts of the vent pipe I could reach.

So it was that I found myself jammed into a vertical plane between the wall of the laundry room and the washer and dryer, my cheek smashed up against the back of the washer, my arms and legs bent out at weird angles like an egyptian stick figure, trying to turn the screw of the hose clamp with my left hand. Each ten tries would produce several swear words, plenty of sweat, an agony of frustration, and about a quarter of a turn. Doing such a simple job under an almost impossible physical situation causes extreme mental stress. Would it be better or worse if the fate of the world hung in the balance?

I did ultimately finish the job. It took me an hour and a half, and all the self-will I posess. Nigel never came to fetch tools that I dropped. The vent hose, by the way, was full--FULL--of lint. Completely filled. To the top. It also had a few interesting objects that had somehow sneaked through the holes in the dryer drum, including a miniature pair of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles nunchucks that Tim lost about two years ago and looked for for a solid month. I didn't give them back to him. Too much pain when he loses them again.